Gunki hatameku moto ni

Director Fukasaku is best known for his cult classic Battle Royale, as well as numerous yakuza flicks from the '70s. Under the Flag of the Rising Sun is really the film he should best be known for. He produced it independently, and it's easily his most prestigious and all-around exceptional film. It's a WWII movie, made from the perspective of a quarter century later. Sachiko Hidari stars as a war widow in 1971 who is still trying to get benefits from the government, as well as restore her husband's honor. He was supposedly executed in the waning days of the war, but any further information has disappeared. To find the truth, she begins searching for veterans who may have known her husband. She interviews several witnesses who give her a conflicting story of her husband, but a pretty vivid picture of what it might have been like to be a soldier fighting in the New Guinea front. The film isn't exploitative, but it can be explicitly violent (most of the flashbacks are in black and white up until the violence starts - Fukasaku does not want the audience to be separate from that). Under the Flag of the Rising Sun is one of the most unflinching of all the great Japanese WWII films. You really feel the pain that still exists in the early '70s. The sequences with the war veteran teacher, watching over his students who have grown up after the war and are completely innocent of it, are especially gut-wrenching. I also loved the performance of Noboru Mitani, best known for playing the irresponsible homeless father in Kurosawa's Dodeskaden, who plays a veteran with a dark secret.

I'm a fan of Fukasaku's gritty doomed gangster movies, and have come to expect a harrowing exposition of human frailty and self destruction, usually at a very personal level. However, this movie plays out on a much grander scale as it sets about exploring the nature of nationalism, militarism, obedience, subjective reality, repressed memory, and guilt. I'm hard pressed to think of a western movie that digs so deeply into the despair of war widows, or examines their feelings in such minute detail. Technically it's almost a documentary, but personalised by the heroine's relentless quest for the truth.

Far from being a glorious affair full of grand heroism and precision munitions, war is a filthy business conducted at the sharp end by people who have little or nothing to gain by it. At the blunt end, the politicians and generals eat well and live a life of whimsical luxury while their forces starve and die brutally in foul conditions. Odd that so few filmmakers choose to explore the madness that sends millions to their death for overweening greed, imperial insanity, or even a bare faced lie. The Blue Max, Dr. Strangelove, and Oh What a Lovely War, amongst others, have examined the glib lunacy inherent in the equation, but Fukasaku's movie is all the more poignant for its protagonist's middle aged ordinariness.

If someone tells you that Battle Royale is Fukasaku's finest hour, just ask them if they've seen this movie. It's not "easy" to watch, but it's educational and moving. Try it with rice instead of popcorn.

Searing indictment of war and the individuals discredited in its aftermath. Directed by the masterful Kinji Fukasaku, it is a harsh, bleak work that uses monochrome flashbacks with occasional explosions of color, war photographs, and grim narration to tell a terrible tale.

Sachiko Hidari, a war widow, has spent twenty-six years searching for the truth about her husband's death. Was he executed? Was he a deserter? Was he a hero? As the government adheres to an official, flawed version of events, the stubborn woman seeks her own answers by speaking to the men who served with her husband. The stories told by these damaged soldiers comprise the bulk of the movie and accounts are complicated by each man's "truth".

Exceptionally well acted and directed with a savage determination to depict the insanity of war in its rawest state, this is surely one of Fukasaku's greatest achievements and certainly one of the most honest portraits of homosapien behavior ever branded to celluloid.

This film puts most war movies to shame. Here is a cinematically beautiful yet shockingly realistic depiction of what war is like. The betrayal of humanity involved on numerous levels is juxtaposed with the individual soldier's will to survive and with one widow's need to know the hidden truth about how her husband died. Her journey of naivete to knowledge and understanding is the central character arc that traverses through the accounts of several veterans from her husband's unit. The gorgeous photography features shot after shot of beautiful landscape that serves as a kind of silent and solitary witness to the mayhem.

Nowhere do you see the cloying sentimentality and heroism that stink up so many war films. I give it the highest rating.

If you are thinking of watching this, you need to know what your are getting into first. This is a violent movie, in the extreme.

I do not ordinarily watch violent movies. But I am glad I watched this one, even though I had to turn away a few times. The subject matter is about violence, and the director pulls no punches.

It is so easy to romanticize war, either in victory or defeat. This movie clearly has a message for the Japanese people about WWII that the director intends them never to forget. That it was received so well, speaks well of the Japanese people's honesty. And it has a message for her Asian neighbors who suffered at the hands of Japanese soldiers, that perhaps hate is no longer appropriate.

Viewing it as an American, I was struck by how different the image is from that of the well-disciplined soldier presented almost as a polite stereotype in Hollywood movies. An American director could not have gotten away with such a movie. However, I can't help wondering if this is perhaps not exactly a representative view of what Japanese soldiers went through.

The movie is told very effectively through its plot, following the inquiries of the war widow into the death of her husband. As the truth comes out, it hits you in the gut much as it would have hit this widow.

At the same time, the director apparently did not intend for this film to be viewed too narrowly as an antiwar movie. It is not just about war, and it is not just about Japanese soldiers, it is about human beings, and what any of us might do in similar circumstances.