Yuki is a young, single mother supporting herself and her son, Haru, with a job as a bar hostess.

The story focuses on the widower Nemoto, ostensibly a businessman, who has one son, Kanichi, the hero of the title. Nemoto remarries; his new wife is a widow with a son and daughter of her own. However, Nemoto’s business turns out to be out a shady scam, and he disappears, leaving his wife to raise the three children alone. In order to support the family, she is obliged to become a bar hostess. She conceals this shameful employment from the children, but the truth comes out years later, after her daughter is rejected by her husband’s family when they investigate her background.

Two childhood friends go their own ways but meet again some years later after they have both married. They get re-acquainted, meet each others’ families, and all is well. Then the disagreements start...

1934 film by Hiroshi Shimizu

A socially committed film about the feudal state of many Japanese women in 1946. Hiroko Hosokawa, a female lawyer, defends Mrs. Asakura, who suffocated her child in her grief after her husband died penniless following an industrial accident. The prosecutor is Hiroko's sister's husband Kono, who also sent Hiroko's fiance, Yamaoka, to jail for his liberal views during the war. Yamaoka has just been freed, but is seriously ill from his time in prison.

In Depression-era Japan, a courteous bus driver carries an eclectic group of passengers from the mountainous Izu to Tokyo.