Fires on the Plain

In Ichikawa Kon's film _The Harp of Burma_ the company of soldiers led by Captain Inoue, although a bit travel worn and homesick, looked at least to be in decent health and well fed in the foreign environs of Burma. However, in his film _Fires on the Plain_ the Japanese soldiers stationed on the Island of Leyte in the Phillipines are malnourished, desperate men who are willing to do anything to survive

The first scene in the film depicts Pvt. Tamura being slapped viciously by his superior. The superior is angry because Tamura returned to their regiment. a sufferer of tuberculosis, Tamura is unable to support himself and relies on the other soldiers, who can barely forage enough food for themselves, to gather food for him. Not wanting a dependent in their midst, Tamura superior sends him back to the hospital along with a few potatoes. Tamura does, however, have one more key item in his possession: a hand grenade.

If he tires of living or is unable to, Tamura is to kill himself with the grenade. The grenade appears several times in the film. One can almost see the gears turning in his head, an inner struggle whether he wants to live or die. However, each times he decides to keep trudging along.

Tamura does in fact arrive back at the hospital, but of course he is refused. The doctors will only let men who are very near death to stay in the hospital. Tamura, unwanted in his own camp, decides to stat with a group of stragglers who have also been cast out of their respective companies. Tamura is able to make friends with these individuals at least until the Americans begin bombing the area. The doctors leave the patients, first taking all the food, to be blown up in the bombing, and Tamura and friend are separated to the four winds.

Tamura continues his travels and eventually arrives in a small village where he kills a Fillpino girl who would not stop screaming. He also tries to kill her boyfriend, but he runs away successfully.

Tamura begins to care for the wounded girl, but pushes her out of the way when he discovers a hidden cache of salt. He soon continues his journey to no real destination.

_Fires on the Plain_ is a brutal film which depicts the remnants of the once powerful Japanese army struggling to survive, but without any hope of ever being truly rescued. These soldiers just want to live for a few hours longer, their primal instincts to survive much stronger than dieing in service of the Emperor. A will to survive that will even make some of them eat "Monkey Meat."

However, even in this bleak film there are some signs of humanity. Tamura although tubercular and emancipated willingly shares his few rations and his precious salt even when he has little. There are moments of semi friendship between Tamura and the stragglers, and also between Tamura and another soldier named Nagamatsu, however, the outlook is bleak for our pleasant spoken Tamura.

Based on a novel written by Ooka Shohei.

I recently saw "Nobi" ("Fires On the Plain"), for the second time. Of all Ichikawa's films, and most of his films - (the ones I've seen), even "Tokyo Olympiad", has a strong thread of despair running through them. This is one of the few films (especially as its from the Japanese perspective), that deals, uncompromisingly, with how ordinary soldiers deal with, and are prepared to go, to survive a war where no prisoners were taken. It's a depressing film, but it should be seen by all the people, especially the Generals and Politicians, who think war is an heroic endeavour.

I got this movie out a week after the death of Ichikawa Kon - I suppose if there is one way to mark the passing of a great director, its to raise a glass of wine to him while watching one of his greatest movies. Ichikawa had one of the finest careers in Japanese film, but as he never had a distinctive style or theme he often seems to be overlooked compared to his near contemporaries such as Ozu and Kurosawa (he was a little younger than them, but not by much). He is one of those directors who defies auteur theories - its likely that his wife (who wrote the screenplay for this and many other of his movies) was as much responsible for the quality of the movies as he was. But at his best, he was as good as any Japanese film maker at the time. In particular, he had great technical skills, allowing him to tell complex stories in an accessible manner. But in terms of theme, this movie could hardly be simpler - war is hell. No really, its seriously hell.

Fire on the Plain doesn't follow the normal war genre rules. There is no real beginning - we start as the wretched Tamura, who is a regular private (although it is implied he is more thoughtful and educated than most of the others - at one stage it is shown he understands English, but he clams up when the others ask him how he knows it) is ordered to hospital, as his unit is already in an appalling state. The soldiers are defeated and starving to death. They are no longer an army, just a rag bag group of refugees - hunted by the locals, and pretty much ignored by the Americans, who have bigger fish to fry. Hunger and despair is driving the soldiers to the edge and beyond of madness.

In typical Ichikawa style, its not all just grim - its oddly funny in parts (a very black humour of course).

The high points of this movie to me are the outstanding performances from the leads and the vivid photography. The characters, in all their humanity, but also their complete loss of humanity, are all too believable. This is that rare film - one which will refuse to erase itself from your head, even if you want to forget it.

Every American who thinks he or she understands World War Two should see this movie. Few Hollywood films about the war have defied the stereotype of Japanese soldiers as emotionless brutes obeying orders without thinking. We like to think that every Japanese man was ready and able to fight to the death, right up to the day we bombed Nagasaki. "Fires on the Plain" shows a different reality: troops pathetically undersupplied, demoralized and starved to the point of cannibalism. They euphemistically refer to human flesh as "monkey meat." The movie and novel on which it was based also put to death the myth that Japanese soldiers all preferred death to surrender: They had good reason to believe that their enemies were in no mood to take prisoners. To me it raises a question most Americans would rather avoid: If the Japanese military was so beaten down at this point in the war, why was it necessary to nuke Hiroshima?

A harrowing masterpiece on the sheer madness and despair of war, Fires on the Plain (Nobi) is not going to be to everybody's taste: this is a war movie in the truest possible sense of the term, one that resorts neither to flag-waving patriotism nor saccharine sentimentality. Nobi cuts deep, it's ugly, tenebrous and bleak as few things ever committed on celluloid will ever be. This is war behind the cannons, with no triumphs or heroes, no moral victories or defeats to be had, just a handful of gaunt and terrible-looking men strewn across a land ravaged by war like penitents fleeing a great disaster. The characters defy moral judgment because they are creatures beset by a great woe, a woe that does not permit questions of a moral nature. War and survival. Pitting one's will against the other's in a battlefield arena. The loser is simply removed from existence.

Tamura, soldier in the Japanese Imperial army, is discharged from his platoon and ordered to report in a nearby hospital on account of him coughing blood and being disliked by the rest of the platoon. He's told to never come back and instead commit suicide by hand grenade in case the hospital rejects him. Which it does. The hospital is nothing but a shack made of wooden planks and the hospital surgeon simply tells him that if he's capable of walking he's just fine. It is in that shabby excuse of a hospital that one of the most harrowing scenes of the film takes place. As the area is carpet bombed by American planes the doctors and those who can walk and sustain themselves flee from the hospital and into the woods. Moments before the hospital is blown to pieces, the gaunt and crippled figures of the sick and injured crawl out of it in every manner of posture, dressed in their sickly white robes, as if the building is some kind of beast spewing viscera and filth out upon the earth.

That is Nobi's greatest success; the stark and brooding depiction of the suffering of war in simple but evocative images, without melodrama or pseudo-heroism. Soldiers cross a marsh, wading knee-deep in mud, move across the opposite bank and into a field only to discover enemy tanks hiding in the woods, their lights shining like malignant eyes as they scan the dark. A procession of injured soldiers, dirty and half-mad, crossing a road, dropping to the ground on the sound of enemy planes. Buzzards feasting on a pile of dead bodies. An abandoned village. A mad soldier that believes himself to be Buddha sitting under a tree, covered with flies and his own excrement, offering his arm to be eaten by Tamura when he's dead. These are the images Kon Ichikawa conjures for our eyes, merciless and unflinching in their poignancy but honest and raw.

Nobi doesn't rush to get somewhere. It is content to follow Tamura's travels through the war-torn land as he tries to reach the regrouping center of Palompa, and observe the madness and obscenities of war. The movie wades through the sludge of the horror of war, slow and brooding, just like the characters it follows. The final thirty minutes with Tamura taking refuge with two deserters who feed on 'monkey meat' are the closest Nobi comes to adhering to conventional narratives and they're no less powerful for that matter. Strikingly photographed in black and white, with great performances from the cast, and Ichikawa's assured direction, Nobi is not only among the best war movies to be made but also among the finest of Japanese cinema.