A Few Words on Keisuke Kinoshita's Army

I was unfamiliar with even the name of Keisuke Kinoshita until early one morning I happened upon his 1944 film Army on TCM.

What overwhelmed everything else for me while watching the film was the official value system the movie presented as prevailing in the Japan of the movie's day. The world over people are told that it is right that the state draft the children they spent their adult lives raising to fight and possibly die in the state's wars--and that they ought to be proud of their children doing so.

However, here it went further--parents told they should not merely be willing to have their children drafted and fight and die, and proud of those who fight and lay down their lives, but that they should be ashamed for caring whether those children are alive or dead, whether they will ever see them return home, instead of being content that they are "serving the Emperor" (and not simply by pompous authority figures, but supposedly "right-thinking" peers). And indeed the film is above all remembered for infuriating the censors with its final scene in which a mother seeing her son off to war, shows herself unable to let go of the child she raised.

I was aghast at the propaganda line this film was intended to promote, and which (as I later learned) at least some of the makers of the film bravely defied in that final scene, and that reaction has stayed with me ever since. In fact it has been much on my mind in these years as the Japanese people protest the rehabilitation of wartime militarism by the nationalist right in their country. This was what they lived through--and they have no desire to repeat the experience.