Thirty minutes, and you will sit through the credits without moving. This isn't a studio filling a war-drama slot: it was produced by the Himeyuri Alumnae Foundation, the people who run the Peace Museum in Okinawa, which means the source material is survivor testimony rather than a screenwriter's imagination. The subjects are high school girls pulled out of class and handed nursing work in the middle of the Battle of Okinawa, and most of them never came back. It was built to be shown to children, and that's precisely what makes it brutal, because it does not sand down the ending to make the lesson easier to swallow. There's no speech about the futility of war here. Just teenagers the same age as the kids watching, in uniforms nobody asked them if they wanted.<br>

This 30-minute drama film tells the story of the Himeyuri, a group of high school students who worked as nurses during the Battle of Okinawa in World War II. Many of these young nurses died in the fighting. The film was produced by the Himeyuri Alumnae Incorporated Foundation, which operates the Himeyuri Peace Museum in Okinawa, as a way of passing the nurses' experiences on to children.