The Masters of Cinema Series

Character Type…

by Keiko I. McDonald, 1983

Character Type and Psychological Revelation in Ichikawa’s BIRUMA NO TATEGOTO

Ichikawa Kon’s Biruma no tategoto [The Burmese Harp, aka Harp of Burma] (1956) was inspired by Takeyama Michio’s novel of that title, published in 1946. [1] The novelist’s purpose was frankly didactic: to inspire youth, then facing the radical transformations in Japanese life, in the aftermath of the war, with hope in the future of their country. Takeyama sought to do this by referring the Japanese youth to a traditional Japanese value system, namely, the Buddhist ideal of compassion as exemplified in his hero, Mizushima.

With a few exceptions, Ichikawa follows the novel closely, though the effect of the film is to highlight and contrast three value systems that might direct the course of Japanese life after the war. Ichikawa represents these value systems by three character types: Mizushima; a new type of soldier; and an old type of soldier. To schematise the value systems, the protagonist, Mizushima, follows heroic altruism; the new type of soldier led by a captain fresh from a music academy acts upon individualism; and the old type of soldier led by a tenacious captain acts upon collectivism. The film, like the novel, is “action-packed”, yet Ichikawa’s development of its purpose involves elevating conflicts of value to a psychological plane. This is the key to understanding Ichikawa’s method in this film.

Donald Richie has already noticed the importance of psychodrama in Ichikawa’s work:

“The seemingly various parts of Ichikawa come into focus when one remembers that his extremely personal style, one of the most finished in contemporary Japanese cinema, is upon a kind of duality. Willing pupil of Disney, he is at the same time drawn to the dark matter of Enjo [Conflagration] (1958) and Bonchi (1960). Maker of official documentaries, he is also drawn to the most intimate of psychological revelations. A humanist, he is, almost consequently drawn to death and destruction. All this is somehow redeemed by beauty.” [2]

Biruma no tategoto definitely illustrates Ichikawa’s avid concern with “psychological revelations”. First, it deals with a number of stages of perception that Mizushima experiences on the way to his final epiphany. Second, it concerns the long-sought discovery of his ultimate mission that the new type of soldier reaches after various turns of event. Finally, it guarantees the audience’s gradual initiation into a culminating revelation of cosmic tragedy. Furthermore, Ichikawa’s specific modes of representation, especially tightly organised cross-cutting and frequent close-ups, ensure their communicative effectiveness for his intention.

The film begins with an epigraph imposed on a static view of a landscape: “The soil of Burma is red, and so are its rocks…” A wind blows dust across the scene, suggesting a double thematic significance in this image of mobility, dust, intruding on an image of perdurability, mountain peaks. The words of the epigraph cue the viewer into a double thematic significance in what he is about to see. First, there is the Buddhist notion of this world as a world of dust, a world impure, especially when it becomes a battlefield, a world of dust reddened with bloodshed. Second, there is the actual red of the Burmese soil and mountain peaks. These offer a transition from the world as it is, to a world transformed through spiritual awakening – symbolised by the ruby, which plays an important part in the protagonist’s struggle for transcendence in the latter half of the film.

The camera then focuses on a company of soldiers, led by their captain, singing:

“A night in late autumn The solitary traveller Looks up at the sky With a desolate heart His beloved home-town His parents dear The path of his dreams Is one that leads back home”

A number of such songs are used in the film. They serve two functions. Contextually, they serve as an analogue for the feelings of the individual characters. Rhetorically, they approximate the audience-character distance because the particular emotive quality of these songs helps draw the audience (steeped in Japanese tradition) into the character’s predicament. Thus, the soldiers’ dragging feet, marching in time with the slower tempo of the song, render precisely the weariness and fatigue of war. Yet these soldiers have not really experienced the worst horrors of war: the carnage of battle, the chaos of defeat. Their war-weariness is internalised, a matter of weariness and homesickness. They are at worst soldiers waiting to confront horrors. It is important to remember that the reality of war they confront is not at all like that Ichikawa explores in Nobi [Fires on the Plain] (1959), which deals even with cannibalism.

These Japanese soldiers come to learn that Japan has lost the war through native villagers who betray them, after having been their protectors. It is here that the film reveals the central problem: “What is the reality of defeat? How is a soldier to come to terms with it?”

As suggested in the opening epigraph, there are basically two ways to approach this reality. There is the way of dust: acceptance of the flux of time as a necessary condition of human existence. And there is the way of the mountain peaks: a repudiation of time as a thing extrinsic to human existence viewed in another light. These are, of course, antithetical values embraced by opposing character types. “The singing company” led by the young captain accepts defeat as part of the human condition. The other group keeps resisting even after they are persuaded by Mizushima to surrender.

“The singing company” members learn of their defeat in unusually amicable circumstances. The song, “Home, Sweet Home”, which they sing, brings them together with the enemy British soldiers in a mutual acceptance of the futility of the war and an expectation of safe return to their respective homelands. Thus, the song reconciles them through the commonplace of hope. They hope to survive confinement in a POW camp. They also hope to work for the reconstruction of their country, each in his own way. These soldiers surrender to the British because they accept defeat as an inevitable consequence of the human condition. They accept the progression of time, seeing in its insistent turning toward the future a confirmation of the value of the individual life. When they are relocated in the POW camp later, these soldiers sing a song about the wheel of a mill. Significantly, the song’s recurring image of the turning wheel expresses a natural and spontaneous feeling about the passing of time and human destiny. Thus, “the singing company” might be said to represent individual man, the character type of “humanism”.

Set against this value system is that symbolised by the second group of soldiers, who repudiate the fact that they have lost the war, clinging to the past glory and grandeur of the Imperial Japan for which they have fought. Giving themselves up to the enemy is not compatible with their sense of honour. Hence, they decide to fight on to the bitter end, choosing death over survival. This fatalistic chivalry, which is not the main thrust of the film, is an outward manifestation of a kind of altruism rooted in the tradition of collective duty in service of Imperial Japan. These soldiers refuse to compromise with time; indeed, they seek to reverse its progress. To do this extraordinary thing, they must act collectively, sinking their individuality in a kind of group ideology.

Mizushima, the protagonist of the film, mediates between these two extreme views, and in the end reconciles them. Initially, he is drawn to the course of individual freedom pursued by his comrades. However, subsequent stages in his encounter with the calamity of war finally lead him to a sort of golden mean. He encompasses both life (progression of time) and death (reversal of time) by consenting to live, even as he gives his life as a sacrifice into the hands of the All-Compassionate Buddha. In other words, he denies individual life by transcending it. Thus, Mizushima represents the character type of Heroic Altruism – quite a different sort of altruism from that of the old type of soldier willing to sacrifice himself for Imperial Japan. It is also different from the commonplace humanism of “the singing company”, because Mizushima embraces the way of Buddha, ultimately dedicating himself to serving the unknown soldiers, by praying for their permanent sojourn in Heaven.

Biruma no tategoto is a film about spiritual quest. Stage by stage we are shown Mizushima’s encounters with levels of “reality”, and value systems that attempt to explain it. Ichikawa often lets the camera take an unusually long focus on Mizushima walking, in order to keep the quest theme predominant in the film.

Our first view of Mizushima shows a soldier’s initiation into the horrors of war. The immediacy of this destruction is so terrible that Mizushima faints near the cave to which he has been sent. The colour contrasts that we see are strong and stark: blackness in the landscape, and overhead a sky that seems white – a symbol of illumination. Mizushima wakes and moves from darkness into light. The meaning is obvious, though it hints of future developments. The same can be said of the background music that plays when he faints: the familiar hymn tune “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”, foretelling his martyrdom to Buddhistic self-sacrifice.

As Mizushima walks into the light, leaving the battlefield behind, the hymn tune swells. En route to rejoin his comrades in the POW camp, he loses his civilian clothes to a thief and is forced to don the garb of a Burmese priest. This outward “conversion” suggests his gradual absorption into the way of Buddha. A villager gives him food, saying: “Burma is still Burma. Burma is the Buddha’s country.”

Next he encounters corpses scattered in the forest, and a heap of them on a riverbank. His first impulse is to start cremating them. This conflicts with his urge to rejoin his unit, which tarrying here would seriously delay. Even though Mizushima clearly follows his propensity for choosing individual, over collective, behaviour, the conflict here is significant, as is Ichikawa’s use of the camera to externalise his character’s inner battle. Ichikawa shows us Mizushima’s footprints in the shallows of the river. They meander, conveying a sense of indecision, of lingering hesitation about following the path of individualism. Even so, Mizushima clearly intends to leave the corpses unburnt; and yet, as if to keep his protagonist’s conflict clearly in view at every turn, Ichikawa presents us with a deft counter-clue to his intent at this stage. We see Mizushima passing from the left of the screen to the right. But when he takes the boat bound for the camp, and his comrades, we see him carried left again. For a moment, the alert viewer is confused, thinking that Mizushima has changed his mind and is going back where he originally came from to cremate the bodies after all.

We see the river in close-up. It flows on, indifferent to human transactions. Mizushima and his boat occupy a tiny spot on that flow. The symbolic association of the river with the flux of time is clear. The battle, which to men is a radical turning point in their lives, comprises only a single, insignificant moment in the scheme of time, which encompasses the entire corpus of diverse human affairs. In short, this filmic composition reveals the traditional concept of mujo, the mutability of human affairs, which is best illustrated in such Japanese classical works as Heike monogatari [The Tale of the Heike] (circa 13th century) and Kamo no Chomei’s Hojoki [An Account of My Hut, aka The Ten Foot Square Hut] (1212). Thus, the picture of the protagonist crossing the river articulates the sense of futility and waste of the dehumanising war.

The next stage of Mizushima’s journey is his taking refuge in a Buddhist monastery, where he sees a group of British nurses holding a memorial service for the unknown soldiers. A medium shot of the nurses’ faces is quickly transfused into a close-up of his face expressing awe and consternation. This is precisely the moment that Mizushima’s prolonged conflict is finally resolved. He now realises, with the immediacy of experience, that the enemy are also people and capable of altruism, and that altruism extends to all of the races who fought in the war. His impulse is to run back to the cloister. He comes to a stop in the middle of a corridor, which is illuminated, while the rest is enveloped in darkness. Mizushima covers his face with his hands, his head lowered. The scene is immediately succeeded by a rapid sweep of flashbacks to the previous two stages of his confrontation with death – first, with the dead as he regained consciousness on the battlefield, and second, with the face of a mummy leaning against a tree in the forest, and more corpses on the riverbank. The leitmotif, “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded”, returns louder than ever before, as if to celebrate this revelation of the universality of altruism. This movement represents the harmonious synthesis of conflicting views of life as presented in the film. The synthesis obviously is taking place in Mizushima, yet everything we see on the screen suggests that the director is inviting, if not requiring, us to realise it in ourselves. We are given no close-up of Mizushima’s face; only a view of his lowered head. It is up to the viewer to synthesise all the elements of this film experience – from the most concrete flashback to the most extended use of symbolism in music and filmic texture. As if to emphasise the elegiac quality of such a moment, Ichikawa makes use of a fade-out to effect a smooth transition to the cross-cut that follows.

Thus, Mizushima’s determination is now clear to the audience; he will not go back to Japan. Instead, he will stay in Burma and hold services for dead soldiers. The culmination of his altruistic conduct puts into the white wooden box (used to contain the ashes of a cremated body) the ruby, which he earlier found in the mud of the river. The sense of impurity of the secular world is symbolised by the red soil of the mountains and peaks of Burma, and is further concretised by the man-devouring war. His act of putting the red ruby into the white box suggests a catharsis, a purging of the world’s dross as Mizushima approaches his commitment to heroic altruism through the way of the All-Compassionate Buddha.

Ironically, even as Mizushima is dying to the world – in a transcendental sense – his comrades are following his spiritual progress at a distance through the simple worldly act of trying to discover whether or not he has survived the battle. Ichikawa makes brilliant use of cross-cutting technique to keep the two distinct value systems represented by Mizushima and his comrades predominant and also to enrich our sense of Mizushima’s quest. As the captain and his men search for evidence of Mizushima’s survival, our perspectives on events enlarge dramatically. We see experience in more than one version – versions that merge as readily as they diverge, thanks to Ichikawa’s skilful control of the thematic terms of his story.

This is most dramatically apparent in the scene in which the captain’s group encounters a Burmese priest who bears a striking resemblance to their lost comrade. It cannot be Mizushima: all the available evidence suggests that he is dead. We, as detached observers, know more than either of the two parties concerned. We know that the priest is Mizushima. And logically we expect this to emerge as we see his face in close-up and the expectant faces of his comrades. But we are surprised; when the soldiers call his name, Mizushima does not answer.

So much for evidence at the most obvious level. The soldiers pass now to a higher stage of truth seeking. The captain hears a beggar boy playing a harp. The tuning that the boy uses is too much like a mode that is uniquely Mizushima’s. The captain’s stubborn belief that the man still lives, despite all evidence to the contrary, leads to the climactic revelation of the identity of the Burmese monk.

Yet here too, another stage of truth-seeking is reached. The captain sees the truth, not face to face with the living Mizushima, but in the ruby in the white box: clear evidence of the great, the unselfish commitment that Mizushima has made. The captain has arrived at the stage where he can speak to the ruby, as if he were speaking to Mizushima face to face: “What happened to you on Triangle Mountain? And what happened after? I have no idea. But I think I know how you feel.”

A less complex film might leave us with this mesh of understandings. Ichikawa has built too much tension into his work for us to “rest easy”. In lieu of simple identification with either party’s predicament, we are asked to witness yet another clash between conflicting value systems. Again, the film does this by placing versions of experience in conflict. Though the captain knows that Mizushima has survived, his men have yet to learn this. As they sing “Kojo no tsuki” [“The Moon Over the Ruined Castle”], the camera cross-cuts rapidly between them outside and Mizushima inside the reclining Buddha. This rapid deployment of contrasts on the screen creates a mood of detachment in the viewer. Mizushima’s very human urge is to play his harp as his comrades sing; equally compelling is his need to curb this impulse. His comrades, overjoyed that Mizushima is alive, pound on a door he cannot and dare not open.

Again, while his protagonist is in spiritual agony, Ichikawa keeps his face from us – keeps us from identifying with him. Here Mizushima’s face is pressed against the wall of Buddha, deep in shadow. It is as if Ichikawa required the viewer to synthesise the given clues and reach for the logic behind this suffering; to get beyond sympathy to empathy.

Thus, the director’s technique again puts us at a distance, though we find ourselves emotionally drawn to the protagonist’s pain. All along, we have been made anxious to see a reconciliation of the value systems that conflict so powerfully; and again that is our reward, rather than mere identification with the psychological reality of either party. Therefore, we, who have more adequate knowledge of their situations, are compelled to remain detached observers. Our response to Mizushima’s emotional turmoil will, then, be empathy rather than sympathy and we will say to ourselves: “This is how somebody like Mizushima will feel about his commitment. We understand his psychological dilemma”, instead of “We can put ourselves in your position and become one with you, Mizushima, and by so doing, we share the same emotion”.

“Kojo no tsuki” sung by Mizushima’s comrades has a great thematic relevance in this scene. The moon is invested with the cyclic pattern of nature, which operates on all the earthly phenomena of human creation epitomised by the castle which is now in ruins. Thus, the song reinforces mujo, the sense of futility and waste of all the human transactions, including the war fought by Mizushima and his comrades.

The subsequent stage of the spiritual revelation of Mizushima’s comrades takes place when Mizushima comes near the barricade of their POW camp, with two parrots on his shoulder. It is precisely at this moment that they realise that their message delivered to him through one parrot, “Mizushima! Let’s return to Japan together”, has not moved him. Mizushima plays, “Aogeba totoshi” [“Farewell Song”], expressing his inability to join them and at the same time his gratitude to them, since they helped him through the ordeal of war. [3]

In this final scene we confront the final resolution of the two options, which have been in tension throughout the film. Mizushima’s final commitment is to the absorption of heroic (Buddhist) altruism, which encompasses both the progression and regression of time, while the captain and his men, who are now going home, affirm the propriety of their commitment to individualism. These two options can be further analysed as two different world views represented by the two parties. The world view that Mizushima’s journey reveals is presented as tragic. Refusing to follow his initial impulse to return home, Mizushima is gradually compelled to devote himself to the Buddhist mission. The outcome of his choice of cosmic altruism, which is not individually rewarding, runs counter to his genuine human wish to go home with his comrades. His choice is an affirmation of the misery in the human situation, which, in turn, generates the questions found in his letter to his comrades: “Why must the world suffer such misery? Why must there be such inexplicable pain?” To live with this tragic knowledge continuously is the only spiritual gratification he derives from his acceptance of the unselfish motive.

On the other hand, the captain and his men plunge themselves into the immediacy of their experience when they confront the inevitable truth of the defeat of Japan. Their internalisation of their motive consequently leads to its materialisation; they can go back to Japan and assert their individual freedom, with which they will impel themselves forward to the reconstruction of their lives in the aftermath of the war. Thus, the final world view of their spiritual journey is romantic in its ultimate sanctification of individualistic humanism, which they spontaneously accept as a legitimate option.

The third cinematic movement of psychological revelation takes place when the captain reads Mizushima’s letter to his comrades. It brings together three parties that have hitherto been involved in the action: Mizushima; the group led by the captain; and the audience, detached observers of all the events which befell the former two character types. All of Mizushima’s motives and actions, which have so far been unknown to the captain and his men, are now clarified through his personal letter.

Next the screen is awash in shade and cloudy sky, as if to underscore the doubt expressed in the letter and felt all around. Again, the camera depicts for us, detached observers, a powerful drama yielding now to a mood of carefully balanced doubt. Then, as if to hold out a promise of intellectual poise, the screen is suffused with the light of sun and sea. Symbols converge aplenty. The river, so important in the film, is transformed into the sea, the sea of fertility and the reservoir of life’s forces, toward which the individual soldiers led by the captain are oriented in the future.

Significantly enough, collectivism, which has been thus far prevailed under the captain’s leadership, now dissolves into individualism, foreshadowing what awaits these soldiers in Japan. The unison, “We”, is now replaced by each soldier’s “I”. They start telling one another what they want to do upon their return to Japan. One soldier says: “When I get back to my house in the mulberry orchard, I’ll take a nice long nap on the veranda.” Another replies: “I’ll whistle as I ride my bike through the Ginza delivering telegrams.” Again, the music swells.

The film ends with the same scene with which it began. But this time, a human figure, as well as the dust blown in the wind, intrudes upon the serenity of the soil. In the recurrence of the subtitle, “The soil of Burma is red, and so are its rocks…” we again recapitulate what has gone before, and visualise the long spiritual journey yet to come for Mizushima.

REFERENCES

[1] Ichikawa has directed a number of films based upon controversial Japanese novels: for example, Kagi [The Key, aka Odd Obsession] (1959) taken from Tanizaki Junichiro’s Kagi [The Key] (1956); Nobi [Fires on the Plain] (1959) from Ooka Shohei’s 1951 novel of the same title; and Hakai [The Broken Commandment, aka The Sin, aka The Outcast] (1962), taken from Shimazaki Toson’s 1906 naturalist novel of the same title. He has also made Enjo [Conflagration] (1958), an adaptation of Mishima Yukio’s Kinkaku-ji [The Temple of the Golden Pavilion] (1956). For a general critical introduction to Ichikawa’s works, see Donald Richie (1971) Japanese Cinema: Film Style and National Character, pp. 181–197; (1966) “The Several Sides of Ichikawa Kon”, Sight & Sound 35:2 (Spring), pp. 84–86.

[2] Donald Richie (1971), p. 196.

[3] Japanese students frequently sing this song at a graduation ceremony, expressing their gratitude to their teachers.

Copyright © 1983 Keiko I. McDonald, reprinted by kind permission.