Japan's involvement in World War II unfolds here through color footage long assumed not to exist, since historians believed no color film survived in Japan before the American occupation in 1945. The material proves otherwise: Imperial Japanese troops in Manchuria in 1931, domestic street life in 1930s Japan, mobilization for war in 1939, and the occupation of Shanghai in the 1940s. Letters and diary entries written by soldiers and civilians are read alongside the footage, giving individual voices to events usually seen only from the Allied side. The film does not treat Japan as a single unified villain or victim; it sets out to show both the people who carried out the war effort and those who suffered under it, including the domestic population fed a narrative of a righteous, culturally sanctioned struggle. Rather than a battle-by-battle account, this is a record of what the war looked like and felt like from inside Japan, built almost entirely from recently uncovered home footage rather than newsreels or postwar reconstruction.