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In 1933, the state’s concern with Japanese reformatories of juvenile delinquents changed with the enactment of “The Juvenile Education and Protection Law” (少年教護法). According to this legislation, reformatories were expected to function not only as asylums to punish and cure delinquency, but also as welfare facilities to support delinquents’ growth into self-reliant, responsible citizens. When we think of how these two aspects of reformatory were represented as cultural products, Shimizu Hiroshi’s film Introspection Tower (1941) gives us an interesting example. However, it is curious that the film’s depiction of delinquents is equivocal, probably because he intended to show them simply as socially disadvantaged children rather than as little fringers who needed to be isolated from the society. By doing so, Shimizu could reproduce the reformatory as an ideal institution of welfare run by the government. Moreover, in this film, the welfare state, represented by the reformatory of juvenile delinquents, employs the voluntary collaboration of members in the struggle for their lives in the reformatory, in order to approve war mobilization. By examining the last episode in which waterways are constructed by the children’s own hands, I argue that it could be interpreted as a metaphor for the war mobilization. In this episode, children’s labor is portrayed as a natural outcome of childhood innocence in enjoyment of physical activities. This representation of working children was to appear as well as Shimizu’s films in postwar period.
