Ningen no joken II

“From a certain point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I’ve always questioned authority. That applied to my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, a time finally came when we could address these issues directly,” commented Masaki Kobayashi, who began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN in the late 1950s, a nine-hour, unflinching indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the mid-1950s autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa and produced by the Ninjin Club, this sometimes graphically violent three-part epic depicts the journey of naïve idealist Kaji from being a conscientious objector and guard at a forced labor camp to eventually becoming a soldier and finally a Soviet prisoner of war.

NINGEN NO JOKEN II: 1944/45: After Kaji is conscripted, his humanist convictions soon bring him into conflict with the ruthless officers who harass and humiliate the recruits at the training camp. When Kaji lodges a complaint against one of these officers, he ends up being transferred to the front. He is put in charge of a group of young recruits there, who he tries to protect from the veteran artillerymen. During a mission lasting several weeks aimed at  building dugouts, his small unit is overrun by the advancing Red Army. Kobayashi paints an unequivocally damning picture of the cruelty of the Japanese military leadership, which made him a target of attacks by ultra-conservative revisionists, who accused him of slandering the Japanese army. (mg)