Five Scouts
1938 film by Tomotaka Tasaka
Five Scouts (Japanese: 五人の斥候兵, Hepburn: Gonin no sekkōhei) is a 1938 Japanese war film directed by Tomotaka Tasaka. It won best film at the 1939 Kinema Junpo Awards and was nominated best film at the 1938 Venice International Film Festival.
Plot
During the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, on the front lines in Northern China, a company commander sends five soldiers on a reconnaissance patrol, a mission that is nearly suicidal. The soldiers successfully scout the enemy's position but on their way back to base, they are ambushed, resulting in the loss of one man. The four surviving soldiers return to camp and mourn their fallen comrade, only for him to unexpectedly straggle back to camp later. He had become separated from the group in the darkness and chaos of battle.
With their mission complete, the soldiers are ordered to move out for another battle, fully aware that the likelihood of losing comrades this time is very high.
Cast
Isamu Kosuji as Unit Commander Okada
Bontaro Miaki as Sergeant Fujimoto
Ichiro Izawa as Private First Class Kiguchi
Shiro Isome as Private First Class Nakamura
Toshinosuke Nagao as Private First Class Endo
Hikaru Hoshi as Private First Class Nagano
Toshimasa Inoue as Private First Class Masaki
Kiyoshi Watanabe as Private First Class Inoue
Mantaro Ushio as Private First Class Tanaka
Haruhiko Nishi as Corporal Yasuda
Enji Sato as Military doctor
Ryoichi Kikuchi as Messenger
Ryuji Kita as Captain
Production
Five Scouts was the first significant Japanese feature film to depict the undeclared war in China. The government of Japan, eager to have films made which exalted the war effort, turned to Nikkatsu Studios because of their experience and expertise in making action films - even though they were usually in historic settings. Neither director Tomotaka Tasaka nor screenwriter Ryozo Kazahara had served in the Japanese Army.
The public source identifies “Five Scouts” as 1938 film by Tomotaka Tasaka. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Five, Scouts and film.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5456127. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1938 and 1939.
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This entry incorporates text from “Five Scouts” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.