Among the early examples of the shomin-geki genre - realistic renderings of lower-middle-class life - Yutaka Abe's prewar films usually fell on the lighter side of their serious subjects. Children of the Sun, made in 1938, treats mixed-generation marriage, and extra-marital sex and pregnancy, within the framework of a drama that avoids moralizing and sentimentality. The owner of a reformatory for delinquent boys falls in love with a young woman in the welfare home run by his sister. He takes the girl home to be his wife. She disappears and, when found, discloses that she is pregnant, but not by her husband. His response: No blame, for we are all “children of the sun.”
Yutaka Abe received his film training in pre-Twenties Hollywood, where he was among several Japanese directors-to-be who formed the retinue of matinee idol Sessue Hayakawa (Abe played Hayakawa's valet in DeMille's 1915 The Cheat). Abe's return to Japan in the Twenties brought a new sophistication to the Japanese comedy; one of his earliest films, the Lubitsch-inspired The Woman Who Touched Legs (1926), was re-made in 1952 by Kon Ichikawa in tribute to Abe, under whom Ichikawa studied.