The Reverend Marlin D. Farnum lived with his family in Hiroshima Prefecture’s Innoshima (now Onomichi) way back in the early 1930s—just prior to Japan’s late Showa-era expansionism and the country’s involvement in World War II.

The period in which American Farnum called Japan home makes the man’s recently recovered home video footage from approximately 1933 to 1935 all the more fascinating for its depiction of the peaceful, almost quaint lifestyles of Japan’s idyllic, pre-war countryside.

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