It sits you down and makes you watch a man destroy the thing he loves, and you understand exactly why. Minosuke starts with nothing, sees a kerosene lamp burning in town, and builds an entire life out of carrying light to houses that never had it. Then the electric wires come, and the story refuses to let him be a villain about it, even when he's at his ugliest and most desperate to stop progress. The lamps hung in the tree branches over the water, the stones, the glass going one by one: twenty-three minutes and that image stays parked in your chest for years. Telecom's hand is all over the quiet stuff, the lamplight on walls, the patience of a shot that just lets an old man finish his sentence. Niimi Nankichi wrote it for children. It absolutely was not for children.

A boy playing hide-and-seek comes across an odd old lamp, and his grandfather responds by telling him about his own youth and the part that lamp once played in it. In those days the grandfather earned his keep running errands for people in his small town, until a trip to a nearby town showed him Western lamps lighting up the streets. Selling lamps soon became his livelihood, tying his personal story to Japan's modernization and the changes it brought. The result is a short drama film, made as one of four originals under JAniCA's Young Animator Training Project.