There Was a Father (1942)

A widow sends her only son away to receive a better education. Years later, she visits him, finding him a poor school teacher with a wife and son.

A young boy follows Tashiro home to his tenement housing complex on the outskirts of Tokyo, the boy who was separated from his carpenter father somehow and somewhere in Kudan. The father purposefully abandoned the boy as he went off to look for work.

Two sisters find out the existence of their long-lost mother, but the younger cannot take the truth of being abandoned as a child.