#Junpei Gomikawa

[anamon-book]

「神話」の崩壊－関東軍の野望と破綻　五味川純平 文藝春秋 装幀＝高麗隆彦

[randomrichards]

THE HUMAN CONDITION 3: A SOLDIER’S PRAYER

From a lost soldier

To a prisoner of war

A good man broken

[byneddiedingo]

Tatsuya Nakadai and So Yamamura in The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (Masaki Kobayashi. 1959)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Chikage Awashima, Ineko Arima, Keiji Sada, So Yamamura, Akira Ishihama. Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi, based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Art direction: Kazue Hirataka. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

The first three and a half hours of Masaki Kobayashi's nine-hour, 47-minute epic The Human Condition are themselves divided into two parts, though the break seems more a courtesy to the Sitzfleisch of the viewer than to any inherent division in the story. I have a friend who says he's never read a bad novel over 600 pages long, because once he's done with it he has to justify the time spent reading. I think something like that may apply to The Human Condition once I've finished it. Which is not to say that there isn't a greatness that adheres to Kobayashi's unsparing, audacious film, even though at times I found myself feeling that The Human Condition I: No Greater Love derived as much from the more earnest black-and-white Hollywood films of the 1940s, the ones that starred Tyrone Power or Gregory Peck, than from the high artistry of Ozu or Mizoguchi. It is often unabashed melodrama: We worry that Kobayashi hasn't burdened his protagonist, Kaji, with more than is really credible. An idealist, he not only finds himself supervising slave Chinese labor in Manchuria during World War II, he also has to manage a brothel staffed with Chinese "comfort women." And the more he does to better the lot of the workers, the more he elicits the ire of the kenpeitai, the Japanese military police. On the other hand, if he compromises with the authorities, the Chinese prisoners and prostitutes make his life miserable. And not to mention that, his wife is incapable of comprehending the stresses that make him so distant at home. But Tatsuya Nakadai is such an accomplished actor that he gives Kaji credibility, even when we're beginning to think he's too virtuous, too idealistic, for his own good.

[filmstruck]

Resilient Soul: THE HUMAN CONDITION (’59-’61) by Thomas Davant

Director Masaki Kobayashi was at the end of a two-month location scout around the islands of Japan for his next project and he still didn’t have a lead actor for his ambitious adaptation of the epic, best-selling novel The Human Condition. The story of one man’s journey from idealistic labor camp supervisor to abused foot soldier to doomed POW unfolded across the plains, forests and mountains of Manchuria, but it was looking as though Kobayashi would have to use the Japanese island of Hokkaido as a substitute. His last night was spent at a hot springs. Getting ready to climb in, he wondered who would play the determined protagonist Kaji? Every Japanese actor was clambering for the part. Whoever filled the role would need to have the audience on his side right from the start as he endured defeat, torture and suffering. Engulfed in the steaming water, the director had a vision: the thin figure of a young man, unshaven cheeks and hollowed eyes, deep pupils encompassing in their pools a lifetime of tragedy, pain and transcendence. Suddenly, it was decided. “It’s got to be Nakadai.”

The handsome Tatsuya Nakadai cut a striking figure. Having starred as a supporting actor in a few of Kobayashi’s early films, the actor had his best work ahead of him. Then again, so did Kobayashi. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the actor and director would form a connection which, while not as plentiful, proved just as affecting as the Kurosawa-Mifune collaboration. During production of this film the thin actor would grow thinner, enduring heat, extreme cold and physical beatings. It was all to aid the vision of the man he later called his greatest mentor.

Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi often make the cut of Japanese filmmakers most familiar to western audiences. Kobayashi, unfortunately, seems to exist on the outskirts, waiting for those more curious seekers of Japanese cinema to discover him. Scholar Donald Richie claimed that Kobayashi was the only filmmaker working in postwar Japan who was unafraid to criticize his country’s imperialist policies. To examine his past is to understand his work.

He was among the generation doomed for the Second World War. Having proved adept as a private, he refused promotion. His unyielding opposition to authority (especially within the military) would define his films. His time as a POW under American forces “wounded his pride as a human being,” observed friend and fellow filmmaker Masahiro Shinoda. When the war ended he found work at Shochiku Studios and served under Keisuke Kinoshita, whose domestic dramas would influence Kobayashi’s early work. But the angry young man couldn’t shake his memories of war, and his work began to take a critical stand against Japanese policy and ideals.

The plot of THE HUMAN CONDITION is fairly simple: an ambitious Japanese man set on changing the treatment of Chinese labor in occupied Manchuria finds himself thwarted by his peers and ground beneath the wheel of the Soviet-Japanese war. The heartbreaking current running through the film is the way Kaji’s unbending sense of justice and morality proves a hindrance.

Full historical context isn’t required before viewing this mammoth film, as long as you’re familiar with the main points; i.e., Germany fell before Japan during WWII and Japanese forces continued to fight the Soviets for control of lands in China until September of 1945. Despite his infamous perfectionism (he had no regard for the studio’s schedule), Kobayashi wasn’t concerned with stressing facts. His aim is to suggest that in the thick of war, the details lose all meaning. The army trains you to aim, fire and shoot, to march until you drop. But as the bodies pile up beneath plumes of smoke and teeth-jarring explosions, the soldier becomes a human once more, frightened and longing for the life he was forced to leave behind. It’s not hard to grasp Kobayashi’s stance on war. “To die on the battlefield is a dog’s death,” Kaji remarks, and Kobayashi seems to suggest that there is no shame in fear.

The film is divided into three volumes: NO GREATER LOVE (’59), ROAD TO ETERNITY (’60) and A SOLDIER’S PRAYER (’61). Kobayashi directed book in hand and with author Junpei Gomikawa at his side for the entirety of the four year shoot, accounting for the film’s novelistic pace and scope. Extended sequences of grueling marches across burning plains and fruitless attempts to find food outnumber the combat scenes. Shinoda described the film as a road movie, in which the protagonist undertakes a long, hungry journey back home.

The photography is breathtaking: wide shots of battlefields aflame under dark smoke appear like Bruegel paintings come to life and deep focus within the barracks unveils layer after layer of grimy faces emerging from shadow. It is not an easy viewing experience, though not for its nine and a half hour length (like an arresting TV show, it’s a fine way to spend a cold, rainy Saturday). It’s the film’s unflinching, realist depiction of human brutality and suffering which makes for a taxing experience. You��re there for every beating, death and moment of suffering. Kobayashi retains a romantic subplot involving Kaji and his wife, which feels somewhat forced to start but suffuses the film with a heartache that grows like a cancer and makes the ending all the harder to bear. As a whole, the film is at times repetitive, frustrating and tiresome. Yet Kobayashi, I believe, achieves what he set out to do, weaving a tragic tapestry of the way humans treat one another while underlining the resilience of one man’s hope. For this reason, it is an essential watch.

Kobayashi’s entries in the samurai genre HARAKIRI (’62) and SAMURAI REBELLION (’67) carry on his critical stance, taking the sword to established authority and societal obligations in the name of personal honor. To explore his filmography is to discover a filmmaker who was a master of his craft, fearless and uncompromising. In the early stages of discovering Kaji, Nakadai realized the headstrong protagonist and his determined director were one and the same. Both demanded the most from the world, even if the world wasn’t willing to give as much in return.

[thepeacefulspider]

Masaki Kobayashi’s “The Human Condition” (1959)

“Masaki Kobayashi’s mammoth humanist drama is one of the most staggering achievements of Japanese cinema. Originally filmed and released in three parts, the nine-and-a-half-hour The Human Condition (Ningen no joken), adapted from Junpei Gomikawa’s six-volume novel, tells of the journey of the well-intentioned yet naive Kaji (handsome Japanese superstar Tatsuya Nakadai) from labor camp supervisor to Imperial Army soldier to Soviet POW. Constantly trying to rise above a corrupt system, Kaji time and again finds his morals an impediment rather than an advantage. A raw indictment of its nation’s wartime mentality as well as a personal existential tragedy, Kobayashi’s riveting, gorgeously filmed epic is novelistic cinema at its best.“ - The Criterion Collection.

The Human Condition’s Criterion Collection page, with reviews and trailers:

https://www.criterion.com/films/2106-the-human-condition

“It’s not my fault that I’m Japanese . . . yet it’s my worst crime that I am!” The words are those of Kaji, hero of The Human Condition, but in their anguish and existential despair, they also speak for the film’s director, Masaki Kobayashi, whose own experience closely paralleled that of his protagonist. Like Kaji, Kobayashi found himself caught up, and unwillingly implicated, in his country’s wartime aggression. The Human Condition—nine and a half hours long, four years in the making—can be seen as one of the most monumental acts of personal expiation in all cinematic history ...” - Philip Kemp, essay on Criterion.com.

Philip Kemp’s complete essay:

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1226-the-human-condition-the-prisoner

Enjoy :)

[randomrichards]

THE HUMAN CONDITION 2: ROAD TO ETERNITY

Pacifist soldier

Morals detriment in war

Clash with his own men

[byneddiedingo]

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (Masaki Kobayashi, 1961)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Tamao Nakamura, Yusuke Kawazu, Chishu Ryu, Taketoshi Naito, Hideko Takamine, Kyoko Kishida, Ed Keene, Ronald Self. Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Koichi Inagaki, Masaki Kobayashi, based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Art direction: Kazue Hirataka. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

Homer's Odysseus made it home to Ithaka and Penelope, but Masaki Kobayashi's Odysseus, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), doesn't make it home to his Penelope, Michiko (Michiyo Aratama), and he's not certain that his Ithaka in southern Manchuria still exists. Kaji struggles toward her against all odds, but dies in a snowstorm, without even a moment of transcendence or a heavenly choir on the soundtrack to ennoble his death. It's a downer ending to a nine-hour epic, but if it feels right it's thanks to the enormous conviction of Nakadai as the stubborn idealist Kaji. The Human Condition is an immersive experience rather than a dramatic one: Drama would demand catharsis, and there is really none to be had from the film. The human condition depicted in the film is Hobbesian: solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short -- though the length of the film works against the last adjective. It is a statement film: War is a stupid way for people to behave to one another. And as such it never quite transcends its message-making, leaving the film somewhere short of greatness. Still, it has to be seen by anyone who seeks to understand Japan in the twentieth century and after, and by anyone who wants to know the limits of film as an art form.

[byneddiedingo]

Tatsuya Nakadai in The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity (Masaki Kobayashi, 1959)

Cast: Tatsuya Nakadai, Michiyo Aratama, Kei Sato, Kunie Tanaka, Michiro Minami, Keiji Sada, Kokinji Katsura, Jun Tatara. Screenplay: Zenzo Matsuyama, Masaki Kobayashi, based on a novel by Junpei Gomikawa. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Art direction: Kazue Hirataka. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Chuji Kinoshita.

If the first part of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition makes me think of the earnest "serious pictures" that came out of Hollywood in the 1940s -- I have in mind such movies as The Razor's Edge (Edmund Goulding, 1946), in which Tyrone Power searches for the meaning of life, or Gentleman's Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947), in which Gregory Peck crusades against antisemitism -- then the second part, Road to Eternity, suggests, even in its subtitle, the influence of From Here to Eternity (Fred Zinnemann, 1953), that near-scathing* look at brutality in Army basic training. Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), our idealistic protagonist, has been sent to war, and has to endure all manner of abuse even though he's an excellent marksman and a sturdy trooper. His objections to Japanese militarism and his belief that the war is wrong mark him out as a "Red," and for a time he contemplates escaping into his idealized version of the Soviet Union. But his sympathy for his fellow recruits keeps him plugging away, occasionally taking heat for his defense of them, especially from the military veterans who have been called up to serve. They object to his treating the recruits he is put in charge of training with respect and human decency -- they went through hell in basic training, so why shouldn't everyone? The film ends with a cataclysmic battle sequence, during which Kaji has to kill one of his fellow soldiers, who has gone stark raving mad and whose antics threaten the lives of other soldiers. It's not the first time Kaji has resorted to killing a fellow soldier: Earlier, he has been mired in quicksand with a brutal man who has caused the suicide of a recruit, and Kaji lets him drown. The intensity of the battle scenes takes some of the focus away from Kaji's intellectualizing, which is all to the good.

*I have to qualify: From Here to Eternity is not as scathing as the James Jones novel on which it's based, thanks to the Production Code and the residual good feeling of having won the war. In some ways, The Human Condition II is more properly an anticipation of Stanley Kubrick's no-holds-barred Full Metal Jacket (1987).