When he was 5 or 6 (before primary school), he moved to Manchuria with his family and spent his childhood there. He came back to Japan to go to junior high school in Miyazaki Prefecture, where his grandparents lived.
After he got back in Japan he started to work in the factory. The factory was bombed during he was working. He survived from aerial bombing but 10 of his friends died. He saw his friend's head cracked open and his friend losing legs, all happening in front of him. This became his trauma. Together with stress caused by his difficulties with Miyazaki's dialect, he had neurosis. The World War II ended when he was 14 by neuclear bombing. (It may be interpreted differently. At least in Japan, the end of war is the neuclear bombing.)
In one of his interview, he said his experience of living in colony and experience of surviving from bomb had always been in his mind. Time after time he remembered his friends died in aerial bombing.
In Japan, the film "Tomorrow - Ashita" is known as Kuroki's Trilogy of Requiem, together with "Utsukushii Natsu Kirisima" (2002) and "Chichi to Kuraseba" (2004). (English titles are "A Boy's summer in 1945" and "The Face of Jizo".)
These three movies are about people's life before/ after neuclear bombing. The experience in his childhood may have caused him to consider tragedy of war happening not in the battlefield but in people's daily life. In the film "Tomorrow - Ashita", he drew attention to people's daily life and suddenly tragedy took over. In other two films of Kuroki's Trilogy of Requiem, the main characters suffer from feeling of guilt after surviving from A-Bomb (Guilty feeling that s/he survived while others died).
Thus, his experience in childhood certainly had influenced his film making.
Interview: Japanese Documentary Author Interview No.16, Kazuo Kuroki. Yamagata International Film Festival. For English translation, click here .
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