Memories of war from a distance

Utsukushi Natsu Kirishima

Rating: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Director: Kazuo Kuroki
Running time: 119 minutes
Language: Japanese
Currently showing

Why has the flow of Japanese movies about Japan at the end of World War II never stopped, more than 50 years after the event? Why have they far outnumbered the films set in the earlier years of the conflict? It is as if, instead of "Saving Private Ryan," "The Thin Red Line" and "Pearl Harbor," Hollywood filmmakers had made endless variations on "The Best Days of Our Lives."

One reason often advanced is that the Japanese prefer to see themselves as the war's victims rather than its perpetrators -- hence all the movies set in Japan, 1945 rather than in China, 1937.

But most makers of these films -- Shohei Imamura, Masahiro Shinoda and Kazuo Kuroki among them -- can hardly be described as Hinomaru-waving apologists. Like the vast majority of Japanese alive today who remember the war, they experienced it only on the home front -- and became strongly antiwar as a result. It's only natural that their most vivid memories should be of bombings, starvation and chaos rather than victorious battles and parades. The end of the war rather than the beginning.