Made immediately after World War II, No Regrets for Our Youth is based on an incident in Thirties Kyoto in which a democratic-minded university professor was dismissed for “Communist thinking” and one of his students, a leader of an anti-war movement, was subsequently executed as a spy. Kurosawa is concerned with the effect of this persecution upon someone whose implication in the events evolves from personal rather than political commitments--namely, the professor's daughter, who is also the student's girlfriend. Her suffering--which leads her to eventually leave the city and go to work on a farm--is the focus of the film.
Kurosawa has commented, “The critics were ferocious about the character of the woman in this picture but it was only here and in Rashomon that I ever fully and fairly portrayed a woman. Of course, all my women are rather strange, I agree. But this woman I wanted to show as the new Japan. I was right, I still think, to show a woman who lived by her own feelings. The critics hated her as though she were a man. But she wasn't--that was the point” (quoted by Donald Richie in Sight and Sound).