The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity

Kaji continues his path to righteousness, his path to herodom, his path to killing evil with kindness and companion for his fellow man. He will always be the guy who shows the other cheek and will take it for his fellow man.

The thing that is so effective from what Kaji does is that he puts up a mirror to what evil is made by his fellow man towards his other fellow man. The first fellow man doesn't like that. The first fellow man doesn't understand where Kajis kindness comes from. Why is he so different?

But it's easy to be Kaji. Just be a human being and act the way you want to be treated by others. That's why Kaji makes an impact. Because he does all this while one of the most horrific periods of human existance was underway.

This is the second of a three-part movie (9.5 hours in total) covering one man's experience during World War II. This part takes place in 1943 in a military training unit, and later in 1945 in Manchuria, after the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria in August 1945. Part II is three hours in length.

Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) has now been drafted in 1943 into the Japanese military. He resists veterans' harsh treatment of new recruits even though he personally excels at physical fitness and target practice. He is deeply shaken by the suicide of a recruit named Obara (Kunie Tanaka) after brutal treatment. He is allowed one brief visit with his wife, Michiko (Michiyo Aratama). Later, in early 1945, Kaji, now a private first class, becomes a trainer of new recruits, including older men in their 40s. He is still harassed and sometimes beaten by five-year veterans because he refuses to treat his men harshly and continues to believe the war is based on false values.

In August 1945, Kaji and his platoon are sent to dig trenches to anticipate the Soviet attack on Manchuria. There is much despair as the men know that Okinawa has been lost. There is an extended battle scene where Kaji's rifle company in foxholes tries to fight 15 Soviet tanks and support troops.

There is much violence in Part II, but it is not graphic. The cinematography remains striking in black and white. Kaji several times states his opposition to the Japanese war machine. He is willing to fight to protect his men and himself, though he looks appalled the first time he kills a Soviet soldier. He also considers himself a murderer when forced to kill a comrade who has gone mad.

This is the 18th in my list of movies in which pacifists are primary characters. In Part II, Kaji is not strictly a pacifist, though he remains very anti-military.

All filmed at once and released over a period of three years, The Human Condition is the Japanese, arthouse version of The Lord of the Rings or Manon of the Source, a single film production broken up into multiple parts for release reasons (who's gonna sit through nine-and-a-half hours at once?). The second part continues the main character's journey downward from a suited up bureaucrat in a corporate office to almost an animal by the end of this, his time in the Japanese army in Manchuria as Japan is steadily losing the overall conflict on both sides, from America at the Pacific and from the Soviet Union on the land.

Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai) is in basic training at a remote military installation near the front against the Soviet army. He is under suspicion, meaning that he receives informal harsher treatment and won't be on the promotions list, just like Shinjo (Kei Sato), a three-year recruit that has accusations over his head that he is a communist because his brother wrote in a communist paper. The two have become friends, isolated from the rest of the unit, but Shinjo is kept busy by their commanding officer Warrant Officer Hino (Jun Tatara) to the point where they simply don't have enough time for any kind of plotting. Otherwise, Kaji is a good soldier. He's a quality marksman, and he does what he can for the struggling members of the unit, in particular Obara (Kunie Tanaka), a bespectacled young man whose wife and mother-in-law are always fighting back home.

The trials and tribulations of a Japanese soldier at the tail end of World War II are not exactly the stuff of American cinema depictions of American military basic trainings. There's a whole lot more corporal punishment meted out all of the time for the slightest of infractions. The opening scene of the film is actually the unit being awoken in the middle of the night, forced to line up, and the officer in charge slapping every single one of them because a cigarette butt was found in the drinking water. Obara was in charge before lights out, so he is blamed. Kaji comes to his defense with his own witness testimony that everything was in order when Obara was relieved, evidence that heavily implies that it was an officer patrolling around the barracks that flicked the cigarette into the water, but the officer will have none of it. Punishment will be meted out to the junior recruits with the veterans looking on from their bunks up above.

This period in basic training really is a transitional period for Kaji, between the remnants of the civilized world and the harsh wilderness and savagery of life on the battlefield, so it seems appropriate that he gets one final moment with Michiko (Michiyo Aratama), his wife, who comes to the remote training ground and is granted one night with her husband in the storehouse. Their night is his last grasp of love before he must go to the front, and it's painful. They love each other deeply, and there seems to be little hope that they'll ever meet each other again.

The recruits' graduation is a long march, and Kaji does everything he can to help the exhausted Obara to finish it. He takes half of his pack on his own back and carries Obara's rifle, but Obara still cannot finish, eventually picked up by the cart picking up the stragglers (there are three total). The veterans in the training corps, led by Yoshida (Michiro Minami) then humiliate those who couldn't finish, most particularly Obara, which sends Obara into a spiral that ends with him committing suicide. His suicide scene ends up being incredibly sad, not just because he loses hope and decides to end it all with a rifle in the latrine (echoes of this definitely end up in Full Metal Jacket), but because he fails several times and then decides that it's a sign that he should continue on before the gun suddenly goes off. It's tragic in a way, and emblematic of how hard it is to find one's humanity in a system like this.

That extends to Kaji's reaction to Obara's suicide. He wants the offending veteran punished, but the command structure will not allow it. They use a variety of excuses, from Kaji having a personal vendetta to everything being hearsay, but they will not allow the punishment of the perpetrators. Kaji can only stew in his own anger at the injustice as the Japanese military refuses to do anything about it. When the unit is moved towards the border, things gain a different character. It almost becomes wistful as a gap forms between basic training and actual combat, with the border (presumably the border with the Soviet Union) just on the horizon, with promises of freedom for the individual (said by Shinjo, communist, so...eh, it's about the promise not the reality). During an emergency, Shinjo runs towards the border, deserting, and both Kaji and Yoshida run after him with Kaji knocking Yoshida into quicksand, unable to save him. He accidentally kills someone. The humanist who threw his whole life away to save some prisoners of war accidentally kills a man.

That's the end of Part 3. A lot of events in these films, and yet because they're all so tightly focused on Kaji himself and his emotional journey, it never feels like a jumble. There are a handful of small scenes without him (between a couple of superior officers, for instance, who talk about how his guts show that Kaji should remain on the promotions list), but even those scenes outside of his view are all in service of him. Even poor Obara's suicide feeds into Kaji's overall journey (sorry, Obara, this ain't your movie).

Part 4 moves the action to near the border where the unit goes in for artillery training, led by a friend of Kaji's from the civilian world (whom we saw briefly at the start of Part 1), Kageyama (Keiji Sada). Kaji gets the ranking of Private First Class and is put in charge of the barracks, giving him a chance to implement his humanist labor policies one more time, focusing on his fellow rookies. It all falls apart again in relatively the same fashion with human nature from outside the small group putting pressure on the inside until they crack. His ideals meet the real world and survive for a little while until they begin to fall apart as human nature intervenes over time. To relieve some of the tensions in the camp, Kageyama sends Kaji and most of the rookie soldiers out to build fortifications, during which the Russian campaign into Manchuria begins. Kaji's little unit is folded into a new one, and they are the second line of defense after the first line further up dies gloriously for the Japanese Empire.

And here, about six hours into this war epic, do we get our first battle. From a technical point of view, the battle is competent and small in scale. It's remarkably tense, though, and that has almost everything to do with the extraordinary amount of work that went into building Kaji as a character. There are about a dozen tanks, but the extras seem a bit thin. Still, it's easy to see what's going on and watch as the action moves around, and the action does no move in Japan's favor. In the end, Kaji must pick up his gun and fire into the coming soldiers. Did his bullets hit and kill the men we see? Can we be sure in the hail of millions of bullets? We can be sure of the post-battle moment when Kaji has to strangle a fellow Japanese soldier to keep him quiet that he killed him, though. The humanist has become an outright murderer. Surely there's no more for him to fall. We may find out in Parts 5 and 6.

Much like the first part, The Human Condition: Part II really could stand on its own. Kaji has his ideals and his journey (it's downward, if you hadn't surmised), and his time in the regular army has a clear beginning, middle, and end. And that journey is involving and surprisingly crushing. Watching an idealist in the middle of his ideals crashing around him to the point that he has to violate them all is really sad, and the subtext of both Kobayashi and Junpei Gomikawa's own views in relation to the trajectory of Japan through the 30s and 40s (they were against the militarism and colonization of Manchuria) gives it an extra flavor.

This may be the middle third of a three-part tale, but it's a great one.

A three-film saga chronicling the journey of a Japanese pacifist who continues to find his morals at crossroads with his duties to his country while trying to survive the oppressive regime & imperialist ideology of World War II-era Japan, The Human Condition is a mammoth undertaking that offers an honest observation of the uphill battle it always is for anyone trying to rise above a corrupt system and makes for an epic war drama that's grand in scope & exhaustive in narration.

The second part of the trilogy, Road to Eternity finds our protagonist now conscripted into the Japanese army after losing his exemption from military service due to his actions in the last film. Proving to be an excellent marksman with strong discipline, he bears witness to the cruelty & mistreatment from army vets and then incurs their wrath after reporting their malefactions to higher officials.

Co-written & directed by Masaki Kobayashi, there is a greater sense of danger at play here in this second chapter but at its core the plot continues to be about his struggle to stay true to his core beliefs. Facing harder challenges, physical abuse & endless punishments for slightest offences, he slowly begins to understand the difference between having ideals & acting on them by setting an example.

The story is told in two parts just like the previous entry, with the first one detailing his hardship at boot camp training and next one transporting him to the frontlines. Kobayashi also sheds critical light on the hazing culture that exists in the army in addition to corruption within the ranks itself but as before, it is Tatsuya Nakadai's committed showcase that keeps things glued together and helps us invest in the drama.

Overall, The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity may lack the steadier flow of its predecessor but it ventures into darker spaces and challenges the resilience of the human spirit by pushing our character's determination to test. The issues that plagued the first film are still here and the 3-hour runtime remains bothersome but the personal growth and better sense of right & wrong that our pacifist gains makes it a worthy sit in the end.

Thanks to even just a couple of his works Kobayashi Masaki had already been cemented in my mind as one of the greatest filmmakers to ever live, and upon sitting for 'The human condition' that opinion is only affirmed once again. The first film of the trilogy, 'No greater love,' was stark and sometimes almost unbearable in the difficult gravity of its narrative that so heavily impugns war and the military - but also boasted some of the best writing, direction, and acting that I've ever seen in a title that was altogether exemplary. With the same cast and crew also working on this next portion of the trilogy it's safe to say that I had high expectations, though with a runtime of three hours it may well have again been the case that the picture would take its time to progress to the next level. Sure enough, 'Road to eternity' also begins comparatively softly, but ultimately such stringent dissection is almost beside the point, for this is just as strident in its harsh judgment, if arguably more subtle. Most war films emphasize big action sequences while unthinkingly embracing chest-beating jingoism, toxic masculinity, and sycophantic glorification of the military, and only rare examples are smarter and more thoughtful in approaching the subject matter. Like an even smaller corner of the genre, though this follows in the tradition of exemplars like Abel Gance's 'J'accuse' and Stanley Kubrick's 'Paths of glory' in being unflinching in its unabashedly scorching assessment of the military. In fact, though it starts out more gently, it doesn't take long before the story becomes as ugly as in its predecessor; 'Road to eternity' tackles a slightly different subset of the topic, but is just as fierce, resulting in a feature that is both wonderfully compelling and absorbing as a viewer, but also once again not the easiest to watch. But if that doesn't speak to the power of cinema, nothing does.

Picking up where the previous movie left off, idealist Kaji has been conscripted into the Imperial Army as a recruit, and his commitment to principles of humanism and justice butt up against the turgid reality of the institution and those who breathlessly uphold it. Informed by his own experiences while working alongside Matsuyama Zenzo from Gomikawa Junpei's novel, Kobayashi sets his withering gaze on the dangerously boorish juvenility, barbarous hypermasculinity (and homophobia, and misogyny), and abusive rigidity of basic training and military units; the cold, unyielding inhumanity and self-protecting inaccountability of any military command structure; and even the reckless severity of army hospitals. All this only builds upon those themes already addressed in 'No greater love,' including the corrosive destruction that war and military culture wreak on the human spirit; if not entirely as rough, in no time the viewing experience is just as commanding. Even through all the unpleasantness the narrative is roundly captivating as Kaji's stubbornness again produces trouble, and the scene writing remains dynamic and gripping as the plot develops toward an inevitable, terrible culmination. Kobayashi's direction is unfailingly tight all the while, sustaining a buzzing electricity about the proceedings while orchestrating shots and scenes with masterful finesse. This is to say nothing of the cast, all giving superb, spirited performances befitting the grim vibes of the saga. Naturally Nakadai Tatsuya stands out most as Kaji, deftly meeting the physical and emotional demands placed on him as an actor, but co-stars including Tanaka Kunie, Sato Kei, and Fujita Susumu are to be commended just as much.

While less harried and visceral than in some comparable fare, the stunts, effects, and action sequences we see in 'Road to eternity' are no less brutal and troubling. Miyajima Yoshio's cinematography is gratifyingly sharp and vivid in capturing every detail, whether the nuances of the acting or the horrid, varied violence throughout, to say nothing of the crystal clear audio. Outstanding detail fills the production design, art direction, costume design, and hair and makeup to adjoin terrific filming locations, and the excellence of the craftsmanship somewhat stands in contrast to the nature of the material and the presentation. Kinoshita Chuji's original music seems even more prevalent to me in this title and it is a welcome, somber complement to the tale at hand. Truly, in all regards this is just as fantastic as Part I - the writing, acting, and direction just as exceptional, the storytelling just as dour and dispiriting, and the criticism of war and the military just as strong. I'm inclined to think that this portion of 'The human condition' may overall be less fully striking, yet any discrepancy is quality is negligible to the point that nitpicking is pointless. One way or another the incontrovertible fact is that this is another essential classic in Kobayashi's oeuvre, and 'Road to eternity' and the broader trilogy are stellar movies that demand viewership. Between the tenor of the story and the pictures' lengths one should be well aware of what they're getting into when sitting to watch, but if you have the opportunity to do so, it would be a sore mistake to pass these up. Kobayashi once again proves what an incredible filmmaker he was, and I can only give this my very highest and heartiest recommendation.