Kurosawa's second film, The Most Beautiful is a documentary-like fictional treatment of women working in a wartime lens factory. Grinding and polishing lenses for gun sights, they are under extraordinary pressure not to make a single mistake nor waste a bit of glass. Illness and other distress symptoms begin to take over their lives. The Most Beautiful was both a "national policy" assignment and Kurosawa's own original story, which accounts for the balance between its very Japanese sense of team play and wartime subordination of the personal to the national goal, and Kurosawa's own characteristic belief in the individual. David Owens writes for The Japan Society, "Though its chief influences were in German and Russian documentaries, The Most Beautiful bears uncanny similarities to the 're-created' documentaries Humphrey Jennings was making in England during the war, about the difficult but noble lives of civilians laboring on the home front as the nation struggled for survival...." And Donald Richie writes in The Films of Akira Kurosawa, "The plot line is manipulated to a degree, but oddly, the characters are not. In this context of preserved actuality, of beautifully captured wartime stringency (the very conditions of which-not enough film, not enough lights, not enough sets-might account for the extreme economy and directness of the picture) the performances ring with a kind of truth that one finds only in real documentaries."