MOVIE
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches on
1983 | 122 min | Colour
Directed by Kazuo Hara
Synopsis
Kenzo Okuzaki (66), who runs a battery store in Kobe, has been working as an anarchist to hold the state and society responsible for the war even 40 years after the war.
He was assigned to the 36th Regiment of Independent Engineers during World War II and was sent to the New Guinea front. The Corps of Engineers is a unit that prepares for battle, from building pre-battle positions to supporting infantry and clearing mines. The New Guinea front was one of the toughest battlefields, with only 100 of the 1,300 troops surviving.
In order to get to the bottom of the executions that took place within the military at the time, and the alleged cannibalism incident between soldiers, Okuzaki guerrilla-style raids on the homes of those he suspects were involved in the executions and tries to get their testimony. Soon, shocking facts come to light one after another, and Okuzaki decides to kill his former superior officer…
☆☆☆
When I first saw this movie, I honestly thought it was scary.
First of all, this Mr. Kenzo Okuzaki's face was scary.
He has black, animal-like eyes that hardly show any emotional movement. As he says himself in the film, he was imprisoned for 10 years in 1956 for stabbing a real estate agent to death in an argument.
Is this what the eyes of a person who has killed someone look like?
Sometimes he talks about his sins with remorse, and sometimes he gets angry at the mere mention of the word "Yasukuni" and beats up the person in front of him・・・
If you think about it, without this eccentric presence of Kenzo Okuzaki, this documentary would not have been possible in the first place, but it would have taken a certain amount of determination to accept it.
Forty years after the war, all the people involved at the time were all old and living peacefully in the countryside. Suddenly, Okuzaki and his camera barge in and demand, "Tell us what you've been up to! Suddenly, Okuzaki and his camera came in and demanded, "Tell us what you've been doing!
Okuzaki said.
"If you don't talk about what you went through in that tragic war, people will eventually forget and it will happen again. If you tell the truth, you will create a world without war."
It was people as old as my own grandfather who were yelling at me and making me feel small. That's enough. Even my own grandmother never talked about the war. Everyone had been through too much pain and wanted to forget about it as soon as possible. And then a complete stranger comes in and rubs salt in the wound. To tell the truth, I was annoyed.
But in the end, what Okuzaki had said was true.
Somewhere along the line, people forgot about it. It's like muddy water that has settled over the years, and now it's there, clear as if nothing happened. But it's rotten water. If you throw a stone into it, it will instantly become muddy water again.
This past August, the film was being shown in revival across the country, and I think now is the time to see it.
Yukiko Yako