"Opening acknowledgements note, 'Soldiers at the front were very cooperative in making this film.' But the authorities at home were not at all cooperative about exhibiting it, for it did nothing to glorify the Imperial Army's war in China. The film was banned by the government and never shown publicly. If it failed to glorify, Soldiers at the Front did a great deal to portray the ordinary Japanese infantryman as a sympathetic human being. It chronicles the daily existence, the ordinary routines of the soldier's life: cleaning equipment, foraging, cooking, caring for pack animals, moving the front. 'It calmly documents,' writes Kyoko Hirano, 'the hardships of the Japanese soldiers as well as those of victimized Chinese. The film was nicknamed Tsukareta heitai (Exhausted Soldiers), as it focuses on the physical and emotional exhaustion of the soldiers rather than their bravery in battle.' It illustrates this through a series of extended vignettes.... (Director Fumio Kamei's) 1937 documentary Shanghai, commissioned by the Imperial Navy, though widely praised by his professional peers, angered the authorities for its sympathetic portrayal of the Chinese. After the debacle of Soldiers at the Front, Kamei was arrested in 1941 and tried on charges of propagating Communism through film. He was released in 1942 and remained inactive until war's end, when he once again became a prominent, influential figure in documentary films." David Owens, Japan Society