Fires on the Plain

When people think post-war Japanese cinema, they automatically think of Akira Kurosawa. His exported samurai epics have done a good job creating a sense of history, nobility and grace among the art cinema crowd. Yet arguably more important to Japan's unique cinematic history during that era, are the humanistic war stories brought to life by the likes of Masaki Kobayashi, Nagisa Oshima and Kon Ichikawa. Comprising a portion of the Japanese New Wave, these war dramas challenged their viewers head-on, illustrating the ugliness of war in all it's absurdity and horror. These movies were noble in their own way by angrily confronting the attitudes tolerated by Japan during it's peak nationalist period. Fires on the Plain is just as incendiary as it's title would suggest and serves as a prime example of such a film. It may also just be the most engaging and accessible war tale Japan has ever produced.

Set during the closing days of Japan's dominance in the Philippines, our sick, fatigued and jaded hero, Private Tamura attempts to survive the on-coming slaughter. Tamura is forced out of his unit due to tuberculosis; if he's not well enough to dig trenches than he's useless according to his superiors. He treks to the hospital just past the hills only to be rebuffed by the hospital who tells him if he can walk, he's not sick. Before he can return and presumably commit suicide via grenade, Tamura's unit is wiped out in a fierce battle with allied forces. He then wonders aimlessly through the countryside staving starvation, fatigue, death and worse still, fellow brothers in arms.

If Kurosawa is considered the Spielberg of Japan than director Kon Ichikawa is it's Martin Scorsese. Known less for an all-permeating thesis that seeps into his oeuvre, Ichikawa gives his work an idiosyncratic style and a visceral veneer. Throughout his career Ichikawa was known for taking on all popular genres, all of which balanced his knack for realism and expressionism. His worlds always have a beautiful wholeness and lets the pathos from each situation dig into the audiences cranium through all sides. Sometimes he accomplishes this with shock, other times with a mischievous sense of humor. One such iconic moment happens in Fires on the Plain when a platoon of soldiers march upon a pair of jungle boots. One soldier swiftly puts them on and discards his own, the next soldier takes the previous soldier's boots, and so on and so forth until Tamura looks down on the tattered remains of the last guy's boots, takes his off and keeps walking barefooted.

There are many more scenes of contradicting sentiments occupying the same earnest frame. We as the audience must decide whether we should laugh or cry or both yet we never feel the need to look away. There's a dark sense of realism that makes Fires on the Plain stand out from other contemporary works such as The Human Condition Trilogy (1959-1961). The realism, tinged with an expressionistic flare keeps us engrossed; pensively hoping Tamura and his fellow soldiers don't do the unthinkable.

As things become more desperate and deprived on the island of Leyte, the true intentions of the film start to soar with devastating economy. The film was adapted from Shohei Ooka's novel of the same name. Much ado was made at the time about Ichikawa's radical ending change which is surprisingly antithetical to the traditional Hollywood ending we're all so drearily used to. With Ichikawa's ending however there is no absolution, no completion, no sigh of relief. Much like All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) the film's resolution comes with a simple message about the inhumanity of war.

Fires on the Plain is a frightfully good film that tells it's story through imagery both stark, maddening and sublime. Powerful in every sober sense, Ichikawa should be on everyone's short list of most important Japanese filmmakers. He's got a style full of contradiction yet permeating with an excess of feeling. I promise that once you've seen this provocative, bleak, heart-wrenching picture, you won't soon forget it.

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.

This is probably one of the best examples of that film genre known as the anti-war movie. It is a story about a group a Japanese soldiers in the last days of the second world war,weakened,demoralized,and starving. The situation deteriorates even further when one of them resorts to cannibalism in an attempt to ward off hunger. As they shuffle their way through the jungle one notices their shabby appearance with their feet sticking out of their boots and a sense of resignation or futility about them. It has even an element of the absurd about it in one of the scenes when one of the soldiers pleads to a comrade to eat him. This portrayal of them appeals to one's sense of pity or sympathy regardless of what cause or nation they're fighting for. For their situation could be anyone's unfortunate fate if circumstances were unfavorable. If there is one thing this film can show or get across is that our sense of humanity or what makes us feel civilized, is but a thin veneer or facade that in the right or wrong situation can vanish. The stark truth as depicted in this movie is that we are only always a few steps away from returning to the jungle if given the chance. This reminds me of another movie"Lord Of The Flies" which was about a group of English schoolboys stranded on an island after a plane crash. After awhile they descend or regress into a bunch of jungle savages or barbarians losing whatever decorum or civilization they possessed.

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.

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.