The dismal reception of The Catch forced Oshima back into the studio fold at Toei where, most appropriately, he was assigned a film about an inveterate rebel and iconoclast, Shiro Tokisada, the legendary leader of Japan's most significant peasant rebellion. Virtually impossible to see today, Shiro Amakusa is an important bridge between Oshima's early youth films and his politically and formally ambitious later work. A violent and beautiful widescreen film, Shiro Amakusa captures the spirit of radical upheaval so central to Oshima's generation, updating the Christian rebel's revolutionary saga into a relevant cautionary tale about the necessary price of subverting authority.

A two-month research trip to South Korea in 1965 resulted in Oshima's lyrical and sharply polemical documentary short, the first of several works to grapple with the still-taboo subject of Japanese imperialism and Japan's troubled relationship with Korea and Japanese of Korean descent. Distressed by the epidemic of child poverty in South Korea, Oshima crafted a powerful montage of his own still photographs of Seoul street children with a soundtrack that interweaves readings from the gripping diary of a six-year old Korean boy and a fierce invective against Japan's legacy of imperialist aggression.