Exploring Japanese Film: Kobayashi, Fires on the Plain, 24 Eyes - Essay Sample

Introduction

After they lost their stake in World War II (WWII), the Japanese found that their role in the war had earned them a burdensome heritage they needed to rid themselves of. In the fast-evolving post-war dynamics, there was no time to alter existing perceptions; they opted instead to rewrite the narrative. One result of this strategy is the image of “Japan as a victim” that has been increasingly working its way into popular culture. Aware that it would take both time and effort to perpetuate this shift, the Japanese chose the medium of the film industry of the 1950s.

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Even though the ideals they were perpetuating had been tried and tested in the post-war circumstances, where the Japanese lacked the agency, the industry of culture would prove paramount in seeing these changes remain and evolve within the Japanese consciousness. Long-term political events such as the reverse course of the American occupation, and the economic impact of the Korean War on Japan muddied the waters as to what Japan both could and wanted to be. Likewise, with any modern culture, there was no feasible way for a modern nation to be any degree of monolithic in their ideals. The reverse course not completely stripping Japan of what it once was and the Korean war providing the economic enrichment to keep on. Bottom line being that in spite of what Japan aspired to be, from a socioeconomic standpoint there was no certain future to be seen without some sort society-wide intervention.

The Japanese film industry saw a significant change as the country shifted to its post war state. The major economic and social restructuring took its toll on the industry, and left it in an arguably volatile state. The film industry produced numerous films on the events that had transpired during and prior to the war. Films being produced early on found themselves able to handle the source material in a greater range but over time became films more the struggle of the Japanese against their own system. Looking to reshape their visage they sought to reimagine the period in emerging themes and ideas common to the postwar mentality such as pacifism and victimization.

Films by their very nature bring out these condensed viewpoints in a variety of ways, the primary of these being how they are produced and how they are received by their target demographics. For this purpose, I have chosen to focus on the films produced exclusively during the 1950s as I feel they best represent the thoughts and emotions that would rise above, but also those that would appear the most empathetic to those living in this period. The Japanese film industry suffered as a result of the major post war economic and social restructuring, leaving it exposed. The films played their part in chronicling the events of the war. The early films had the advantage of working with source material in a greater range, but with the passage of time the narrative turned inward and became one of the Japanese against their own system. This cultivated the image of Japan as more of a victim than the victimizer.

Background Information

The Japanese film industry suffered as a result of the major post war economic and social restructuring, leaving it exposed. The films played their part in chronicling the events of the war. The early films had the advantage of working with source material in a greater range, but with the passage of time the narrative turned inward and became one of the Japanese against their own system. This cultivated the image of Japan as more of a victim than the victimizer. The Japanese film industry has its roots from way back in 1897, when a Japanese cameraman captured sights in Tokyo using the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe motion picture system, in the Silent Era of filmmaking. The industry grew fast, and by 1909 Japan’s first film production studio was built. They stayed with silent films for a while, and in 1930, Fujiwara Yoshie no furusato, Japan’s first feature-length talkie film was produced (MoMA, 2015). In 1939, the Japanese government introduced censorship into the Japanese film industry with the Film Law (Hirano, 1992). The government was interested in encouraging the development of propaganda films and culture films, which served to show the might of the Empire of Japan during the war. Those produced around this time depicted patriotic and militaristic themes. When Japan lost the war and the American occupation began under the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), the industry was now under the censorship of the Civil Information Educational Section (CIE), which favored showing Japan’s responsibility for the war as part of the occupation policy (Maher, 2016). This new censorship regime banned the portrayal of nationalism, patriotism, as well as brutal violent movies. The purpose of this was to show America as the ideal political, social, and cultural model for Japan.

The Films

Masaki Kobayashi

The Thick Walled Room

The 1950s is usually referred to as Japan’s Golden Age of film. With the lapse of the SCAP mandate in 1952, production of war movies that had been censored during the occupation began. It is in this atmosphere that Masaki Kobayashi’s 1953 film, The Thick Walled Room, was produced. It was written by acclaimed novelist Kobo Abe, and it was one of the first Japanese films to tackle the scars of WWII head on. The movie is a drama about a group of Japanese soldiers that had been jailed for crimes against humanity that they had committed during the war. As the characters are unveiled in the present, flashbacks reveal their past and the actions that had led them to their current circumstances. It shows the prisoners in their former civilian lives, and then as soldiers, and follows events during the war and goes into detail into the crimes for which they are now answering. The plot of them film portrays the characters as scapegoats for a government that refuses to take responsibility for the systematic crimes that the soldiers were made to commit, either by coercion, or through the systemic conditioning they had experienced during the war. They end up paying for the crimes of their government and superiors. This message and the emotions it aroused was thought too dangerous for the American ideal that the departing occupiers had been perpetuating, that the film had to be shelved for three years. It was eventually released in 1956.

In my research I found films directed by Kobayashi Masaki best exemplify this change in conditioning, being that he released two during this decade that provide extensive and visceral descriptions of the war as they knew it. His first film, The Thick Walled Room, was the starting point to what evolved into The Human Condition. On a deeper level these films brought a simpler ideal into fruition, the idea that the Japanese individual in spite of everything may find some redemption in separating themselves from the whole. The Thick Walled Room placing individual Japanese at odds with their own system and being punished for their agency, eventually bringing a more refined version of this with The Human Condition placing a Japanese man with these modern ideals of pacifism into the world they so wished to escape from.

The Thick Walled Room is unique due to its comparatively inflammatory nature, uninhibited in its direction and content. Initially removed from circulation due in part to this nature it would not surface in its entirety until nearly 3 years following its completion in 1953. Seldom few films were willing to tackle the subject matter present in this film even as the time since the war drifts further from collective memory.

The Human Condition

The Human Condition is based on a six-volume novel by Gomikawa Junpei (1916-1995). In the film, which runs over nine hours, Kobayashi explores the contradictions between a number of dehumanizing conditions and his main character’s humanist convictions. The movie is divided into three installments, each of which critiques a specific institution: the capitalist exploitation in Imperial Japan, the country’s imperial military, combat, and finally, communism. In the first part, No Greater Love, the main character’s, Kaji, fails to stop the inhumane treatment of Chinese prisoners in a slave labor camp run by the Japanese in Manchuria. In the second installment, A Soldier’s Prayer, we are shown the cruelty and sadism of the military system that Kaji becomes a part of. The third part, The Road to Eternity, show Kaji facing the problematic implications of his hated Japanese identity at the end of the war, facing his enemies at war, the Chinese and his captors, the victorious Russians.

Most of the film is centered on Kaji’s changing roles from the time of Japan’s occupation of Manchuria all the way to the surrender of Japan at the end of WWII when Japanese soldiers are captured by the Russians. All through the film, Kaji’s pacifist principles conflict heavily with the intrinsic dehumanization of militarism and colonial exploitation, and these create some high emotional intensity in the film. The film ends with Kaji’s death before the tension can be diffused or the conflict resolved. The historical perspective of the film does serve a moral lesson about the personal, yet systematic nature of the suffering caused by war, which is a product of the cooperation of the different dehumanizing institutions. The films offer a detailed exploration of systemic bodily control implemented by the military and the dehumanization it effects on enemy and ally alike. The bodily control makes by alienating individuals from fellow humans and getting rid of subjective emotions.

It is worth noting that Kobayashi, a proclaimed pacifist, was himself conscripted to war. That he refused a promotion from the rank of private in protest, is evidence of his critical attitude, one that finds full expression in his film (Mellen, 2011). The film is an expression of Kobayashi’s personal experience, and the philosophical problems of Japan’s WWII trauma. Kaji’s character acts as the postwar conscience of the Japanese based on a universalizing discourse of peace that constantly criticizes and challenges the imperial aggressive war and attempts to atone for it.

The films portray evil as all dehumanizing institutions that empower power some people to subjugate and oppress others. The Human Condition is a deep and candid expression of the pain and suffering of war. It makes a case for pacifism as an ideal that is threatened by institutional and ideological power. It expresses pacifism as a form of human acknowledgement and repentance, and prods the institutions to accept and free the Japanese so they can move on. Kaji is a mediating consciousness between the pacifist postwar period and the war experience itself, embodying an idealism that critiques dehumanizing ideological systems. The individual becomes the vehicle through which the Japanese explore and denounce the military ideology that is part of its recent history.

The film also explores both victimization and war responsibility, a common theme found in the paradoxical core of Japan’s cultural post-WWII dilemma. It shows how the people’s unquestioning obedience to authority, and the suppression of individual inclinations were respons...