The film from last week that I can’t get out of my mind is the Japanese director’s Masaki Kobayashi‘s masterpiece The Human Condition. It is an epic of three parts made in the years 1959-61, altogether 9 hours and 40 minutes of film! 

Earlier I had got acquianted with Kobayashi through his 60s films like Harakiri, Kwaidan and Samurai Rebellion, all of them great cinematic experiences. Already then I wondered where his strong humanistic emphases and his deep ethical reflection came from. He fits into the Japanese, deeply humanistic story tradition as expressed in the films of Ozu, Mizoguchi and Kurosawa in the 30s thru 50s up to 21st century Hirokazu Kore-eda. 

Kobayashi is more political than Ozu and Koreeda, who develop their human stories more in the realm of everyday life and relationships. Kobayashi addressed particularly for post-war Japan controversial issues like corruption, economic exploitation, discrimination of minorities, militarism and war atrocities.  

The Human Condition follows the life of Kaji, a pacifist who finds himself on and on crushed by the totalitarian Japanese regime of the World War II era. In part I he tries to avoid being enlisted in the army. He takes a job as a head of personnel in the Japanese-run steel company in Manchuria, where he becomes supervisor over Chinese prisoners of war, who have to work in the mines and suffer miserably. He opposes the inhumanity of the army, tries to stop assassinations, but fails and is punished by being sent to the front.

Part II is about Kaji, being in the army at the Manchurian front. He is placed in charge of the new recruits who are severely bullied by the veterans as part of their initiation in the army. He takes the side of the tortured recruits and tries to protect them. Repeatedly, he makes the point that the problem is not one or another officer, but that the whole army system is rotten. Part II ends with a massive tank attack of the Russian army against the underequipped Japanese troops. 

Kaji ends up as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp as brutal as that of Japan. In part III he manages to escape and starts on a trek back to be reunited with his beloved wife Michiko who had married him in the first part and followed along with him to Manchuria. Despised by the Chinese peasants, who regarded him as a fascist oppressor, weakened and starving, Kaji dies in the snow. 

Kobayashi recognized his own fate during WW II in the script of the novel. As a pacifist he himself was reluctantly drafted into the army and sent to the Manchurian front. He refused to rise above the rank of a private and considered the war as senseless. At the end of the war he was captured by the US army and held in detention for a year. He shares Kaji’s dilemma of rejecting the existing society and its system, but needing to remain in it. It presents the case of one’s best intentions backfiring on you, of never to be rewarded for one’s virtue. The film presents through the life of Kaji a celebration of the strength of the individual conscience, but at the same time the suffering of guilt because of complicity in the war. The making of this film was for Kobayashi the acknowledgement of his part of that responsibility. 

When you want to reflect on and discuss how you can remain in an unjust system and avoid being tainted and eventually corrupted by it, this might be the film that presents the dilemma.  

Rinus, Jan 2019

*Image posted for non commercial purposes
under 'fair use' of copyright material in recommendation of the film

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