Still from *Children Full of Life*│© NHK

Every morning, a class of ten-year-olds files into Room 4 at a public elementary school in Kanazawa. They wear the same uniforms, carry the same bookbags, and sit at the same desks. But something different is happening here—something deeper than the hum of multiplication tables or handwriting drills. At the front of the room stands Toshiro Kanamori, a teacher who has no interest in just preparing his students for the next test. He’s teaching them how to live.

Children Full of Life, directed by Noboru Kaetsu, is not a new documentary. It aired in 2003 and quietly became one of those rare pieces of film that never really fades—it’s passed from person to person, generation to generation, like a well-worn letter that still stirs something when you reread it. It’s only 45 minutes long, but the emotional weight it carries stays with you long after the credits roll.

Kanamori’s philosophy is simple but radical: children should be happy. Not just in the fleeting sense of laughing at a joke or playing a game, but in the deeper, more difficult sense of learning how to carry sadness, express love, and care for one another. He believes empathy can be taught. And so, every day, he makes space for it.

There are no lectures on morality. Instead, Kanamori asks his students to write letters. Letters to classmates, to parents, to those they’ve lost. He asks them to read those letters aloud, even when their voices tremble. Especially then. In this classroom, tears aren’t a distraction—they’re part of the curriculum.

One boy reads a letter to his friend, apologizing for ignoring him during recess. Another student writes to her grandmother, who passed away before she could say goodbye. A girl shares the pain of losing her younger sister, and the class listens—not to fix her grief, but to carry it with her. When one child cries, others reach for tissues, or simply sit closer. Kanamori doesn’t intervene. He doesn’t need to. He’s already done the work of creating a space where vulnerability is safe.

And somehow, miraculously, the children understand. At an age when many of us were still being told to toughen up or stop crying, these students are learning the opposite: that it’s okay to hurt, and more than that, it’s okay to let someone else see it.

Still from Children Full of Life│© NHK

There is a moment in the film when Kanamori reflects on a former student who died in a tragic accident. The room falls still. He tells his class that life is unpredictable, that any day could be their last. But he doesn’t weaponize this truth. He uses it to remind them why kindness matters now. Why they should speak their feelings while they still can. Why holding someone’s pain is one of the greatest responsibilities we have as humans.

It would be easy to frame Children Full of Life as a tearjerker, another documentary that wrings emotion from tragedy. But that would miss the point entirely. This isn’t a film about sadness—it’s about the courage it takes to face sadness head-on, and the strength that comes from being seen. In Kanamori’s class, there is no hierarchy of feelings. Joy and grief, shame and pride—they all sit together, side by side, like classmates in a crowded room.

There’s something profoundly Japanese about the way this documentary handles emotion—quiet, deliberate, unsentimental. There are no sweeping orchestral cues or dramatic zoom-ins. The camera just sits there, quietly witnessing. And in that stillness, we see everything. The small hand on a friend’s back. The nervous laughter before a heartfelt confession. The moment of silence after someone finishes reading.

But the lessons of Children Full of Life aren’t just cultural—they’re human. We all carry grief. We all fail to say what we mean. We all wish we had more time. And maybe, if we had a Kanamori in our lives, we would have learned how to navigate those feelings a little earlier.

In the final scenes, as the school year ends, the students write one last series of letters. They talk about how much they’ve grown, how they’ll miss their friends, and how they hope to keep being kind, even when it’s hard. Watching them, you can’t help but wonder: what if all classrooms looked like this? What if we raised a generation of kids who weren’t just smart, but emotionally literate? Kids who knew how to cry with each other, and more importantly, how to listen?

Kanamori says he’s not doing anything special. But the truth is, in a world that often tells us to hide our feelings, to move on, to get over it—what he’s doing is nothing short of revolutionary.

And maybe the most important thing he teaches isn’t something that fits neatly into a lesson plan. It’s the idea that happiness isn’t the absence of pain. It’s what we create when we face it—together.