Ari no Heitai

I really wanted to watch this documentary film “Ari no Heitai” since I first heard about it a few months ago. I was worried if the film would be over by the time I go back to Japan, but thanks to the unexpected popularity, the theatre (a very small independent theatre in Osaka) decided to continue showing for a few weeks longer than the original schedule.

“Ari no Heitai” is a story of an old man, Okumura Waichi, who fought in China during the WWII, and is one of the soldiers who were forced to remain in Shan-xi province and fight in the Nationalist (KMT) army against Communists even after 1945. In 1948 he was caught by the People’s Liberation Army and sent to labor camps around China. He finally came back to Japan in 1954, only to find his military record erased since 1946, and got blacklisted by the security police on the ground that he came back from Communist China. The film does not tell all these facts about him, but solely focuses on the lawsuit filed by him and other soldiers against the government, which denies the fact that it was an organized military order to stay in China in 1945, and Okumura’s visit to Shan-xi to find concrete evidence.

During the first one-third of the film, the camera follows Okumura, going to the judicial court and meeting with his fellow soldiers. Although they submitted a Chinese publication which argues that there was a secret agreement between 閻錫山 (Yan Xishan), a KMT general at the time, and 澄田睐四郎 (Sumida Raishiro), a Japanese general, the judges do not admit that the decision to stay was ordered from the military top, but maintain the government’s official position that the 2600 soldiers remained there voluntarily. Okumura also visits 宮崎舜一 (Miyazaki Shunichi) in the hospital. Miyazaki is a person who tried to send all the Japanese soldiers to Japan against Sumida’s plan (Miyazaki was at a higher position than Sumida), and also the only person who testified that there was a written order issued by Sumida. Miyazaki has been incapacitated since 10 years ago and no longer reacts to people’s conversations, but when Okumura went to apologize about the tentative result of the lawsuit to him, he reacted to Okumura’s words and roared very sadly. It was a very shocking scene. These stories at the beginning show us the anger and powerlessness of individuals in front of the state authority, as well as the reality that those who experienced WWII are dying while many facts and stories remain unrevealed.

However, the message and Okumura’s story get more complicated when Okumura goes back to China and visits Shan-xi province. He visits the place where he stabbed a Chinese woman to death for the first time at the final stage of military training. He says that it was a making of killing machines. Chinese villagers surround him, probably befuddled to see an old Japanese soldier visiting there, but those villagers, municipal officials, and a Chinese woman who tells him her experience of being raped by the Japanese repeatedly are all calm and supportive to Okumura, amazingly so even as they knew they were being filmed. Okumura now faces the fact that the Japanese, including him, were aggressors who randomly killed innocent Chinese, raped them, and burned villages. As a soldier ant, he only saw a small fraction of the war, and he tries to understand what was it that he was a part of during the war.

What was very shocking to me is the scene in which Okumura sees a guy (and his son) whose father escaped from the province and survived the war. In listening to the story of his father, Okumura starts to question the loyalty and spirit as a soldier the guy had, in an accusing tone. After the interview, Okumura realizes that the soul as a Japanese soldier still lives inside and it suddenly came back to him. In the brochure, Okumura comments:

私は２０歳で兵隊にとられ、初年兵教育の仕上げとして初めて人を殺した。人と人が殺し合う戦争の一殺人マシンに仕立て上げられた。それが私の青春の全てであった。
それから６０年の月日を経て私は、自分のおこないと向き合うため、忘れることのできない刺殺現場の処刑場に立った。
然るに何たることか！私は、自分が殺めた中国の方の素性を聞くに及んで、「殺された方に責任がある」と思わず口走った。日本兵であった当時の心に立ち返ってしまった。
８０歳を過ぎて今なお若かりし頃に叩き込まれた軍隊の教えを宿す己を発見し慄然とすると共に、教育の恐ろしさに愕然とした。。。

Thus, the camera captures an old soldier still in struggle in defining his experience of the war. He was made into a killing machine by the state, and the state denies its connection to him between 1945 and 1954. Then what was it? What did he kill Chinese people for? He is not recognized as a soldier by the Japanese government, but he is not accused of what he did, either. It is why he forces himself to face the past while many others keep silence about their experiences. Okumura’s confused feeling about his war experience is also represented by the scene in which he finds out that 閻錫山 (Yan Xishan), the KMT general who made them remain, suddenly escaped from the village when the situation started to look bad. Okumura gets mad in that little library, accusing 閻錫山 of abandoning them. I find it very awkward that while Okumura is angry towards a KMT general, Chinese officials who showed him the document tries to explain what happened and calm him down.

After Okumura and his fellow soldiers re-realized how brutal they were in the war, the film suddenly switches to the festival of Yasukuni shrine, showing people marching, making nationalistic speeches, worshiping the Emperor, and yelling at Okumura “the war in China wasn’t an invasion!” The contrast of the two consecutive scenes is beautiful.

The last scene was him visiting an old guy’s house who supposedly saw what happened when Japanese people withdrew from China (Okumura asks whether it is true that the people killed their own children before boarding on the ship). The guy keeps telling that he does not remember anything. This scene also shows a contrast between the two opposite ways of dealing with the war experience. Although the scene might highlight Okumura’s strong hope to investigate what happened in the war, I could also sympathize with those, including the guy who was suddenly visited by Okumura, who could only bury their memory deep in their heart in order to live a life after the war.