• 肉弾 (The Human Bullet)

8/4/19 (Sun)

A wild anti-war satire by Okamoto Kihachi. This low-budget film, told in retrospect from the perspective of hedonistic 1968 (when the film was made), shows a lowly soldier doing his best to maintain his loyalty to crown and country toward the end of the war. Okinawa has been lost and Hiroshima obliterated, but the soldiers pretend to believe that victory is in sight in what we now know are the war’s final days. They are malnourished and have taken to regurgitating their food and swallowing it again like cows. The hungry hero, referred to throughout only as “that guy” but calling himself Sakura (a homonym for cherry blossom, the flower whose brief blazing moment of glory after blooming made it a symbol for the kamikaze), is caught raiding the food stocks and punished by having to perform his duties naked.

He is abused until he is assigned to the kamikaze squad, which elevates him to a “god”. Knowing that this means death, he says he would rather be a human and heads to a brothel on his one day off in order to have a first experience with a woman before he dies. Things don’t quite work out when the innocent young girl he has his eyes on turns out to be a war orphan forced to manage her late parents’ brothel. The woman that the girl assigns him instead is so frightening that he flees in terror.

He eventually reconnects with the girl, but their fate is undone when her town is bombed. He meets two children who have been indoctrinated completely with ideals that he knows are false; a man (Chishu Ryu, no less) who needs help peeing after losing his arms in the war; desperate prostitutes who seem like witches; a woman who hysterically tries to commit suicide in fear of being raped by Americans; and a number of unhinged officers.

He is ultimately sent out into the ocean in a barrel tied to a torpedo, which he is supposed to use to blow up an enemy ship if one happens by. He does in fact find a ship and unleashes the torpedo, only to see it go the wrong direction and quickly sink – a good thing as it happens, since the ship turns out to be a Japanese fishing boat, whose skipper reports to him that the war ended a week earlier. He is rescued but refuses to leave the barrel, which becomes untangled and separated as the boat speeds on. The man is left drifting in the barrel, which, amid revelers and speedboats, is shown still floating in 1968 with nothing but a skeleton inside.

The film is disjointed, albeit intentionally, and nearly every scene drags on for too long. The constant barrage of over-the-top images gets wearisome toward the end, diluting its power. The film wants to be a Dr. Strangelove or Paths of Glory, but it would have to be much tighter to reach those levels. Still, many of its images are haunting, and there are some odd and interesting touches, like the abrupt view of a record player with a stuck needle mocking the parrot-like commands of the officers. The story offers a convincing portrait of the sheer loneliness of those doing the actual fighting: there’s none of the usual camaraderie for the soldier whose name no one knows and who seems to be fighting his battle largely alone, as befitting a suicide warrior. He’s dying for a country that gives no thought to his welfare, for an ideal that proves itself unworthy. His persistence in going through the motions despite that knowledge is the tragedy.

The satiric tone keeps this film watchable, and certainly the filmmaker’s seriousness in addressing Japan’s militaristic past comes through. A startlingly thin Terada Minori is appropriately exaggerated as the soldier, and Otani Naoko is excellent as the young girl. Nakadai Tatsuya as the narrator is one of several well known names among minor characters, not bad for what is clearly a cheaply made product.