The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 2 | Issue 8 | Aug 06, 2004

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Life after the bomb

Mark Schilling

Life after the bomb

By MARK SCHILLING

The Face of JizoDirector: Kuroki Kazuo

The atomic bombings of Hiroshima andNagasaki in August 1945 were Japan's singlegreatest catastrophe of World War II. Theyloom so large in the popular imagination thatthe events of the previous decade and a halfhave paled -- or faded from view altogether.(Conveniently so, as Asians affected by thoseevents have noted.)In millions of words and images, eulogizing andotherwise, the bombings have been ritualizedand abstracted in that same imagination, theirhorror endlessly referred to, but less and lessclearly felt. Meanwhile, the victims have cometo be seen more as park statuary, less as flawedhuman beings.Filmmakers of the war generation have tried, inrecent years, to reclaim that humanity,including Kurosawa Akira with "Rhapsody inAugust (Hachigatsu no Rhapsody)" (1993) andImamura with "Dr. Shohei Akagi (KanzoSensei)" (1998), but they have also found thememorializing urge hard to resist. Thoughrecognizably -- even eccentrically -- human,their heroes glow with the nobility of wrongedinnocents.Born in 1930, Kuroki Kazuo is also of the wargeneration, but his trilogy of war films --"Tomorrow" (1988), "Kirishima 1945(Utsukushii Natsu Kirishima)" (2002) and now"The Face of Jizo (Chichi to Kuraseba)" (2004) -- come from a different, darker place than thoseof many of his contemporaries. As a 15-year-old

war plant worker, Kuroki saw his friends andcolleagues blown to pieces in an air raid.Instead of staying to help the wounded, he ranto save his own skin -- and carried a burden ofguilt forever after. His war films, he has said,are an act of penance.The filmed version of a play by Inoue Hisashi,"The Face of Jizo" is not as personal a film as"Kirishima 1945," which was not only aboutKuroki's wartime boyhood, but also filmed inthe same house and fields where it unfolded.Nonetheless, it expresses themes close toKuroki's heart, including survivor's guilt, evenwhen the survivor has done little or nothing todeserve it.Also, Kuroki is less interested in conventionalattitudes, however grand, than the human truthof a specific time and place. Set in Hiroshima in1948, "The Face of Jizo" reflects the poverty,exhaustion and traumas of the time, placed inthe context of a close and textured father-daughter relationship. The verbal thrust andparry between the two, played by a graying butstill sprightly Harada Yoshio and a stressed butstill lovely looking Miyazawa Rie, at timesverges on the sitcomish -- and had the IwanamiHall audience laughing out loud. (For non-native speakers of standard Japanese, aprescreening glance at the script is advisable;otherwise the characters, who speak inHiroshima dialect, may sound as though theyhave marbles in their mouths.)"The Face of Jizo" has its stagey, lugubriousand overly determined side, but the warmthand passion generated by its two leads mostlycarry it through -- and gives the ending theright mix of poignancy and chill. A well-made"play" indeed.It begins with Mitsue (Miyazawa), a younglibrarian, rushing home in a thunderstorm,

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frightened out of her wits. Her terror, we soonsee, is a product of the war, particularly theatomic bombing of Hiroshima, which she barelysurvived.She lives with her father, Takezo (Harada), intheir bombed-out house, now partly repaired.Dad is her confessor, adviser and friend, theonly one she can tell about her fears, dreamsand past. Most of her friends and family died inthe bombing -- including Dad.That Dad is with her only in spirit doesn't fazeher -- or him, for that matter. He looks, actsand talks like one of the living (one of the morerobust and vital living in fact). But, as befits aghost no longer bound by selfish earthlyconcerns, he is interested only in her problems,particularly her budding relationship with theshy, bespectacled Kinoshita (Asano Tadanobu),who is researching the bombing and wantsMitsue's help -- and possibly slightly more thanthat.Mitsue resists Takezo's efforts to playmatchmaker -- and not just out of maidenlyreserve. She feels she has no right to be happy.How can she marry, have a family and all therest, when so many of her friends have beenreduced to ashes? There is also another reasonfor her guilt, which she can only reveal underduress and never rationalize away.Nearly all the action takes place in Mitsue andTakezo's house and garden, with onlyoccasional glimpses at Mitsue's past as well asher present-day encounters with Kinoshita.Miyazawa and Harada thus have to carry the

film almost entirely on their own -- and carry itthey do. A larger-than-life type known for hisexcesses on and off the screen, Haradachannels his formidable energies effectively,while riding the fine line between fatherlyjoshing and bullying. Miyazawa, who starts byplaying 23-going-on-13, proves to be anadequate foil for Harada, while expertlyrevealing Mitsue's dark side.Miyazawa's performance also draws strengthfrom her of-the-period attitude and appearance.Most young actresses would have looked toobuff and radiant for the role; Miyazawa, whohas successfully battled the anorexia thatnear ly ended her career , f lawless lyimpersonates a woman who has sufferedthrough postwar food shortages and healthcrises. I only hope she doesn't look as wispy offcamera as she does on.There will be more films about Hiroshima, justas there will be more about the Holocaust. But"The Face of Jizo" may be among the last by adirector with a living memory of the bombing,now nearly six decades past.What will the next generation have to say aboutit? Will they use Kuroki and Inoue's allusiveapproach, which assumes a knowledge ofHiroshima that a younger audience may nothave? Somehow, I think they will come up withsomething different, more direct. Japan may yetget its "Schindler's List."

This review appeared in The Japan Times, Aug.4, 2004