Children

I mentioned low birthrates in an earlier statement, as it stands now the Japanese population is aging, and the birthrate is so low that the population is not replenishing itself. Rather, it is doing the opposite, Japan’s birth rate is currently 7.64 births per 1,000 people. By the same 2009 United States CIA estimation the birth rate in America is 13.83 births per 1,000 people. Despite the longevity of Japan’s elderly population, and the influx of foreigners moving into the country the population growth is negative 0.191%. When families are out and about it is usually a mother and one or two children, sometimes more. This along with the negative population rate means that women have pressure put on them to have children, and young men have a pressure from their families and the media to get married and have children. In Tokyo it can be noticed that when there is a child around, many adults will watch them, knowing that they are the hope and the future of the country.

In noir it is very rare to see children, just as in Tokyo, on a normal day for many men and women who work in offices. In noir children always represent hope and future. The world and especially the city in noir are twisted and torn; it’s a dark place with so few bright spots to shine on any type of optimism. Often it seems that in the few noir films where children do exist, something happens to them, and there is a type of loss of innocence, whether this is through a criminal act, or murder done to the child, or children, such as in the film Night of the Hunter in which the Preacher, Harry Powell, played by Robert Mitchum, first manipulates, then kills the mother of two children, only to then try to kill them to find money that their father had hidden.