[Superior front seat] Japanese soldiers staying in Southeast Asia

"The Burmese Harp" (ビルマの風琴/The Burmese Harp) is one of Ichikawa Kun’s most famous works. It talks about a group of Japanese soldiers who were in Myanmar before the defeat and surrender. The captain played by Rentaro of the Three Kingdoms was a music teacher before joining the army. Mizushima has learned Burmese and can also play the Burmese harp. Because Mizushima saw the dead bodies of Japanese defeated soldiers everywhere, he decided not to return to Japan with the brigade. The Japanese soldiers in the movie hardly kill, and their performance in the concentration camps is also very gentle. Coupled with Mizushima's self-sacrificing behavior, "The Burmese Harp" has become a humanitarian classic.

"The Burmese Harp" is adapted from a work written by the children's novelist Takeyama Michio two years after his defeat. The author himself has not been to Myanmar. There are only pitiful and kind images of Japanese soldiers in the story, which is not difficult to understand. At that time, many Japanese soldiers "evaporated" after the war, and the story of Zhushan had a soothing effect.

In the 1970s, the movie market was sluggish, and it was mentioned last time that Akira Kurosawa's "Small Market Without Seasons" also ended at a loss. Shohei Imamura, who has already filmed masterpieces such as "Japanese Insects" and "An Introduction to Anthropology", hardly made movies at the time, but made many documentaries for TV stations during the period. In order to find the Japanese soldiers who stayed in foreign land, he went to Malaysia and Thailand successively. Some of these Japanese changed their names, lived in seclusion in backward villages that would not be too hostile to the Japanese, and married locals and had children.

Shohei Imamura found a soldier in Malaysia who came to Southeast Asia to fight in 1935. After the war, he worked as a fisherman, ran a bicycle shop, and worked in a factory opened by a Japanese businessman during the filming. Because only the Muslim elders were kind to him, the soldiers became devout Muslims and prayed 5 times a day, but were reprimanded by the boss for this. The Japanese soldiers said that both Christian and Muslim gods are gentle, and that the emperor is only a man, not a god. He said that as human beings, there must be justice and greed in their hearts, and the Japanese are too greedy, so they provoked war. The Japanese who come to Malaysia to set up factories now have economic goals in mind. He believes that Japan has become an industrial power in the 30 years after the war. Sooner or later, it will hit a wall somewhere, and then the people will suffer again.

Compared with "The Burmese Harp," Imamura's documentary is rough and lacks compassionate poetry. However, through the testimony of Japanese soldiers, he has more naked and deeper reflections on the nature of inhuman warfare.

The original article was published in Ming Pao Sunday Life on October 5, 2008, and the column was published every other star.

Documentary (fragment):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSNGTuJI8KM

View more about The Burmese Harp reviews