Ozu's Record of a Tenement Gentleman (Nagaya shinshiroku) 1947.

I've only seen a few movies by Ozu.

A widow, Otane, is forced to take in a young boy who was separated from his father. The kid doesn't really speak, but his mother is dead and it appears that his father has abandoned him. Otane doesn't want him and resents having him foisted on her.

The people in the movie are horrible. There's one nice guy who brings the kid home, but he's renting a room from another guy who won't let the child stay. There's no discussion of taking him anywhere, like there's no one in authority whose job it is to care for homeless children, and there may not have been in postwar Japan.

The women does finally develop some affection for the kid.

The boy wetting his futon doesn't help. They show the futon hanging outside to dry, and, to me, it looked like an American flag. It had plaid instead of stripes, but it had a corner that was a darker color with a pattern of what weren't really stars. They were under occupation so you have to admire them slipping that past the U.S. censors, a Japanese kid going to the bathroom on Old Glory.

The thing looked as much like an American flag as the flags on the doors of the U.S. embassy did in Kurosawa's Sanshiro Sugata 2.

I'd seen Ozu's silent, Little Rascals-like I was Born, But… (1932) and the thing that struck me was how soft Japanese children were. The kids--they were all boys--would burst out crying at the drop of a hat. I had always assumed it was American children who were weak and spoiled.

There was an interview on public radio with a man who had been a prisoner in Guantanamo. He was Afghan but was a British Royal Subject which is why he was released. The host asked him what he thought of Americans after being around the U.S. troops. He didn't want to answer, but the host pressed him, and he started by saying that he wasn't talking about ALL Americans---we aren't all this way----and I thought it was going to be really bad. But then he said that Americans are like little girls. They're afraid of spiders, they're afraid of snakes, they're afraid to get their clothes dirty, they run to the nurse if they get a cut.

I would have thought that Afghan girls were made of tougher stuff.

In this movie, Otane talks to her friend and laments how hard life had become for Japanese children, how callous adults had become and how different it had been for them in their day. 

Over 60 Palestinian children were just slaughtered by God's Chosen People using American weapons. This means that at least twice that many were wounded, many with burns or amputations. Entire families were wiped out. And the bulk of Americans--at least those in government--and Jews in the U.S. and Israel seem to have the idea that Palestinian children must be used to it by now. 

That kid was right to pee on the flag.