Harp of Burma
Introduction
A "strangely poetic saga of the transformation of a militaritic
consciousness into one of passionate dedication to humanity." At the
end
of World War II, as Japanese military forces pull out of Burma, a popular
Japanese private becomes separated from his comrades. He disguises himself
as a Theravada Buddhist monk to make his ay back to his troop, but as he
travels through the devastated countryside, he becomes spiritually
transformed. An extraordinary film about military action, colonialism,
sadness, guilt, and transformation.
THE BURMESE HARP (BIRUMA NO TATEGOTO)
ICHIKAWA Kon, Japan, 1956
Cast
Of the great masters of Japanese cinema, the work of Kon Ichikawa is probably
the least well known in the West. His films have never achieved the public
or critical attention they deserve and this is likely due to his vision
as an auteur. With 75 films and counting, covering an eclectic and daunting
range of subjects, it's difficult to get a grip on what is truly at the
heart of this overlooked body of work. As the director said himself, "I
don't have any unifying theme. I just make any picture I like...."
The Burmese Harp is one of Ichikawa's first widely acknowledged films,
bolstered by success at The Venice Film Festival. A compassionate, anti-war
film (yet refusing to enter into any cinematic discussion of where to lay
blame), this is one of the first films to portray the decimating effects
of the war from the point of view of the Japanese army.
Through the voice over of one soldier, we're told of the devastation and
capture by the British of a Japanese troop in 1945. The battalion's harp
player, Mizushima, is sent on a liaison mission to persuade another troop
into surrender from a mountain in Burma. But Mizushima fails and after encountering
the full carnage of war, bodies of his fellow countrymen piled high and
left to rot, he refuses to return to his troop. Appropriating the Buddhist ethos, Mizushima
devotes himself to burying each of his comrades, sparing them the ignominy
suffered in wartime with the dignity of a humane burial. Dramatic overhead
shots of a solitary figure, the quest of one man's journey to find an inner
sanctum, lilting melodies extending emotion where words seem futile, this
is truly a magnificent epic on every level.
Clare Norton-Smith
from: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/cinema/features/burmese-harp.shtml
From the opening epigraph of the novel:
Our Japanese soldiers who came back from overseas were a pitiful sight.
They looked thin,
weak, and exhausted. And some of them were invalids, drained of colour and
borne on
stretchers.
But among the returning soldiers was one company of cheerful men. They were
always
singing, even difficult pieces in several parts, and they sang very well.
When they disembarked
at Yokosuka the people who came to greet them were astonished. Everyone asked
if they had
received extra rations, since they seemed so happy.
These men had no extra rations, but had practiced choral singing throughout
the Burma
campaign. Their captain, a young musician fresh from music school, had enthusiastically
taught his soldiers how to sing. It was singing that kept up their morale
through the boredom
or hardship, and that bound them together in friendship during the long war
years. Without it,
they would never have come home in remarkably high spirits.
One of these soldiers told me the following tale... (p. 11).
Corporal Mizushima of the "singing Company" has learned to play the Burmese
harp and seems to be the most acculturated man in his outfit. That is, he displays
an interest in and a degree of comfort with Burmese customs and culture. He
even speaks a little of the language. His colleagues always joke that he should
stay behind after the war because he seems to feel so at home in Burma. Mizushima
has a special place in the hearts of his comrades, and also a special role to
play in the company. He functions as a scout by dressing like a Burmese native
and walking ahead of his unit into the forests with his harp. If there is no
danger, he plays a pre-selected melody on the harp to sound the "all clear."
Just when the company thinks it is about to be engaged by the enemy (Great
Britain), they learn that the war has actually been over for three days. Japan
has surrendered. So does his company, basically without incident. Nevertheless,
it is difficult to process what has occurred. The Captain speaks to his men:
In time, I suppose the shock will give way to sorrow. We'll probably feel
despair, and doubt, even anger and bitterness. . .
All we can do now is wait to see what the future brings. . .[T]he manly
thing to do is to recognize clearly how we stand, accept our lot, and make
the best of it. Let's at least have the courage to do that much....All
we have left is our faith in each other. That's the only thing we can count
on. It's all we have.
So let's go on sharing our sorrows and our pain. Let us help each other...
And if the day ever comes when we can go back to Japan, let us go back
together--every man of us--and work together to rebuild our country. (32-33)
This becomes the pledge that the company members make to one another. It seems
like this is the pragmatic, the practical outlook to embrace.
But there is another company nearby, dug into a mountainside, that manifests
the hardline, "imperial way," never-say-die mentality. They refuse to believe Japan would ever surrender, so they refuse
to give up. Committed to fulfilling their "duty" unwilling to "insult"
the memory of comrades who have already died for the cause, they are, literally,
the "die hards." As Mizushima recounts in the novel,
As I listened I felt that these raging men were controlled by a strange
force....Having incited one another with a false show of courage, they
could no longer back down.
They believed that to surrender at this point would be to dishonor those comrades
who have already fallen in battle. They wish to fight to the death. They epitomize
the logic of the fanatical adherents to the emperor system. Mizushima is dispatched
to try to persuade the hold outs to give up. As we saw above, his ideal--and
the ideal of his company--is to return to Japan and help rebuild the country.
That is their understanding, their interpretation,of how to appropriately perform
their patriotic duty. They are against wasting lives senselessly. Japan needs
their lives and their energy in order to rebuild. That is why Mizushima's company
pledges to all return to Japan together as a unit as their way of accomplishing
this ideal.
But the die-hards ridicule him; they reject his pleas and scoff at him. Yet
he stays with them until the ultimatum expires and the British attack begins.
He is rendered unconscious by an exploding mortar and later is shot as well. He wakes up some time
later amidst a sea of corpses. A Burmese Buddhist priest takes care of him, nursing his wounds and feeding him. The priest tries to tell him that he is in the land of the Buddha and it is not necessary for him to do anything, but Mizushima's aim is to return to Mudon where his company
is being detained. As a consequence, he steals the priest's robes while he is bathing and sets out on his journey dressed as priest as his disguise.It is kind of a despicable act to steal from this priest who cared for him. But, at this point, his mission is still his top priority: get back to his company, return to and rebuild Japan. He shaves his nead but he is still not very priest-like. Burmese people who respect priests immensely, stop him and offer him food
even though they have very little for themselves. They are expressing their reverence for him. Meanwhile,
he continues to care for the war dead. He burns or buries their corpses in order to do something
for his fallen comrades.
There is in an important sequence in which Mizushima stops by a dead soldier
to pick up a photo of the man with a child, and he realizes that each of the
numerous bodies he encounters everyday is an individual person whose death affects
other people. He can comprehend no reason for the death of the Japanese soldiers
but he does the only thing he can do: he offers them the respect they deserve
by burying the bodies--what else is there to do? Mizushima realizes and states
clearly at the end of the film that we may never be able to understand why suffering
exists, but we must nevertheless try to ease the pain it inflicts. Having witnessed
day in and day out the tragic waste of life that the ravages of war inflict
on humans, Mizushima begins to adopt a spiritual perspective. With the passage
of time, he is actually becoming one with his role as the priest, he is taking Buddhist teachings seriously even though the rolepf the priest was one that he
originally assumed as a disguise. He was a soldier but now he is gradually becoming a Buddhist priest.
Meanwhile, the company worries about him and wonders where he is. Occasionally
they catch sight of this priest who "resembles" Mizushima, but he
says nothing to them. Another time, they hear him play the harp as only he can.
They begin to believe that the priest is Mizushima. One day, in a procession
to honor the war dead, they spot the priest carrying thesame kind of wooden boxes
that are typically used for ashes in Japan. Later, when the Captain is taken
to the repository, he sees the box that Mizushima has placed there and it confirms
for him the priest's identity. Actually, while the Captain is in the morturary,
Mizushima is there too and hears him speak aloud about his understanding of
what Mizushima is doing. Mizushima weeps as he resists the impulse to reveal
himself to the Captain and rejoin his company. The time is drawing near for
the company's repatriation to Japan and the company desperately wants Mizushima
to make the return voyage with them, to make good on their pledge that all shall
return together and rebuild Japan.
When I first saw this film more than 30 years ago, it was part of a PBS Japanese
Film Series introduced by Edwin Reischauer. His commentary was that the hardest
thing for a Japanese person to do is to make the decision to leave the group,
to set aside one's identity as a Japanese person, for something else. As the
text says, "Even so, Japanese long to be with other Japanese" (67). During the
war, all Japanese people could do was succumb to or immerse in their identity
as Japanese Imperial Subjects, and do what their superiors told them. What will
Mizushima do?
His fellow soldiers train a parrot to say in Japanese "Hey, Mizuhima! LET'S
GO BACK TO JAPAN TOGETHER." They give the parrot to the old woman who comes
around to trade food for knicknacks with the Japanese. Soon, he shows up outside
the barbed wire where the soldiers are detained with two parrots on his shoulder.
They sing to him--still unsure if he is Mizushima--and he responds with a melody
on the harp. They know it is him and they rejoice. But Mizushima utters no words
to them. The song he has played is a familiar one; it is the song of farewell, the song that students sing to their teachers at graduation.
The refrain, which Mizushima repeats on the harp says "Now we must part, now we must part" (p. 88) [or, more fully, "And now it is time to say farewell with an eternally grateful heart"]. When he just bows, turns around, and departs without uttering a word, he
has made his statement, loud and clear. He must bid his comrades farewell. If the message wasn't
already clear enough, the young boy who accompanies him gives the men one of
the two parrots on Mizushima's shoulder. The parrot has a message: "I CANNOT
RETURN TO JAPAN WITH YOU."
As the critic cited below in the next excerpt notes, one can view the image of Mizushima as he appears near the end of the film, in his priestly robes, on the occasion of his the last appearance before his comrades at the camp, as "Christ like."
The point is, I think, that he was sacrificing something--his own happiness and his sense of belonging to his group--for a higher calling.
Some time later, a letter is delivered but the Captain waits until the ship
has set sail to read it to his men, for he has figured out that Mizushima must
remain behind in Burma to fulfill his role as Buddhist Priest, as the one who
cares for the remains and the souls of the Japanese war dead. As he says in
the novel in his letter:
. . .[M]y choice was clear. The bones of the
countless unknown dead are calling me. They are waiting for me. I
cannot ignore them. . .
I want to study Buddhist teachings, reflect on them and make
them part of me. We and our fellow countrymen have suffered
cruelly. Many innocent people were sacrificed to a senseless
cause. Fresh, clean young men were taken from their homes, jobs,
and schools, only to leave their bones bleaching on the soil of a
distant land. The more I think of it, the bitterer my sorrow. As
I look back at what has happened, I feel keenly that we have been
too unthinking. We have forgotten to meditate deeply on the
meaning of life. (129)
We Japanese have not cared to make strenuous spiritual
efforts. We have not even recognized their value. . .Our country
has waged a war, lost it, and is now suffering. That is because
we were greedy, because we were so arrogant that we forgot human
values because we had only a superficial ideal of
civilization.
How can we truly be saved? And how can we help to save
others? I want to think this through carefully. I want to learn.
That is why I want to live in this country, to work and serve it.
(129-30)
Mikuni Rentaro, the actor who plays the Captain, delivers a triumphal performance
as he reads the letter from Mizushima aloud, his voice is full of emotion and
nearly breaks on several occasions. It is one of the most moving scenes in modern
film. But some may argue, reasonably, that these remarks are devoid of something
important. They do not really extend to an apology for all the suffering Japan
caused to the people of Southeast Asia and China. Reference is made to all the
Japanese who suffered; but what about the other victims? Where are the bodies
of the non-Japanese combatants, the people against whom Japanese soldiers carried out atrocities, whose lands and farms were burned and looted? This complaint remains vocal today when it comes
to the questions of the Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women, not to mention
the larger matter of issuing an apology for the war. Critics see that Japan
is all to willing to see itself as a victim while remaining unwilling to accept
the fact that the nation and its policies was directly responsible for a tremendous
amount of violence and suffering. Yet what I think this text and the film do
accomplish is to acknowledge that the war was senseless and wrong; and that
it was rooted in a greed and arrogance which stemmed from the way Japan embraced
modern civilization, as though it could be reduced to fukoku kyohei.
Also, the novel especially, conducts a discourse about the differences between
Burmese and Japanese societies, how the one remains tranquil, underdeveloped
but religious and close to nature. The other, Japan, embraced a strong work
ethic, a drive to succeed in the world, a quest for power and control. As the
narrator comments about the discussions the men in the company would have:
Our argument tended to boil down to this: it depends on how people choose
to live--to try to control nature by their own efforts, or yield to it and
merge into a broader, deeper order of being. But which of these attitudes,
of these ways of life, is better for the world and for humanity? Which should
we choose? (47).
At the very least, this text and this film ask us to think about something
very fundamental about the choices Japan made over the previous half-century,
and have framed the discourse in a very humanistic context which, in itself,
is in stark contrast to fanaticism and inhumanity of war. The director has arranged
his shots carefully, often placing Mizushima alone against the empty spaces
of the otherwise beautiful landscapes of Burma. These shots remind us that,
in the end, Mizushima is an individual, a single Japanese who
might make a difference by trying to do some good, by trying to do the right
thing. This is in contrast to his comrades in the company, who always appear
in a group, usually behind barbed-wire fences. At the film's conclusion, as
the unit sails back to Japan, the sea is vast, open, peaveful and beautiful.
It is a moment of great poignancy as the captain reads Mizushima's letter explaining
why he couldn't return with them. The camera turns toward the expansive, empty
ocean, allowing the poignancy of Mizushima's words to penetrate our hearts while
echoing in the vastness of the sea air. The final shot is a cut to Mizushima
traversing the spiritual path through the Burmese plains that he has elected
to follow. As one critic puts it, by choosing to "transcend rather than
return," The Harp of Burma, he goes on to say, "is a film which,
even while dealing with war and all its senseless tragedy, refuses to cheapen
life and maintains the importance of death."
Here is part of another review:
The meaninglessness and waste of war is illustrated with heartrending precision in Kon Ichikawa's masterful Burmese Harp, a moving tale that takes place in the final days of World War II, when everyone involved takes a moment to look around at the carnage and see what they've done. In the sweaty jungles of Burma, a small Japanese unit led by Captain Inoyue (Rentaro Mikuni) is marching toward nothing in particular. Hungry and exhausted, they just hope to make it back to Japan alive. To keep his troops' spirits up, Inoyue, a choirmaster in civilian life, has the men sing constantly, and they sound pretty good, especially when they're accompanied by the soldier Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), who has taught himself how to play an elegant little Burmese harp. When the war is finally over, the victorious British ask Inoyue to send one man to tell a group of Japanese holdouts who are still shooting out of a mountainside cave to give up the fight. Mizushima goes on the mission, but with only 30 minutes to make his case to the crazed soldiers, all of whom would rather die for the Emperor than face the shame of defeat, he fails at his task, and a slaughter ensues. Mizushima is presumed dead, and the rest of his unit marches sadly to a Burmese prison camp....
We watch in flashback as Mizushima staggers alone through the jungle in search of his friends and comes across many scenes of gruesome carnage. Hundreds of Japanese soldiers' corpses are rotting in piles and being devoured by vultures. After watching a British medical team bury the body of an unknown Japanese soldier with grace and dignity, Mizushima realizes his mission in life will be to bury each of his dead comrades, a gruesome task that he begins immediately.
Mizushima's colleagues try everything they can to persuade him to rejoin them, even delivering to him a talking parrot that they teach to say 'Hey, Mizushima, let's go back to Japan together.' In the film's most amazing moments, he stands outside the prison fence silently appearing nothing short of Christ-like as he plays his harp along with the singing of his mystified and tearful friends.
Ichikawa is a master of black and white cinematography, and the film is an absolutely gorgeous study of light and shadow. With plenty of chances to push emotional buttons, he bravely holds back and uses understatement to deliver the hardest emotional blows. Mizushima is an unforgettable character, a man of few words who says no to the violence of the world and yes to enlightenment without ever saying very much at all. He lets his harp do the talking.
And another:
THE BURMESE HARP (1956)
D: Kon Ichikawa; with Rentaro Mikuni, Shoji Yasui, Jun
Hamamura, Taketoshi Naito, Akira Nishimura.
History, they say, is written by the victors, so it can be enlightening to
revisit it through the eyes of the vanquished. Sometimes translated as Harp
of Burma, this affecting drama paints the devastating aftermath of war
with a Japanese brush. It's 1943 and the war is going badly (for them), so
troops trekking through Burma sing to preserve morale, one of them playing
a Burmese harp he picked up along the way. The scene in which the Japanese
find out the war is over, toward the beginning of the film, is one of the
most powerful in the history of war movies: The resting soldiers spot British
forces hiding in the bushes and carry on singing "Home Sweet Home"
in Japanese (to fool the Brits into thinking they suspect nothing), only to
find the surrounding soldiers singing along in English.
Japan has surrendered. But that's just the beginning of the company's trials.
As they linger in a British prison camp, waiting to be sent home, harpist
Mizushima (Yasui) volunteers to try to persuade a still-fighting unit holed
up in a cave to surrender. It's a mission that takes him much farther than
anticipated -- presumed dead, disguised as a monk, wandering through fields
strewn with the bodies of the slain, unable to return to his comrades or his
former self until he somehow brings peace to the countless dead of war.
**************************************
See also another review of the film, Harp of Burma, by Audie Bock:
In beautifully composed black-and-white, lilting easily from sweeping landscape to emotional close-up, and tempered by a gentle and nostalgic choral score, director Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp probes deeply into the moral chaos of war. Following the actions of a young Japanese officer separated from his battalion at the close of the Pacific War in Burma, Ichikawa shows one man's journey from the comforts of companionship in adversity to a solitary confrontation with, and eventual grasp of, mass death in the name of patriotism. Corporal Mizushima's silent conversion from warrior to Buddhist monk, and his final refusal to return home to the country that sent him into war, bear a message of pacifism as inspiring and baffling in our own time as it was to his defeated countrymen in 1945.
In The Burmese Harp, Ichikawa (The Makioka Sisters, Tokyo Olympiad, Odd Obsession) displays some of the versatility that continues to mark him as one of Japan's leading film directors. Not only has he made animated features, working-class comedies, sports documentaries, and adaptations of the rich novels of one of the most twisted erotic sensibilities in modern Japanese literature (Junichiro Tanizaki wrote both The Makioka Sisters and The Key, which is the basis for Ichikawa's Odd Obsession), but with The Burmese Harp he has made a simple story of universal humanistic appeal. Based on Michio Takeyama's novel Harp of Burma, it won the prestigious Venice International Film Festival San Giorgio Prize in 1956. It is one of a handful of Japanese films -- such as Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) -- that were the first to call the attention of the world to the mastery of cinematic art in Japan. Like Kurosawa's Ikiru (1952), it shows one man unwittingly embarking on a spiritual quest that culminates in service to humanity.
At the close of the Pacific War, a weary unit of Japanese soldiers straggles cautiously through mountain jungles in Burma. One of them, Corporal Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), has learned to play the Burmese harp, which he uses with enthralling virtuosity to accompany the men as they keep up their spirits by singing. When Mizushima's unit is ambushed by the British, they learn that the war is over and surrender peacefully, but Mizushima is sent to convince a holdout unit of Japanese in the mountains to give up. He begs them to remember the families who wait for their return, but they decide to die for their country, while accusing him of cowardice. Knocked unconscious in the final massacre, he awakes in a different world, rescued by a Buddhist monk.
From the moment Mizushima steals the monk's robes to rejoin his unit, an inexorable transformation takes place in him -- triggered by the terrible aftermath of battle.
It is this very carnage that brings about his comprehension and embrace of Buddhist altruism. By the time Mizushima's comrades find him -- in a chance encounter on a bridge which so powerfully underscores his newly transcendent identity that it is echoed later in the film -- he has already decided not to go home with them.
Toward the end, the tale turns on the contrast between Mizushima's spiritual journey and his captain's frustrated but relentless search for him from within a POW camp.
Screenwriter Natto Wada (Ichikawa's former wife) lets minimal dialogue carry the emotion of The Burmese Harp. Ichikawa allows the grandeur of the Burmese landscape and the eerie power of its Buddhist statuary and architecture to sustain the mood of Mizushima's conversion and the mystification of his Japanese comrades. Yet the gravity of the film lifts with the lyrical score, the light humor of a local bartering woman (Tanie Kitabayashi) with her parrots, and the genuine but uncomprehending affection of the soldiers for their missing mate.
Part of the mastery of The Burmese Harp lies in the subtlety of its anti-war message. Mizushima never condemns Japanese military policy for the fanatical suicide stand of an entire unit, but his decision not to return to Japan after the war is his personal attempt at redress. If the warring nations treat soldiers as mere cannon fodder, he and the Burmese peasantry would mitigate that inhumanity by cremating and burying the casualties. Inside the box for the ashes of the dead, he places a huge rough ruby plucked from the river mud. Only when the captain (Rentaro Mikuni) observes the familiar monk who carries a Japanese-style funerary box in the ceremony honoring the war dead, and later learns the contents of the box, does he understand Mizushima -- he has forsaken both national identity and an opportunity for worldly wealth to show respect for those who sacrificed their lives. Accepting this, the captain too can relinquish a primary Japanese need for belonging to the group, and allow one of his men to disappear into a strange land to serve a higher spiritual purpose.
-- Audie Bock
CREDITS
Director: Kon Ichikawa
Producer: Masayuki Takaki
Original Story: Michio Takeyama
Screenplay: Natto Wada
Photography: Minoru Yokoyama
Editor: Masanori Tsujii
Lighting: Ko Fujibayashi
Music: Akira Ifukube
Also:
Kon Ichikawa’s deeply humane, spiritually resonant masterpiece The Burmese Harp is routinely but reductionistically described as “pacifist” or “anti-war,” terms also applied to his subsequent Fires on the Plain. The description is apt in the case of the horrific Fires on the Plain, but in The Burmese Harp war is the occasion for the central theme, not the theme itself, which is nothing less than the intractable mystery of suffering and evil, affirmation of spiritual values, and the challenge to live humanely in evil circumstances.
Both films were based on postwar Japanese novels, and made within ten to fifteen years of the end of the Pacific war. Both depict weary Japanese troops struggling in the backwash of a war already lost, though that loss is not yet declared in Fires on the Plain, and not fully acknowledged in The Burmese Harp.
Adapted from the novel of the same name by Michio Takeyama, The Burmese Harp’s simple, almost fable-like narrative follows a division of exhausted Japanese soldiers stationed in Burma, who struggle to keep their spirits and humanity alive by singing — not just simple choruses but complex harmonies. The universality of the soldiers’ melancholy circumstances and simple longing is emphasized by the one tune to which they return again and again, Hanyu no Yadu or “There’s No Place Like Home.”
Contrasted with this simple nostalgia is the harder wisdom of the proverb “You can’t go home again,” a lesson learned by one of the soldiers, a talented harpist named Mizushima (Shôji Yasui) who undergoes a spiritual transformation after being separated from his unit and disguising himself as a Buddhist monk. Burying the dead, one of the seven corporal works of mercy in Catholic tradition, plays a key role in an elegant parable of reparation and individual conscience.
Although the story dwells on war-related horrors, above all the countless unburied bodies of the slain, The Burmese Harp’s message is not simply that war causes suffering. Nor, despite its Buddhist milieu, does the film endorse the Buddhist doctrine that suffering (dukkha) is caused by desire (tanha).
Instead, the film declares, like the Book of Job, that we mortals do not know why suffering happens. Rather than diagnosing a cause, The Burmese Harp emphasizes the importance of compassion, humility, and spirituality in facing up to the disease.
A Recent review of the DVD release:
Kon Ichikawa's The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto, 1956) is a visually sumptuous, dramatically uneven but generally impressive film about a Japanese soldier's religious odyssey in Burma (now Myanmar), where he's compelled to abandoned his unit at the end of the war so that he may remain and bury its war dead. The film was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Film and won the San Giorgio Prize at the Venice Film Festival, reportedly after tying with Rene Clement's Gervaise. In any case it was among the first in the tiny handful of Japanese movies shown in the west in the 1950s following Kurosawa's Rashomon a few years before. Nearly all of the earliest Japanese movies exhibited in the United States were period dramas crammed with "Asian exoticism"; American audiences, it was perceived, wouldn't be interested in contemporary Japanese stories, so at the time they got pictures like Sword for Hire (Sengoku burai, 1952) instead of movies by directors Ozu and Naruse.
The international success of The Burmese Harp (released at the time as Harp of Burma) established an inaccurate portrait of its director. This and Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1959) seemed to peg director Kon Ichikawa as a filmmaker specializing in antiwar dramas. In fact up to this time Ichikawa was best known in Japan for his biting contemporary satires, which remain among his very best pictures even though they're almost never shown in America and, up to now, haven't been released to home video in the west.
Based on the novel by Michio Takeyama and adapted for the screen by Ichikawa's wife, Natto Wada, The Burmese Harp follows a platoon starving and on the run in July 1945. Gentle Captain Inoue (Rentaro Mikuni), with a civilian background in music education, keeps his men's spirits up by teaching them choral music, with Private Mizushima (Shoji Yasui) accompanying them on a Burmese harp he's taught himself to play.
The war ends and Inoue and his men surrender, but Mizushima volunteers to try and convince another platoon, holed up in a remote cave in the mountains, to surrender to the British. However, the unit's commander (Tatsuya Mihashi) vehemently refuses to surrender: he and his men would rather die honorably than acquiesce. The cave is shelled and dozens die meaninglessly.
Making his way back to the relocation center/prison camp in Mudon, Mizushima gradually fades into the landscape, adopting the robes of a Buddhist monk and, en route, is overwhelmed by the endless piles of rotting Japanese corpses, shown in very honest and graphic terms by mid-1950s movie standards. "The soil of Burma is red," reads the text that opens and closes the film, "and so are the rocks."
The Burmese Harp has variously been described as an antiwar film, an adult fairy tale, a religious odyssey of enlightenment, a sentimental war drama, a kind of penance for the senseless loss of human life at the hands of Japan's militarists. In fact it's all these things, and Ichikawa and Wada for the most part manage to juggle all these balls in the air at once with nary a misstep. Seen today, the film is more impressive for its visual design and its unusualness - there's nothing quite like it in early postwar Japanese cinema - than its emotional impact, though like the men in Inoue's charge most Japanese audiences can't watch it without crying their eyes out.
As Ichikawa points out in the 2005 interview about the film, included as an extra feature, only a few scenes with actor Yasui were actually shot abroad; most of the film was made in Japan, near Hakone and Izu, though unless the viewer has actually been to Myanmar the effect is completely convincing. Ichikawa and longtime Shintoho/Nikkatsu cinematographer Minoru Yokoyama's compositions are vivid and evocative with painterly framing and lighting. The black and white photography, with its high-contrast compositions, creates a movie-real grittiness for the battle-type scenes that simultaneously allow for poetic, ethereal vignettes that at appropriate times convey a dream-like quality. The screenplay deftly splinters off into two directions, telling its story from two perspectives: the men wondering about Mizushima's fate, and Mizushima's odyssey, with a chance encounter on a bridge as the fulcrum in which these points of view intertwine.
That the film plays at times like filmed novel lends it both its uniqueness and a certain weakness. Some images, like the transformed Mizushima standing in a field in his newly adopted monk's robes with two parrots on his shoulders, as Inoue's fenced-in men watch him from a distance, are beautifully realized and work wonderfully well. But the film's barrage of sentimental songs (and composer Akira Ifukube's mournful underscoring, at times nearly identical to cues he wrote for 1954's Gojira) is extravagantly overdone, hammering away at its core message on the universality of music and its use, as write Tony Rayns describes it, as "salve for the soul." At times the film threatens to become insufferably noble while ignoring the realities of Japan's militarism in Asia, but the filmmaking is at such a high level it's easy to ignore this and lose oneself in its hypnotic telling.
Video & Audio
The Burmese Harp is presented in a very clean full frame transfer (as per its OAR) that's windowboxed but much less severely than other Criterion's titles. Two 35mm fine grain master positives were sourced and this, combined with the digital cleanup, result in a very impressive transfer. The mono sound, from an optical soundtrack print, is also well above average. The optional English subtitles are excellent.
The transfer does beg one question. In its original theatrical release in Japan, The Burmese Harp was first exhibited in two parts. The Burmese Harp - Part 1 (subtitled "Nostalgia Volume") opened on January 21, 1956 with a running time of 63 minutes. Part two debuted three weeks later, on February 12th, with a running time of 81 minutes. Apparently the 116-minute cut of the film, the same one that is on Criterion's DVD, opened simultaneously in other Japanese markets. Whether this two-part version still exists, or what additional footage it might contain, is unknown.
Extra Features
Extras include an Interview with Kon Ichikawa in which the director details his approach to the material. Interestingly he mentions that the film was originally planned for color, but that plan was abandoned because, unlike other studios which were then shooting in Eastman, Agfa, and Fujicolor, producer Nikkatsu Studios was then leaning toward a process Ichikawa calls Konicolor, which sounds like the old three-strip Technicolor process, requiring cumbersome cameras that would have been impractical on location.
Eccentric actor Rentaro Mikuni, whose long career and personality in some respects resembles that of Marlon Brando, likewise appears in an Interview about the film. Both are in 16:9 format. An original Japanese trailer, complete with translated text is also included.
Finally, an 18-page booklet includes an essay by Tony Rayns called "Unknown Soldiers," which offers a nice overview of the film and pointedly notes Japan's still-strained relationship with Asian neighbors it invaded all those years ago, or that Japanese soldiers weren't the benign invaders nor as kind toward Burma's indigenous people as the film likes to suggest. (The famous Japanese character actress Tanie Kitabayashi plays the old Burmese woman that symbolizes this. She reprised the character in Ichikawa's 1985 remake.) Significantly, no mention is made of Mizushima burying or making any effort to bury dead civilians or enemy combatants.
Conspicuously absent are references to Kon Ichikawa's 1985 remake of The Burmese Harp. Although that film was produced by a different company (it was financed primarily by Fuji Television and distributed by Toho), it's a shame Criterion couldn't have included at least a trailer for that version, and certainly could have used a booklet essay comparing the two versions (and perhaps the films with the novel) in greater detail.
Parting Thoughts
Though a contemporary of Kurosawa, Ozu, and Mizoguchi, Kon Ichikawa's career is better likened to that of American director John Huston, who like Ichikawa dabbled in every conceivable genre, and made as many terrible films as great ones. (And, like Huston, he changed with the times and was commercially savvy enough to maintain an extremely long and active career.) The Burmese Harp is then hardly representative but remains one of Ichikawa's finest films.
Film historian Stuart Galbraith IV's most recent essays appear in Criterion's new three-disc Seven Samurai DVD and BCI Eclipse's The Quiet Duel.
http://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/27001/burmese-harp-criterion-collection-the/
The most gentle of war dramas, The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto) lyrically ventures into sentimental terrain, yet the film's earnestness rescues it from being another glib anti-war vehicle. Kon Ichikawa's 1956 black and white film would make an interesting companion piece to Letters from Iwo Jima; it may have even served as inspiration for Eastwood's 2006 film. Both significantly feature letters back home in the narrative, suicidal soldiers senselessly engulfed by their strict bushido code, and poignant portraits of Japanese soldiers who merely want to return home.
Told primarily through Japanese infantryman Mizushima (Shôji Yasui), the story is set in Burma (Buddha's country) near the end of WWII where a platoon of exhausted men are struggling to survive in the humid tropical region. Music major Captain Inouye (Rentaro Mikuni) frequently leads his men in song--amazing choral arrangements in three-part harmony while Mizushima accompanies them with a Burmese harp that he has taught himself to play. Whether taking a rest break or even suspecting an upcoming enemy ambush, the platoon frequently sings a melancholy and hopeful version of "Hanyu no yado" ("Home Sweet Home"). They are even joined by a British platoon one evening in an eerie and pointed sequence that firmly solidifies Ichikawa's anti-war sentiments. How can anyone even conceive of fighting after joining the "enemy" in choral worship?
It turns out that Japan has surrendered after the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, so the Japanese platoon goes to an internment camp to await the time that they can return home. Another Japanese platoon remains holed up in a mountain, and Mizushima is dispatched to inform them of Japan's surrender. That group doesn't sing the same song, however. They are determined to die honorably in battle. When they are easily wiped out by the British, it is assumed that Mizushima has perished with them.
Fate has intervened of course. Mizushima is the sole survivor and is nursed back to health by a Buddhist monk, and he takes on a second life diametrically opposed to his sojourn as a soldier--a journey akin to that of Sidhartha. Seeing a vast number of corpses left rotting in remote ravine, the young harp player decides to dedicate himself to a spiritual mission--to "go native" and attend to the needs of the many souls of Japanese comrades who can never return home. Poignant and mystical connections with his former platoon buddies are made primarily through music, culminating in a heartfelt written message that the captain reads as the platoon returns home.
The Burmese Harp marks a significant breakthrough for Ichikawa, bringing him international recognition when unknown to him it was screened at the 1956 Venice Film Festival, where it won acclaim and gained a number of western distributors. Inspired initially to become another Walt Disney, Ichikawa began as an animator but soon switched to live action along the lines of mentors Yamanaka Sadao and Itami Mansaku. He polished his craft as a journeyman company director, but this was the first material that really fired up his passions.
When reading Takeyama Michio's anti-war children's book, Ichikawa knew that he wanted to adapt it to film--it was the first time he ever felt this way. Occasionally serving as a primer for Buddhism, the best selling novel was relatively vague about its setting. Michio had never set foot in Burma; he just used it to work his Burmese harp metaphor more conveniently into his anti-war theme. Collaborating with his wife/writer Natto Wada to shape the screenplay, the most critical change was to transform the narrative into an adult allegory. While some may see the film as overly sentimental, The Burmese Harp works its humanitarian magic profoundly--sewing unforgettable visual images that grow on the viewer like a lotus blossom. It's impossible to dismiss its deeply felt spiritual reality.
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The controversy over Japan's war responsiblity continues right down to the
present. For example, on August 15, 2002, Prime Minister Koizumi made official
remarks at a ceremony commemorating the 57th anniversary of the end of the war.
As an online news account relates his remarks.:
"Representing the people of Japan, I once again express deep
remorse and offer sincere condolences to the victims (of the war),"
Koizumi said in a speech at the annual government-sponsored ceremony
at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan hall.
The premier said Japan caused great damage and pain to people in many
countries, especially Asian nations. He said he believes "passing
on a peaceful Japan to the next generation is a way to repay the war
dead."
"Japan will exert utmost efforts to realize a society where the
people enjoy living, by further developing goodwill relations with neighboring
countries and establishing a lasting peace as a member of the international
community," he said. . .Koizumi stressed Japan renounces war and
will work toward creating peace around the world.
Expressions of deep remorse are welcome as is the acknowledgement
that Japan inflicted great and irreperable harm to many Asians. But many people,
I am sure, will say that it falls short of fully accepting responsibility and
apologizing for wrongdoings.
Last year, Prime Minister Koizumi avoided going to visit Yasukini
Shrine in Tokyo, the shrine dedicated to the war dead. Whenever politicians
go, it sparks a wave of protests from citizens who believe the constitution
forbids public officials from endorsing religious practices. At bottom, however,
there is a divide between those who like to summon up memories of the war in
the context of the dedication, suffering and patriotism it enatiled, and those
who think the government was wrong in the 1930s and that these errors should
not be celebrated. The following excerpts from an Asahi Shinbun article
provide an indication of the kind of controversies that occured annually in Japan
in August for many years. Supposedly, curent Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio will nt be inclined to repear these visits...but we shall see.
"The usual suspects at shrine"
Five Cabinet ministers visited Tokyo's controversial Yasukuni Shrine on Thursday,
the 57th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II. The same group
of people also visited at this time last year. When Prime Minister Junichiro
Koizumi visited on Aug. 13, 2001, it sparked a torrent of rage from Asian
countries that suffered from Japanese military excesses
during the war.
The five who visited were Toranosuke Katayama, minister of public management,
home affairs, posts and telecommunications; Tsutomu Takebe, minister of agriculture,
forestry and fisheries; Takeo Hiranuma, minister of economy, trade and industry;
Jin Murai, chairman of the National Public Safety Commission; and Defense
Agency Director-General Gen Nakatani. In addition, Finance Minister Masajuro
Shiokawa, Hakuo Yanagisawa, state minister in charge of financial affairs,
and Heizo Takenaka, state minister in charge of economic and fiscal policy,
paid visits to Yasukuni Shrine prior to Thursday. In all, eight members of
Cabinet ministers have visited Yasukuni Shrine this summer.
Koizumi, perhaps heeding last year's reaction from Asia, did not visit Yasukuni
Shrine on Thursday but instead went to the Chidorigafuchi Cemetery for the
War Dead and laid a wreath.
Asked to comment on the reaction of neighboring nations such as China to visits
to Yasukuni Shrine by Cabinet ministers, Takebe replied: ``China is China.
Japan is Japan. I am I. I paid an ordinary visit to the shrine as an individual
citizen today.'' Nakatani explained that he signed the shrine register as
``State minister-Gen Nakatani.'' He also said he paid for flowers to the shrine
from his own pocket. ``Gen Nakatani, who is a state minister, paid a sincere
visit as a Japanese,'' he explained later to reporters.
A multipartisan group of 54 Diet members that promotes visits to Yasukuni
Shrine visited en masse. Among those joining that group were former Prime
Minister Yoshiro Mori, Mitsuo Horiuchi, chairman of the Liberal Democratic
Party's General Council, and Makoto Koga, former LDP secretary-general. Cabinet
ministers Katayama, Hiranuma and Murai joined the entourage. Making separate
visits to Yasukuni Shrine on Thursday were former Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto
and Lower House Speaker Tamisuke Watanuki.(IHT/Asahi: August 16,2002)
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Update: Koizumi did visit Yaukuni in January 2003. Here is a brief account
from the newspaper:
Koizumi's Recent Visit to Yasukuni January 2003
The Prime Minister of Japan, Junichiro Koizumi visited the Yasukuni
Shine in which war criminals including Tojo and other Class-A war criminals
are enshrined. Below is the news for your reference.
"It is the new year and I want to affirm anew the virtue of peace
and show our resolve not to cause war again,'' Koizumi told reporters
prior to the visit. How would we feel if the German Chancellor explains
his visit to a cathedral enshring Hitler and Nazi war criminals is to
affirm anew the virture if peace and show his resolve not to cause war
again?
Thekla Lit
President of B.C. ALPHA & Co-chair of Canada ALPHA
http://www.asahi.com/english/politics/K2003011500438.html
January 15, 2003
New shrine visit, more criticism
By TARO KARASAKI, The Asahi Shimbun
The Yasukuni issue once again enrages China and South Korea.
Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi prayed for the war dead at Yasukuni Shrine on Tuesday, an early visit that was intended to minimize criticism from abroad but instead infuriated two of Japan's partners in trying to defuse the North Korea crisis. Koizumi renewed a pledge that Japan would never again cause war, during his third visit as prime minister to the shrine, where the nation's war dead, including Class-A war criminals, are enshrined. The prime minister's previous visits were timed around symbolic events, such as the Aug. 15 anniversary of the end of World War II, in 2001, and the shrine's spring festival in late April 2002. Both visits drew harsh criticism from Seoul and Beijing. The latest visit was apparently timed to minimize criticism from victims of Japan's aggression before and during World War II.
Early on Tuesday, Koizumi appeared confident that the visit would not
hurt Japan's relations with China and South Korea.
``It is the new year and I want to affirm anew the virtue of peace and
show our resolve not to cause war again,'' Koizumi told reporters prior
to the visit. ``As in the past, I have explained (my shrine visits)
to both countries. Our friendly relations have not changed, and I hope
that they will understand our friendly relations will not change.''
However, South Korean and Chinese officials said they could not understand
why Koizumi felt the need to pay homage at what critics say is a symbol of Japan's militarism. ``Prime Minister Koizumi's mistaken act will undermine the political
base of China-Japan relations, and has hurt the feelings of the people of Asian countries,
including China,'' Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue
said in a news conference. Responding to a reporter's question, she
said the timing of the visit was irrelevant because the heart of the
matter was how Japan's leadership perceived history.
Kim Hang Kyung, South Korea's vice minister of foreign affairs and trade,
summoned Toshinao Urabe, the minister of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul,
to protest Koizumi's shrine visit.
``It is incomprehensible that the prime minister decided to visit following
last year,'' Kim said.
``Considering the great pain and damage inflicted upon our country during
Japan's colonization, we hope that the Japanese government takes sincere
measures not to allow further damage.''
In Tokyo, the Foreign Ministry expressed concern that Koizumi's latest
visit might cause problems.
``We hope that his motive will be fully understood by neighboring countries
and there will be no negative impact on the cooperative relations''
in dealing with North Korea, said Jiro Okuyama, assistant press secretary
at the ministry. Koizumi told reporters in December that he intended
to visit Yasukuni Shrine in 2003, but did not specify when.
``The prime minister had made his intentions to visit clear, and it
was a matter of timing,'' said a senior Cabinet official. ``The earlier
the better to avoid causing complications in diplomatic relations.''
The official noted that Tuesday's visit was timed well before the ascension
of South Korean President-elect Roh Moo Hyun to office in February,
as well as the finalization of top posts of China's Communist Party
in March.
Koizumi's visit also came after a panel to Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo
Fukuda recommended in December that a new national memorial for the
war dead, unattached to any religion, should be erected. But the panel-criticized
and largely ignored by members of the Liberal Democratic Party, including
Koizumi-left the final decision to the government.
``I am not sure how the visit will be perceived,'' Fukuda told reporters.
``This is a matter of the prime minister's personal beliefs. We can
only explain and have (China and South Korea) understand.''
************************************
See also this critical commentary on Koizumi's shrine visits
from the Singapore Times Straits where
we find this observation:
There continues to be an expectation for Japan's Prime Minister
to do what Mr Richard von Weizsacker did for Germany. As President of the
Federal Republic from 1984 to 1994, he often used his position to appeal
to Germany's conscience on troublesome issues.
In 1985, he made a famous speech challenging older German's assertions that
they 'knew
nothing' about the Holocaust. According to Japan specialist John Dower,
Mr Koizumi could have followed Mr von Weizsacker's example by using Yasukuni
'as an occasion to give a great cathartic speech about what Japan did to
its neighbours and people during World War II'.
Instead, the Japanese Prime Minister reads a wooden statement of 'regret'
for Japan's role in the war every Aug 15 (the date of its surrender), while
a procession of Cabinet ministers pay homage at the Yasukuni Shrine that
honours ex-Prime Minister General Tojo and 13 convicted war criminals.
******************************************************************
And the controversy continues in 2011 although the Democratic Party of Japan leaders did NOT visit the shrine this August, some 50 conservative LDP leaders did:
Conservative Politicians Visit Yasukuni Shrine
Yasukuni Shrine
More than 50 members of Japan’s conservative opposition party, the Liberal Democratic Party, including leader Sadakazu Tanigaki and former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, visited Yasukuni Shrine Monday.
The August 15 visit marks the 66th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II, and by coincidence is the beginning of the Obon, a Buddhist festival that honors the souls of ancestors (although Obon is celebrated a month earlier in the Kanto region, where Tokyo and the Yasukuni Shrine are located).
Yasukuni Shrine was built in 1869 at the end of the Boshin War, which restored the Meiji Emperor to power after nearly 800 years of military dictatorships. The shrine honors 2,466,532 soldiers, including colonial Korean and Taiwanese soldiers, who died in 13 of Japan’s wars (although the vast majority of the souls enshrined at Yasukuni are from World War II). Japanese politicians have always visited the shrine to pray for the souls of Japan’s war dead. Problems began in 1978 after the souls of 14 class-A war criminals were enshrined at Yasukuni. The shrine also houses the souls of 1,068 class-B and C war criminals. Japan’s neighbors–particularly China, North Korea and South Korea–view visits from Japan’s leaders to the shrine as glorifying the militaristic past of their country, which has been slow to acknowledge its wartime crimes against humanity.
I have mixed feelings about Japan’s leaders visiting the shrine. On one hand, politicians have the right to honor their country’s war dead, just as American politicians visit Arlington National Cemetery. One could point out that visiting the shrine is a violation of the separation of church and state. But don’t American presidents place their hand on the Bible when they are sworn into office? On the other hand, I suspect these conservative politicians visit the shrine not despite the fact that it infuriates their neighbors, but because it infuriates them. Or at least because it satisfies Japan’s own right-wing nationalists.
Most Japanese view themselves as the victims of World War II, not as the aggressors. The average Japanese person is ignorant of World War II-era atrocities, and there is no shortage of people who think World War II began when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and ended when the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The official cause of the war was that Japan was liberating its East Asian neighbors from their Western overlords and that the U.S., knowing its own imperialistic interests in East Asia were threatened by this humanitarian mission, prodded Japan into war by cutting off resources to their poor country. It doesn’t seem to matter that their East Asian neighbors have much more bitter memories of the few years of Japanese imperialism than of the centuries of Western colonialism. You’d be hard pressed to find a book in Japanese about the country’s war crimes, which include mass killings, human experimentation, biological warfare, use of chemical weapons, torture of prisoners of war, cannibalism, slave labor, sex slavery, looting. Therefore most Japanese don’t understand why this is a source of resentment from its neighbors, and assume that the Chinese and Koreans only want an official apology because they’re actually seeking monetary reparations due to their countries’ poor economies. Most Japanese certainly don’t think (perhaps correctly) that another country has the right to tell Japanese leaders where they can or can’t pray.
In 2005, one LDP politician suggested Yasukuni Shrine remove the souls of the 14 class-A war criminals, but the priests refused the request, citing separation of church and state.
LDP politicians can always do as Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his cabinet did Monday: Visit a non-controversial shrine that honors Japan’s war dead that is not associated with Yasukuni.
,