Human Condition I: No Greater Love

The first film, No Greater Love (1959) opens with Kaji marrying his sweetheart Michiko despite his misgivings about the future. The couple then move to a large mining operation in Japanese-colonized Manchuria where Kaji is a labor supervisor assigned to a workforce of Chinese prisoners. He tries and ultimately fails to reconcile his humanistic theories with the brutal reality of forced labor in an imperial system.