Japanese Film Revisits the Forgotten Lives of Girls Orphaned by War

Japanese filmmaker Miwa Nishikawa is turning the spotlight on a largely overlooked chapter of Japan’s postwar history with her new film, Children Untold.

The film centres on Kotoko, a 12-year-old girl who loses her family in the aftermath of World War II and disguises herself as a boy to survive on the streets of Tokyo.

Her former schoolteacher, who is struggling with her own traumatic circumstances, sets out to find her.

Children Untold premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, becoming the first Japanese film to open the festival’s competitive Platform section.

Nishikawa said she wanted to focus on girls because stories about war orphans have often centred on boys.

“There must have been just as many girls orphaned by the war,” she said, explaining that she wanted to explore how these girls survived and what happened to them after the fighting ended.

The film is set during a period when an estimated 120,000 children in Japan were left orphaned by the war. Many were forced to fend for themselves amid widespread poverty, destroyed communities and a breakdown of social structures.

For Nishikawa, the story is not simply about what happened during the war, but about what came afterwards.

She said the consequences of conflict continued to shape people’s lives long after the fighting stopped, and she hoped younger audiences could understand that war leaves effects that extend across generations.

Nishikawa began developing the film in 2020, initially concerned that its subject might seem too distant from modern audiences. But the wars and conflicts of recent years have made the themes feel more immediate to her.

The filmmaker, who was born in Hiroshima, has also said that revisiting Japan’s wartime history requires confronting the country’s own role in the conflict, including propaganda and the way ordinary people were encouraged to support the war.

She described making a film about war as a heavy responsibility, but said new generations of filmmakers need to continue finding ways to tell stories from the past.

Children Untold is scheduled for release in Japan on Oct 16, 2026.