Masaki Kobayashi: The Human Condition Parts I-III

Whatever I write about Masaki Kobayashi’s epic film trilogy The Human Condition (1959-1961), which clocks in at around 9.5 hours, which Oscar, Sunny, Laurel, and I saw in its entirety yesterday at the PFA, will just not suffice. Nothing I could write here could do these films justice.

First, let me direct you to this excellent review, written by David Shipman for Film Forum. This review cuts to the gristle of the film, and provides some interesting historical context of the film’s reception in the West, where it suffered poor presentation in British film houses, and then in the USA, where New York reviewers dismissed it as not enjoyable, and as superfluous, though I think this is a very arrogant First World way of insisting on being both ahistorical and bluntly insensitive. The message, imparted upon us in the films, is that war makes us all into beasts, that we grossly and coldly erase the humanity of others, our own “brothers” included here, for our own advancement and because we are petty and sadistic; this is not a superfluous and obvious statement, otherwise war would simply cease to exist.

* Spoilers follow *

Kobayashi is relentless, heaping misfortune upon misfortune upon his hero, Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), who despite being in the extreme minority, fights to hold onto his humanistic beliefs, i.e. treating fellow human beings with dignity. He suffers bitterly and is constantly punished for his compassion. He must work against all established orders, against his superiors who represent these established orders: the mining corporation, the Japanese military, which when joined together as they have in WWII Japanese occupied Manchuria, become a Military Industrial Complex.

Throughout the three films, he is accused by others of being an inherent contradiction. He opposes the Japanese occupation of Manchuria yet he is there living and working in Manchuria. He participates in the system as a labor supervisor of POW’s at the mine. Yet he works against his own superiors for the conditions of the POW’s. The same is true when he is conscripted into war, working against the dehumanizing military order which breaks men down and recreates them in its own image. He opposes the war, he opposes fascism, yet he fights in the war, on the side of fascism.

The PFA staffer introduced the films to us, telling us that Kobayashi’s choice of Nakadai for our film’s hero is obvious. Being young and so charismatic, he represents a new guard in the post-WWII era/latter half of the 20th century, the one who must begin the dismantling of these established systems, for their irrelevance in modern times, for the dehumanizing they heap upon one another for the sake of narrow abstracts (“honor” for whom?).

As Shipman writes in his review, in order for us to endure these 9.5 hours of unflinching brutality and violence, we have to really love our hero, Kaji. We have to keep hoping that his compassion will pay off, that it will affect others around him, hence affecting larger change. There are glimmers of this, substantial human connection, and in these moments we are hopeful.

I realize I am using so many abstracts here. It’s just that the films’ images are so vivid, with emaciated POW’s frying on an electric barb wire fence, unburied maggot infested dead bodies, civilian mothers in the wild pleading hysterically for just a little bit of rice so that their nursing babies won’t die of starvation, implications of sexual violence against orphaned young ladies by predatory soldiers of all nationalities (we never see it on the screen and this is a relief to me but it also makes me think Kobayashi has treated this matter too gently; we never saw the comfort women stations, for example), endless bloody military beatings, suicides. And then there’s the battle scenes, with even the toughest soldiers dying in utter fright. It’s bleak.

In the Soviet POW work camp, in which Kaji’s young trainee Terada tells him that having already been through so much hell, it can’t possibly get any worse. The young optimist Terada goes on to die a horrible death, wasting away in sickness, assigned to latrine duty and in his walking dead state, staggering to and from the latrine with buckets of shit. He dies covered in other men’s shit, after being beaten unconscious by one of his own. It seems the Japanese here are most inhuman to other Japanese, and here, Kobayashi is telling us, not subtly, that the inability to treat one’s fellow countrymen as fellow human beings, is their unraveling as a nation.

As for Kaji’s fate, it’s also very sad and very bleak, and that’s stating it mildly. Again as we hope harder and harder for him as the films plod on, he has escaped the Soviet POW camp, as a beggar he has endured the hatred and beatings of the Chinese villagers. He is the enemy after all. He is starving, delirious, freezing to death alone in the wild. Still, even as he believes he’s descended so low, no longer human but monster, murderer, he also believes he will find his loving wife Michiko again and that they will begin their lives anew, though none of us can be too sure she is even still alive. The country is so wrecked and we have witnessed refugee civilians in various states of desperation and dislocation.

There is no happy ending to be had here, and it’s so painful to hear his internal monologue in the very last minutes of the last film, delirious and dying of exposure and starvation in the snow, still believing in his new life with Michiko. It is this very human desire to survive and to be with the one he loves that has kept him alive when his idealism has descended to shit.

That said, I recommend to potential viewers of The Human Condition: see all three parts at once. It is an exhausting experience, and necessarily so. It is by far the most brutal Japanese WWII film I have ever seen, making Kon Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain (1959) and The Burmese Harp (1956) (which were both excellent and exhausting films) feel rather quaint.