Neat footage surfaces of life in small Hiroshima town circa the 1930s【Video】

The family of a Baptist missionary stationed in Japan in the 1930s sent DVDs of the Reverend’s home movies of the era to the Hiroshima town of Onomichi.

The Reverend Marlin D. Farnum lived with his family in Hiroshima Prefecture’s Innoshima (now Onomichi) way back in the early 1930s—just prior to Japan’s aggressive late Showa-era expansionism and the country’s involvement in WWII.

This era in which the American Farnum called Japan home makes the man’s recently recovered home video footage from approximately 1933 to 1935 all the more fascinating, for its depiction of the peaceful, almost quaint lifestyles of Japan’s idyllic, pre-war countryside.

In the footage (which, we’ll warn you, is over 20 minutes long), viewers can catch the thatched roofs of Japanese homes that, in the country anyway, were still being built in very traditional style at the time. There are images that juxtapose men in western style suits with men and women wearing traditional garments and kimono, and even a scene of old-timey radio taiso, the morning exercises practiced in schools and even many office buildings to this day.

There’s even a bit where Mr. Farnum adorably tries to get a bunch of clearly oblivious Japanese kids to wave at the camera, and an Innoshima-area temple, albeit in the jittery, black-and-white format of era cameras liable to make anyone born in the digital era physically nauseated.

Farnum’s second daughter, Hilda, who is now living in Portland, Oregon, apparently sent DVD copies of the footage to Onomichi city officials, allowing the once-forgotten footage to surface on YouTube recently.

Source: Ki ni Naru Sokuhou
Screenshots: YouTube/Innoshima Kawayoshi

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