In the spring of 1956, about a decade after the Pacific War ended, Rieko Sakamoto takes up a new teaching post at an elementary school in Kiba, a downtown district of Tokyo. That same season, Shizu Miyanaga moves from Kobe and enters the fourth class of the sixth grade. Bright and pretty, she hopes to become a singer one day, and because she excels both at sports and in her studies, she soon draws the notice of her whole class. Akira, the class president and son of a joiner, begins to feel drawn to her. The film is a drama set among schoolchildren in postwar Japan.