The Masters of Cinema Series

The Naked Island

by Acquarello, 2006

When filmmaker and critic Nagisa Oshima remarked that The Naked Island (Kaneto Shindo, 1960) was “the image foreign people hold of the Japanese”, he was articulating a commonly shared view with other Japanese filmmakers and critics who harboured a certain degree of ambivalence and trepidation towards the aestheticized images of postwar Japanese life that was being projected to the international community in order to show that the nation had, indeed, truly recovered. For inasmuch as the film ostensibly presented the image of ennobled, passive acceptance to the harshness of fate and the sobering reality of the human condition, the political, social, and economic state of the nation after Allied occupation was far from ideally reconciled. For the Japanese people, financial austerity, government instability, spiritual desolation, and the humiliation of Occupation were not distant, ephemeral memories but visible scars that reveal how far the country had come since the beginning of occupied reconstruction, and how much of their indigenous identity was irretrievably lost through the inevitable process of imposed rule and cultural osmosis in order to achieve that elusive (and delusive) image of paradigmatic, well-adjusted recovery.

At the cinema, conscientious filmmakers had sought to capture the social problems of contemporary Japan through the revival of the shakai mono film, but soon found themselves struggling through – and increasingly at odds with – the restrictive, amorphously fragile, and inconstant policies of Occupation censors who initially sought to culturally erase the country’s vestigial, reactionary views towards feudalism and imperialism, then subsequently changed creative guidelines in order to respond to the changing American political climate in the years leading to the Cold War. As a result, films that intrinsically espoused more egalitarian sensibilities of individual and collective empowerment – once upheld as positive, reinforcing (if not sacrosanct) ideals by Occupation censors – became suspected propaganda vehicles for the dissemination of leftist ideology. Imposed governance and exploitation of military dominance were no longer regarded by the Occupation forces as spectral echoes of imperialism, but a politically expedient recourse within a complex international arsenal to stem the tide of communism. Culminating in the McCarthyist Red Scare era of the early 1950s in the U.S., the perceived ideological threat of spreading communism would invariably have repercussions on the administration of the Occupation, leading to General Douglas McArthur’s order for the broad-based expulsion of Communist party members and other perceived, left-leaning personnel from government positions and private industries – from which film studios were not exempt – in what became known as the Red Purge of 1950.

Forced out (or effectively blacklisted) from the major studios or increasingly frustrated by the creative limitations imposed by occupation censors during this period, many left-wing, socially and politically conscious filmmakers decided to form their own independent production companies, among them, Kaneto Shindo, a screenwriter turned director who had served as an assistant under the mentorship of iconic filmmaker, Kenji Mizoguchi. For his first directorial effort under his collaboratively founded production company, Kindai Eiga Kyokai (which also included fellow filmmaker Yoshimura Kozaburo, a branded Class C “war criminal” denounced during the early years of postwar occupation for having made wartime films deemed sympathetic to the emperor’s militarist agenda), Shindo accepted a commission from the Japan Teachers’ Union for a feature film based on the Osada Arata novel, The Children of the Atom Bomb.

The synchronicity of the intrinsically political and culturally sensitive subject matter of the nuclear bombing with Shindo’s own agrarian roots on the island of Hiroshima seemed uniquely and ideally suited. Told in fragmented, episodic narrative from the perspective of several children in Hiroshima who were atom bomb survivors (hibakusha), Shindo’s profoundly humanist docu-fiction served as one of the nation’s earliest, post-occupation testaments of the continued toll and human suffering caused by the nuclear holocaust. Shindo would again return to the subject of the Hiroshima bombing in Haha (1964), a portrait of maternal courage in the aftermath of the destruction, and subsequently, in Sakura-tai chiru (1988), a deeply personal and quietly haunting, part documentary and part stylized historical reenactment of a group of former film studio colleagues who had formed an acting troupe and were touring Hiroshima on the fateful day of August 6, 1945 – all having perished as a result of the bombing (some tenuously lingering for a few days, afflicted with acute radiation poisoning before succumbing to slow and painful deaths).

However, Shindo’s continued re-examination and personal reconciliation with the legacy of the atomic bombing are not solely limited to overt representations of the annihilating tragedy, but rather, pervade many of the filmmaker’s more abstract and overtly formalist films as well. The theme of physical disfigurement and grotesque dehumanization under the corruptive weight of cataclysmic barbarity can be seen beneath the veneer of the charged, primeval eroticism of the horror films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968), while latter films such as Deciduous Tree (1968), The Life of Chikuzan (1977), and The Strange Tale of Oyuki (1992) use extensive flashbacks to reflect a melancholic, often unreconciled nostalgia towards an idealized, lost innocence and vanished way of life.

It is within this recurring thematic framework of the unforeseen residual legacy of the atomic bombing and the cultural (and societal) toll of the Pacific War that The Naked Island can be regarded as an oblique representation of hibakusha cinema in the endless toiling of a seemingly inutile, barren land: a bittersweet, poetic elegy for Shindo’s dying ancestral vocation on a rural, isolated island. In essence, the film serves as an allegory for a humble way of life irrevocably transformed by a landscape poisoned by nuclear exposure – a naked island – the uncalculated, indirect fallout of a seemingly distant and alien war. Chronicling the silent, daily ritual of a small family of farmers living alone on a remote island in the Inland Sea as they row their boat to the main island, fetch water, prepare meals, take their children to school, and tend to their meagre crops from dawn to dusk, the film serves as a broader existential parable for the cyclicality of human experience where eruptions of violence and unexpected tragedy are momentarily revealed through de-dramatized, imperceptibly transient perturbations within the eternal performance of a Sisyphean ritual. Far from a portrait of a stoic, demoralized people resigned to their fate, Shindo’s vision is that of a dying culture increasingly (and systematically) isolated from the progress of society, a harsh and marginalized existence that is seemingly only acknowledged – and validated – in the wake of profound loss and universal (and nationally symbolic) tragedy. Rather than an idyllic depiction of a primitive and exoticized cultural otherness, the film illustrates that the curious and alien landscape is not found in the provinciality of the farmers’ quaint, quotidian ritual, but in the perception of an abstracted, rootless, and culturally estranged modern civilization where empty gestures and grotesque, comic pantomimes represent the conduct of everyday life and implicitly celebrate the virtues of technological advancement in contemporary society, even as it continues to stigmatize those who still suffer from technology’s destructive aftermath.

Shot on location with minimal crew and financing, The Naked Island would go on to become an international success, culminating in an awarded tie for the Grand Prix with Grigori Chukhraj’s Clear Heaven at the Moscow International Film Festival in 1961. The film proved to be a transformative experience for Shindo and Kindai Eiga Kyokai, which had not only redeemed the struggling independent production company from the brink of financial collapse and ensured its continued operation, but also impressed upon Shindo the virtues of a collectivist approach to filmmaking, implementing an isolated, communal environment for the production crew during the course of filming in order to harness the personal conflict and travails inherent in their situational intimacy towards a focused, creative synergy for the project. It is this humbled, collective strength borne of shared struggle and sacrifice that is poignantly articulated in the farmers’ return to the familiar, wordless ritual after their heartbreaking tragedy: the defiant resilience of a socially disposable, anonymous people that cannot be annihilated by cultural suppression, unconscionable acts of reckless inhumanity, or the inconstancy of fate.