Portrait of a Young Samurai

"I wrote a typically sentimental scene; a scene where a young Kamikaze fighter saying good-bye to his parents. I hired a young actor to play the scene. While shooting, I repeatedly demanded him to “express more Samurai spirit”, again and again, no matter how well he plays the character, until we reach the moment where the scene starts to express the emotion from unexpected direction. In the past five years in Japan, we started to see more and more overly sentimental war films made. They all have very clear and vulgar nationalistic messages in it. The scene I wrote was directly inspired by those films." (Meiro Koizumi , 2009)