12.7.

2018 Japan's War Guilt and 'Rashomon' — Quadrant Online

CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

Japan’s War Guilt and

‘Rashomon’
Kurosawa took up themes of betrayal, cowardice, dishonesty and
personal responsibility -- unmentionable subjects in Japan for decades
after the war. As the director put it, his script portrays "human beings—
the kind who cannot survive without lies"

When the cable arrived from Europe, the president

of Japan’s Daiei Film Company was puzzled. “What
is a Grand Prix?” Mr Masaichi Nagata asked his
office staff.[1] No one knew. Months before, a
representative from Italiafilm had requested that one
of his studio’s recent productions, an historical tale
called Rashomon, be screened at the 1951 Venice film festival. Mr
Nagata complied, although he considered the movie unsettling. He
had already demoted both the company executive and the producer
responsible for the project following a disastrous run in Daiei’s
cinema chain. Since then Mr Nagata had also suspended the film’s
director, Akira Kurosawa, for continuing to make unprofitable
motion pictures touching on awkward issues.

In the meantime news arrived that the Italians had awarded the Golden
Lion to Rashōmon. No one was more surprised than the unemployed
director, because Daiei hadn’t notified him the movie had been entered
in the major festival.[2] Kurosawa did immediately hear, several weeks
later, that Rashomon had been nominated for Best Foreign Film in
America’s forthcoming Academy Awards—an Oscar it won.

So the Daiei company re-released the film across Japan, and Mr

Nagata, who had publicly dismissed the film as “incomprehensible”,
appeared in the media taking personal credit for Rashomon.[3] Still,
domestic audiences did not flock to see it. Nor, when interviewed by
journalists, would the film company’s president acknowledge what the
difficult—and embarrassing—movie meant. Kurosawa opened up
themes not discussed in post-war Japan.

Rashomon has a puzzling plot. It is bucketing down rain when the tale
begins, and we are in Japanese woods. A journeyman in period costume
runs for shelter under Rashōmon, the freestanding city gate of medieval
Kyoto. This majestic edifice is half-wrecked and badly burnt, evidently

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in a recent battle. What we can see of the once great city through the
gate is in utter ruins with dead tree trunks rising amid rubble.

Within the gate a priest and a woodcutter are squatting together,

exchanging mute glances and headshakes, clearly bothered by
something. The dripping journeyman breaks pieces of wood from the
gatehouse walls, starts a fire and, settling on the flagstones beside them,
asks what has happened. The pair explain that a local magistrate has
just completed an investigation into a violent encounter between a
samurai, his wife, and a bandit. But it is unclear what occurred because
their statements are thoroughly at odds. Wicked things surely took
place, although truth is buried under a heap of lies. No other evidence
has been found shedding light on the incident, and everyone in the
district is anxious. The community’s mood is expressed by the priest:

War, earthquake, winds, fire, famine, the plague, year after year it’s
been nothing but disasters. And bandits descend upon us every
night. I’ve seen so many men getting killed like insects, but even I
have never heard a story as horrible as this … This time I may
finally lose my faith in the human soul.

He then relates the conflicting versions of events which had been given
at the official inquiry—accounts which the viewer watches via
extended flashbacks.

Domestic cinema audiences were unsettled by the subsequent twisting

plot. Publicity suggested Rashomon was a popular Japanese jidai-geki,
medieval costume movies with much swordplay between handsome
heroes and theatrical villains. But it did not conform to
type. Rashomonbroke generic custom in ways unprecedented in
Japanese cinema.

Mind you, Kurosawa’s film had troubling roots. It was very loosely
based on two tales by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, who had adapted the
Western-form short story to Japanese literature.[4] He was a
controversial figure. Akutagawa was acknowledged as the leading
author of the liberal modernising Taisho Period, and his suicide in 1927
was regarded as marking the end of creative and intellectual freedom.
After came that cultural insularity, escalating militarism and political
repression identified with the reign of Emperor Hirohito, an era when
writers and artists lived in fear of the Shiso Keisatsu (“Thought Police”)
which pursued “thought criminals” who encouraged “dangerous
thoughts” (terms borrowed by George Orwell for his 1948
novel Nineteen Eighty-Four). Akutagawa’s writing had been at odds
with the mental climate during those troubled years, and Kurosawa’s
inventive screenplay added a startling abrasiveness to Akutagawa’s
stories by using feudal Japan to say unpalatable things about post-war
Japan.[5]

In the bandit’s testimony in the film, he boasts of overwhelming a

travelling samurai by trickery, then tying him up. Finding her husband
captive, the samurai’s wife pulls a concealed dagger and frantically tries
to knife the lusting bandit. As the pair wrestle she becomes aroused and

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gives in to her attacker. After passionate sex, the wife begs the bandit to
murder her grim-faced husband. The bandit cuts the samurai’s bonds,
and they have a fierce duel which the bandit barely wins, running his
blade through the expert swordsman. The distraught wife then flees into
the forest.

The samurai’s wife tells it a very different way. She says she was raped
by the bandit, who afterward left the scene. She is traumatised by the
assault. But rather than comforting her, the motionless samurai glares,
simmering with anger. He says she has dishonoured them both. So she
begs her husband to kill her, although he does nothing. She becomes
overwrought and faints. She finds her husband lying dead when she
regains consciousness, mysteriously stabbed in his midriff with her
dagger.

Next a clairvoyant appears before the inquiry so that the samurai’s

ghost may also testify. The spectre holds that the bandit consoled his
distressed victim after the rape, wanting her to become his concubine.
However, the samurai’s wife demanded that the bandit kill her husband
for honour’s sake. The bandit is unsettled by this, then turns to the
samurai and offers to kill his wife. The wife panics and runs off. So the
bandit frees the samurai, who weeps in humiliation and takes his own
life with his personal dagger.

Rashomon’s quality as a motion picture relies on the craftsmanship of

these flashbacks. Careful editing gives each segment its own mood and
pace through variations in lighting, camerawork, even musical
accompaniment. This is most evident in the second flashback which, set
to Ravel’s Bolero, builds a throbbing emotional tension.[6]

Lies are densely layered over each other as the film proceeds, and a
Western audience wonders if we will ever get to the truth. Those
acquainted with contemporary events in Japan were not so puzzled.
James Davidson, a Japanese policy expert who had worked for the US
State Department during the war, instantly recognised the overtones to
post-war Japan. He pressed this point in an essay published not long
after Rashomon’s American release:

It should not be forgotten that this film was made in the first
instance for Japanese audiences, at a time when Japanese films
were only beginning to emerge from an understandable period of
complete escapism. A drama laid in medieval Japan, involving
questions of human nature, could have provided a respectable type
of escape without sacrificing its integrity. Yet the picture opens on
the ruined Rashomon: once the great architectural symbol of the
capital of Japan, now the crumbling reflection of a devastated city
whence the seat of power has moved. It is deluged by a relentless,
windless rain.[7]

According to Davidson, the city ruined by war is an unambiguous

metaphor for Japan in 1945. And he was certain Japanese audiences
were being led to reflect on their own experiences, seeing events in the
story accordingly. Making similar points, the film historian Mitsuhino

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Yoshimoto adds that having the camera never show the magistrate
struck local audiences as signifying the Occupation legal system within
its remote Western judges.[8]

A similar view was taken by the academic Donald Keene, who worked
as a Japanese interpreter for the US Navy during the war years. He was
mightily impressed when he first saw Kurosawa’s film in
Massachusetts where he was lecturing in Japanese language and
literature. Keene likewise explained:

As I watched Rashomon in 1951 I became convinced … that it was

an allegory for the war crimes trials in Tokyo, still fresh in
everyone’s memory. For years the Japanese had read in the
newspapers the testimony of men who had declared under oath that
they had not committed the crimes of which they were accused, and
they were contradicted by other men, also under oath, who swore
the opposite. Who was to be believed? Were there no witnesses who
could tell the truth?[9]

Much about the conflicting accounts surely did mirror war trials.
Retreating into self-justifying half-truths when presented with contrary
evidence, the accused did not even adopt the infamous Nuremberg
excuse, “I was following orders.” Instead, the blunt Japanese reply to
allegations of misdeeds was, “I saw nothing morally wrong in what I
did.” Blame was anathema to the proud.

The war tribunals were a fraught issue in Japan. Nearly 6000 soldiers,
politicians and officials had been indicted and then prepared to appear
before courts convened in Tokyo as well as China, South-East Asia and
Melanesia from 1945 to 1950.

Trials held outside Japan proceeded efficiently. The most common

charges comprised: the abuse, torture, maiming and murder of
prisoners; execution without trial; rape and sexual slavery; ill-treatment
of labourers; mass murder, pillage, brigandage and wanton destruction
in invaded villages, towns and cities. The Japanese media’s reporting of
these courts was often slim, which is understandable given the large
number of cases. But obfuscation and heavy summarising did occur
when atrocities were referred to.

The principal tribunal in Tokyo itself was a different matter. Sitting

from April 1946 to November 1948 at the former War Ministry, it
moulded public perceptions throughout the nation. Besides
proclamations of innocence by the accused, and evidence problems
because military records had been incinerated on a vast scale, there
were mounting exemptions from prosecution.[10] If over sixty military
leaders, politicians and heads of business were charged, only twenty-
eight of them eventually stood trial. The remainder were freed over
1947-48 while the Tokyo court was still active.

Behind the scenes there were frictions over this among prosecutors and
the judiciary. Many from other allied nations felt the United States held
too much sway. For instance, certain figures in finance, manufacturing

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and politics got off because America considered them crucial to post-
war recovery. Most galling was how Emperor Hirohito was not charged
on direct orders from General MacArthur. Likewise there was anger
that Japan’s heads of research into biological and chemical warfare
were given immunity from prosecution by the US military in exchange
for all information gathered in their program. Even the activities of this
shady unit, which conducted extensive experiments on live human
subjects, were hushed up.

Public opinion in Japan was also soon influenced by an emerging Cold

War arms race. Prompted by Moscow, leftist agitators in the West and
Japan condemned America’s use of atom bombs on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. These events were branded as potential crimes against
humanity far outweighing other disputed misdeeds in Asia and the
Pacific.

Of course, the film industry itself was buffeted by political winds. In

1950, soon after Rashomon was completed, twenty-nine former staff
members of the Daiei Production Company, who had previously been
purged as war criminals, were excused and allowed to return to the
firm. Then MacArthur ordered a nationwide purge of suspected
communist elements, resulting in thirty other staff at Daiei receiving
pink slips late in the same year. The newly expelled included
Kurosawa’s assistant director Mitsuo Wakasugi.[11]

As Rashomon nears its end we discover there was a separate witness to

the crimes, although he did not present himself to the inquiry. The
woodcutter admits to having gone into the forest to work that day and,
coming upon the samurai, his wife and the bandit after the rape, spied
on the trio from cover.

When the woodcutter arrives the bandit is on his knees begging the
distressed woman for forgiveness, and asking her to run away with him.
She frees her husband from his bonds, but he refuses to fight the bandit
to avenge her. Instead, the samurai rejects her. He orders his wife to kill
herself, then offers her to the bandit when she refuses. The wife
becomes abusive in turn, mocking the two men as cowards without
honour. The samurai and bandit then reluctantly start a floundering
swordfight. Both shake as they nervously try to strike each other. There
is much running for cover, dropping of swords, and frantic ducking
behind protective tree trunks. Finally the unarmed samurai, whose
sword gets stuck in the ground, is skewered by the frightened bandit.
The samurai’s wife and the bandit then run off separately.

The priest and the journeyman look at the woodcutter in bafflement

after hearing this independent account. They ask why he hadn’t come
forward during the trial. “I didn’t want to get involved,” he whines
defensively. The journeyman erupts into cynical laughter, claiming it is
in human nature to look the other way. He has also noticed an
inconsistency in accounts, and accuses the woodcutter of having stolen
the wife’s ornate dagger from the crime scene. He is correct, for the
woodcutter shamefully admits his theft.

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The shocked priest says he will hear no more of human deceit, although
the journeyman sneers, “They are common stories these days.” He
looks around and sees the rain shower is ending. “Men want to forget
things they don’t like,” the journeyman mutters as he stamps out the
fire and prepares to leave. The priest objects, although the journeyman
shrugs off his pieties with a rhetorical question, “Who is honest
nowadays, anyway?” then hurries away.

The film’s poor reception in Japan was surely to be expected. Besides

overt allusions to compromised testimony at the Tokyo trials,
community cowardice, betrayal and brazen dishonesty in time of war
are not easy subjects for a nation to stomach. Witness the response
across France to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s similarly disagreeable
movie Le Corbeau produced in 1943 during the Nazi Occupation.

Clouzot’s drama depicts havoc festering then breaking out in a country

town when an elderly spinster anonymously accuses neighbours of
misdeeds, even crimes. The story was based on true events at Tulle in
south-western France where between 1917 and 1922 a wave of
unsigned letters—around a thousand—had circulated, revealing family
secrets, marital infidelities, illegitimate births and other social
embarrassments.[12] The emotional climate there became so toxic that
some desperate townspeople were driven to crime and suicide.

If the film makes no reference to the war, denunciatory letters were a

key factor of life in Occupied France, when Clouzot read an unsolicited
screenplay by Louis Chavance.[13] Written by corbeaux—“crows”:
slang for authors of poison-pen letters—1500 were streaming into the
Wehrmacht’s headquarters every day, the greater majority being sent by
women intent on derailing the lives of often innocent neighbours.
[14]Clouzot got this risky project authorised by misrepresenting it as a
drama of small-town life, precisely the type of film encouraged by
Goebbels’s propaganda office. But the depraved and corrupt characters
in Chavance’s script were far from those amusing and lovable, earthy
and good-hearted rustic types common in approved movies.

There was tension in the Wehrmacht when the film was commercially
released. The Gestapo wanted to know who gave it the green light,
because denunciatory letters were an invaluable source in locating
resisters, communist cells, Jews and others they wanted.[15] Clouzot’s
career was finished, on joint orders from Vichy and Berlin. Not that the
Resistance admired his efforts, because the clandestine
newspaper L’Écrain Français accused the film of upholding the Nazi
attitude that “the inhabitants of our towns are nothing but degenerates”.
[16]Likewise the church condemned the movie for defaming village life
and rural priests.

Far worse was actually to come after the liberation. Georges Sadoul, a
Stalinist film critic, penned a caustic attack in Lettres Français accusing
Clouzot’s anti-collaborationist movie of being pro-Nazi by presenting a
bad view of the French people in wartime.[17] This prompted charges
being laid at a post-war government purge tribunal. Given the
retaliatory fervour of the moment, the communists had their way. Le
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Corbeau was banned in France and Clouzot was barred for life from
making films. Pierre Fresnay, the movie’s male lead, was also barred,
and shorter sanctions were placed on other actors and film crew of Le
Corbeau.

Fortunately the denizens of St-Germain-des-Prés, including Jean-Paul

Sartre, Andre Malraux and Raymond Aron, made a mighty fuss. So
Clouzot’s ban was reduced to two years. Mind you, the issue was
becoming an embarrassment because Hollywood had made Clouzot an
offer (on his return to Paris, years later, he made the award-
winning Wages of Fear).[18] However, the government veto against
screening Le Corbeau stayed in place until 1969.[19] The French had
continued to find this anti-collaborationist film unpalatable for twenty-
six years.

Rashomon likewise took up themes of betrayal, cowardice, dishonesty

and personal responsibility. These were unmentionable subjects which
rubbed a painful nerve in Japanese society for decades after the war;
which is probably why, writing in his autobiography as late as 1982,
Kurosawa deflected questions of symbolism and covered the film’s
contentious content tactfully:

Human beings are unable to be honest with themselves about

themselves. They cannot talk about themselves without
embellishing. This script portrays such human beings—the kind
who cannot survive without lies to make them feel they are better
people than they really are. It even shows this sinful need for
flattering falsehood going beyond the grave—even the character
who dies cannot give up his lies when he speaks to the living
through a medium.[20]

The international success of Rashomon allowed Kurosawa to join a

more supportive film company. Over the next decade he produced nine
major movies. There would be adaptations of Dostoevsky’s The
Idiot(1951) and Shakespeare’s Macbeth (Throne of Blood, 1957), a low-
life melodrama The Lower Depths (1957), a picaresque tale The Hidden
Fortress (1958), and three films on pressing modern
issues: Ikuru(1952) on a terminally ill bureaucrat who judges his life to
be shallow; I Live in Fear (1955) about a middle-class family dealing
with worries of atomic war; and The Bad Sleep Well (1960) on a
respected corporate head with concealed war crimes in his past.

Significantly there were also two historical films set in the Sengoku
Jidai (1467 to 1568), a period of turmoil and civil wars.
[21] Like Rashomon, they imply parallels between transitions in
medieval Japan and contemporary society due to the loss of customary
morals. The epic Seven Samurai of 1954—set during the peak years of
medieval lawlessness—tackles the predatory opportunism and
unscrupulous business practices which broke out in the immediate
aftermath of defeat. Yojimbo of 1961—which highlights the
displacement of noble values by a grasping merchant class—laments
the spreading materialism and avarice of the 1950s economic boom.

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The latter two films were soon adapted by foreign companies into the
costly Westerns The Magnificent Seven of 1960 and A Fistful of
Dollarsof 1964. But both pictures are travesties. Besides shedding
allusions to changing modern values, the characterisation is corrupted.
The samurai became a rabble of tough gunslingers and hard-drinking
cardsharps played with insolent swagger by Hollywood actors including
Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Robert
Vaughan.[22]This is far from the moral worlds portrayed in Seven
Samurai andYojimbo. Kurosawa’s samurai are dignified men of high
principle in a lapsed world of wickedness and greed.[23] They aim to
refrain from violent acts, and they abhor cocky arrogance, always living
by a virtuous code. Hence, for example, their shock late in The Seven
Samurai when one of the heroes is shot and killed by the bandit gang—
using muskets in battle is disgraceful. It amounts to cheating.

If Hollywood did produce a Western in tune with Kurosawa’s medieval

dramas, it was surely High Noon of 1952. The reluctant hero, a clean-
cut man of principle played impeccably by Gary Cooper, displays
samurai-like traits throughout. Abhorring violence, he walks about
weaponless; although when forced into a fight, he is a master. High
Noon also had an overarching allegorical intent. The director Fred
Zinnemann, writer Carl Foreman and producer Stanley Kramer
employed the Western genre to set American audiences reflecting on
mass cowardice in the face of McCarthyist bullies: the entire town is
too scared to help a decent pillar of the community who has done no
wrong.

High Noon’s similarity to Kurosawa’s approach was, however, quite

coincidental. As for a cluster of cowboy and gangster movies now
claimed to have been indebted to the Japanese director, none really
stand up to critical scrutiny. Then there are commercial films that did
begin as Kurosawa stories but succumbed to heavy-handed rewrites and
garish Hollywood razzmatazz—like the sorry metamorphosis of The
Hidden Fortress into George Lucas’s glitzy hit Star Wars of 1977.

Still, one great motion picture has an irrefutable connection. In 1958,

Ingmar Bergman’s admiration for Kurosawa, and Rashomon especially,
came to creative fruition with The Seventh Seal. In a story set in
medieval Sweden during the Crusades, again we encounter a brooding
reflection on how the trauma of the Second World War has affected
humanity.[24] The central character is a knight who has been fighting in
the Holy Land. But as a consequence of his brutal experiences he has
lost his religious faith, lost even his belief in human decency. In other
words, he has suffered an existential crisis, and he gives voice
throughout Bergman’s arresting film to those urgent spiritual questions
coursing through post-war Europe, and the early Cold War.

Having unsettled its Japanese audience with the depths of human frailty
and deceit, Rashomon does finish with a redeeming act of kindness.
After their discussion, the men sheltering beneath the city gate hear a
baby’s cry. They search the ruins and find an infant wrapped in a
kimono and placed in a safe corner. The troubled priest wonders what
to do. But the woodcutter says he will take this abandoned orphan into
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his family, raising it as one of his own sons. So he picks up the baby
tenderly, and sets off for home.

Christopher Heathcote wrote on the Italian paintings of Jeffrey Smart

in the July-August issue. His most recent book is Inside the Art
Market: Australia’s Galleries: A History 1956–1976 (Thames &
Hudson).

[1] Teruyo Nogami, Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira
Kurosawa, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, California, 2006, p.92.

[2] Akira Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, Knopf, New

York, 1982, p.187.

[3] see Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, op. cit., p.188.

[4] It was mostly based on Akutagawa’s short story “In a Bamboo

Grove”, with aspects of another story “Rashōmon”.

[5] Kurosawa explains that the stories are set in the Heian period (794-
1184). Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, op. cit., pp.181-
81.

[6] Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, op. cit., p.186.

[7] James Davidson, “Memory of Defeat in Japan: A Reappraisal of

Rashōmon,” Antioch Review, vol.14, no.4, winter 1954, pp.496-97.

[8] Mitsuhino Yoshimoto, Kurosawa: Film Studies and Japanese

Cinema, Duke University Press, 2000, p.189.

[9] Donald Keene, “Kurosawa”, Grand Street, vol.1, no.4, summer

1982, p.142.

[10] On problems of responsibility and evidence see Yuma Totani, The

Tokyo War Crimes Trial: The Pursuit of Justice in the Wake of World
War II, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2008,
ch.5 & ch.7.

[11] Nogami, Waiting on the Weather, op. cit., p.93. The “de-purging”
was part of a directive by MacArthur which saw all prison sentences for
war crimes reduced to one third, while those Japanese war criminals
serving life sentences be paroled after fifteen years

[12] Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and
Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation, Yale UP, 2010, p.252.

[13] The screenplay had been written in 1937 by Chavance, then was
filed away at the production company where Clouzot came across it six
years later.

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[14] Spotts, Shameful Peace, op.cit., p.252; Richard Vinen, The Unfree
French: Life under Occupation, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p.176.

[15] Spotts, Shameful Peace, op.cit., p.252.

[16] quoted in Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in
Nazi-Occupied Paris, Vintage Books, New York, 2011, p.196.

[17] Spotts, Shameful Peace, op.cit., pp.252-53.

[18] Antony Beevor & Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Liberation
1944-1949, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1994, p.136.

[19] Spotts, Shameful Peace, op.cit., p.253.

[20] Kurosawa, Something Like an Autobiography, op. cit., p.183.

[21] Joan Mellen, Seven Samurai, British Film Institute, London, 2002,
p.14.

[22] Mellen, Seven Samurai, op. cit., p.69.

[23] Mellen, Seven Samurai, op. cit., pp.20-21.

[24] See Melvyn Bragg, The Seventh Seal, British Film Institute,
London, 1993.

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