Review 1 by Kevin Thomas Los Angeles Times, March 15, 1989; Calendar/p 7
The arrival of Kazuo Hara's "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" in the wake of Hirohito's funeral couldn't have been better timed.
The death of Japan's longtime emperor has called attention to the enduring uncertainty over his role in World War II, but the figure who is the subject of this profoundly unsettling, irresistibly compelling documentary has never had any qualms in calling for Hirohito to accept responsibility for the death of his soldiers and the suffering of his people.
Kenzo Okuzaki, proprietor of a Kobe car battery shop, sees it as Hirohito's moral duty, as Supreme Commander of the Japanese Army, to do this. One of the few survivors of Japan's 36th Engineering Corps who faced malaria and starvation in East New Guinea, Okuzaki in 1969 fired four pachinko balls at the emperor with his handmade slingshot, reportedly crying out the names of his fellow soldiers killed in action. A prison term only intensified Okuzaki's convictions.
In short, Okuzaki was clearly a man obsessed when he crossed paths with Hara, an associate of director Shohei Imamura, who is credited with conceiving this film and who has always been fascinated by obsessive behavior. After seeing this film twice -- it was shown last year at AFI Film Fest -- it is impossible not to believe that Hara has served as a catalyst for pushing an increasingly disturbed individual over the edge. You come away believing that Okuzaki is absolutely correct in his attitude toward the emperor, but that decades of frustration in pursuing his cause have turned him into an increasingly dangerous fanatic -- something that he is not only aware of but revels in. "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" is a highly irresponsible film, which, paradoxically, probes the nature of responsibility
Shot over a five-year period, the film turns out not to be about Okuzaki hectoring the emperor -- although he does this from time to time, shouting over a loudspeaker in his slogan-covered car -- but rather his investigation of the murders of two soldiers in East New Guinea apparently on orders of their own officers, killings that took place 23 days after the armistice. Okuzaki looks up a series of aging veterans, badgering and even battering them physically, until he at last learns the terrible truth about why the killings occurred. Okuzaki's findings are persuasive, but what he tries to do as a result of his discoveries is deplorable.
It's hard to believe that Okuzaki, who was convicted of murder in the 1950s, would have embarked on this journey without Hara's encouragement. (Why are we not told who Okuzaki killed more than 30 years ago and why he did it?) There's an undeniable dark humor in the repeated spectacle of Japanese, middle-aged and older, struggling to maintain traditional decorum in the face of Okuzaki's relentless and deliberate outrageous behavior in the pursuit of truth.
"The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" (Times-rated Mature) is like a Leni Riefenstahl documentary in that you can never truly resolve your contradictory feelings toward it. Undeniably, what Okuzaki uncovered was worth uncovering, and almost certainly nobody else would have bothered. At the same time, you cannot dismiss the feeling that a film maker has exploited a dangerous individual who in fact attempted another killing -- of a man he knew to be innocent.
Review 2 by J. Hoberman Village Voice, March 15, 1988, p 62
The most remarkable of the New Directors documentaries comes from Japan -- and, as matter-of-factly gonzo as it is, it can only complicate whatever stereotypes you hold. Kenzo Okuzaki, the fiery subject of Kazuo Hara's "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On," calls himself the 'Impartial Soldier of the Divine Crusade." Okuzaki was one of the few Japanese soldiers to survive a harrowing retreat into the New Guinea jungle at the close of World War II and he's devoted his life to exposing those he holds responsible. Not that Okuzaki's a dispassionate muck-raker. The sometime auto mechanic made his first national scandal in 1969 when he used a homemade slingshot to fire a volley of pachinko balls at Hirohito's head. Among other things, he's tasteless enough to hold the emperor personally responsible for the war.
Like Okuzaki, "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" breaks a number of rules. The documentary was not only co-produced by its fanatical protagonist but similarly sacrifices the means to the ends, the privacy of individuals, and sometimes even their physical well-being, to get to a larger truth. The alarming, irrepressible Okuzaki is both private eye and prosecutor, bursting in on an old army comrade (Hara's crew in tow) and pummeling him to the ground to extract the information he seeks. Five years in the making, Hara's taboo-breaking verite is complicit in a number of Okuzaki's investigations and deceptions. In the end, this sort of kamikaze filmmaking -- complete with calls to the police from surprised interviewees -- uncovers a truly shocking instance of wartime murder and cannibalism. "As long as I live, I'll use violence, if it brings good to mankind," the triumphant Okuzaki promises. A postscript informs us that he's currently in prison, sentenced to 12 years for the attempted murder of his former commanding officer's son.
Review 3 by Vincent Canby The New York Times, March 15, 1988, C15:1
The New Directors/New Films festival is presenting a number of unconventional documentaries, but none as alarming and significantly lunatic as "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On," conceived by Shohei Imamura ("Vengeance is Mine") and directed by Kazuo Hara as his first feature.
Its central figure is Kenzo Okuzaki, 65 years old, a World War II veteran who lives in Kobe with his pliant, uncomplaining wife, whom we later learn is dying of cancer. At the start of the film, Kenzo has already spent 13 years 9 months in jail. His crimes: plotting to assassinate a former Primer Minister, attempting to hit the Emperor with lead pellets fired with a sling shot and distributing pornographic pictures of the Emperor to people outside a Tokyo department store.
Kenzo is a political activist. He's also a marriage broker. In an astonishing and funny precredit sequence, we see him delivering a wedding feast homily in which he recalls his years in jail and suggests that all countries and, indeed, all families are barriers to the true brotherhood of man. The bride and groom listen with eyes lowered, as if this were the sort of thing every bride and groom expected to hear on their wedding day.
"The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" will be shown at the Museum of Modern at 8:30 tonight and 6PM tomorrow.
>From everything the audience sees, Kenzo Okuzaki is a certifiable
psychotic, though "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" never
addresses this suspicion. He's the sort of fellow who writes long,
crazily incoherent letters to editors, confronts people on street
corners and harangues them with a loudspeaker from his van. It could
be that Mr. Hara thinks the psychotic state is the only sane response
to the contradictions in contemporary Japanese society.
Whatever the film director thinks, he never says. Instead he follows Kenzo around Japan as the former soldier tries to get at the truth of something that happened more than 40 years ago -- the execution of three of his army comrades when they were serving in New Guinea at the end of the war.
The audience never understands just why, at this late date, Kenzo decides to investigate these events, the details of which remain fuzzy. With Mr. Hara and a camera crew in tow, Kenzo calls on former officers and enlisted men he thinks were responsible for ordering the executions. There are suggestions that the men were condemned for desertion or for cannibalism. There's the further suggestion that they were executed to provide meat for their starving comrades.
Some of those interviewed treat Kenzo with respect and attempt to answer his questions. Others equivocate. Some contradict themselves. Through all the testimony, Kenzo behaves as if he had been appointed by God to act as His prosecuting attorney. At one point he starts beating an old man who is sick, while the old man's wife pleads: "No violence. No violence." The farce becomes dark and disorienting.
The cops are frequently called, and Kenzo often has to admit that there are some circumstances in which violence is called for. He says it with the stoicism of the true fanatic. At one point, he decides he'd like to have his own jail cell in his house and drives off to the Kobe prison to get the measurements. When he's not allowed in, he goes into a tirade about the guards being "law's slaves, just like the Emperor."
It's difficult to understand "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" without knowing more of the facts than the film wants to give. It may be that there really are no more facts. What we see is all there is. In that case, the film raises pertinent questions about the extent to which the presence of the camera "entraps" events that otherwise would never have occurred. In some documentaries, like this one, the questions are especially pertinent.
The most invigorating thing about "The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On" is its consistent irreverence. It doesn't mean to be polite or nice or soothing. It means to provoke and disturb-and let the devil take the hindmost.
A screen note at the end of the film reports that after photography was completed, Kenzo set out to assassinate one of his former Army comrades and, unable to get at him, shot and wounded the man's son instead.
He is now serving a 12-year prison sentence, seeming to be very happy, as well as satisfied that his wife died earlier than expected. Otherwise he would have had to worry about how to take care of her.
<http://www.stanford.edu/~brucey/AL75.00/emprev.html> *****
***** Jeffrey Ruoff and Kenneth Ruoff, The Emperor's naked army marches on (Yukiyukite Shingun) (Trowbridge, UK: Flicks Books, 1998).
ISBN 0948911050. 57 pp. £ 9.9.5 stg (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Jeffrey Ruoff)
Uploaded 12 November 1999 | 936 words
Hara Kazuo's 1986 documentary The emperor's naked army marches on is a film once seen never forgotten. Hara tags along behind a former Imperial Army soldier who spent time in New Guinea, Okuzaki Kenzo, on his quest to uncover cannibalism amongst troops abandoned there at the end of the war and assign responsibility to the emperor. At first, audiences are likely to be sympathetic to the underdog. Hara is quoted in this extended essay by the Ruoff brothers as saying, "a documentary should explore things that people don't want explored, bring things out of the closet, to examine why people want to hide certain things" (3). So, although he never declares his hand in the film itself, there is little doubt that he empathizes with his subject's project.
However, in this particular case, it is also clear that Hara got more than he bargained for. Okuzaki is a man obsessed. He is as unrelenting and dictatorial as the system he claims to oppose, prepared to go to the most unreasonable lengths with no regard for others in order to extract what he believes to be the truth. In Hara's case, Okuzaki's provocative behaviour led to the confiscation of all his footage at the end of a harrowing and expensive trek around some of the more remote parts of what is now Irian Jaya in 1983. (16-7) Hara took years to complete this film. For spectators, it only takes two hours to watch. But those who stay with it as it lurches between the absurd and the horrifying leave drained. They may also leave less certain than ever of what happened in the final days of the conflict, of the reliability of memory and confession, and morally troubled by the role played by the camera and their complicity as viewers. It has a lot to say not only about Japanese history but also about documentary film and truth.
As the Ruoff brothers detail in this extended essay, the film was an enormous success at the time of its release in Japan and shown widely at festivals overseas. However, it gets little international exposure today. A major reason for this is the conspicuous lack of English-language scholarship on contemporary Japanese cinema in general and documentary in particular, despite the innovative and diverse character of Japanese filmmaking. These regrettable circumstances make the publication of this book all the more welcome, especially because it not only includes analysis of the film but also details of the production and reception contexts, as well as Japanese historical background and discussion of the film's place in Hara's work.
There are many fascinating and sometimes charming nuggets here. For example, I have always wondered how the film got its arresting English release title of The emperor's naked army marches on. The original Japanese means "The emperor's sacred army marches on" and there is no actual nakedness in the film. On the other hand, as the Ruoff brothers note in this extended essay (18), "it does convey a sense of Okuzaki's fanaticism." If I understand Hara's polite account of the circumstances correctly, it was all a serendipitous accident of translation and not a marketing strategy. But it is the broad backgrounding that will prove invaluable for those wishing to bring the film to the attention of new audiences or use it in the classroom.
Despite these strengths, which reflect the Ruoff brothers' own backgrounds in documentary film work and Japanese studies, the book is not without minor flaws, and I do feel it could have gone further. To be specific, although Hara's own filmmaking background is given, the book pays little attention to the Japanese independent documentary tradition within which Hara works. Instead, it compares The emperor's naked army marches on to the works of Jean Rouch and Ophuls' The sorrow and the pity (Switzerland/France/West Germany, 1971). Although I certainly think such comparisons are valid, I think it is equally important for readers to be informed more about the local direct cinema movement that would have informed Hara's work even more decisively. This only underlines my point about the lack of adequate English language scholarship on Japanese cinema even further.
Second, the book would benefit from close analysis of some sequences. The Ruoffs do break the film down into sequences and describe the moral quandaries thrown up by Okuzaki's misadventures and the questioning of documentary cinema provoked by Hara's very visible presence. However, without a more detailed account of some examples, it is difficult for the reader who has not seen the film to get a more precise sense of the queasiness produced by Hara's rendering of the ethical and emotional rollercoaster ride that Okuzaki takes us on. For example, there is the famous sequence in which he confronts ex-Sergeant Yamada in an effort to get him to talk about what happened in New Guinea. As the camera follows Okuzaki up to the house, the technique elicits the thrill of participating in an ambush from the audience. However, when Yamada turns out to be a sickly old man and Okuzaki starts to kick him and beat him up on camera, the audience is less likely to be comfortable with the results. A careful tracing of the shifts in mood and thought and the ways in which Hara's editing of his material orchestrates them would be very productive here.
Despite these small reservations, there is little doubt that this is a valuable contribution to scholarship on documentary film in general and Japanese documentary in particular. I hope that it will encourage readers to seek out Hara's film and view it either again or for the first time.
Chris Berry
<http://www.latrobe.edu.au/www/screeningthepast/reviews/rev1199/cbbr8a.htm> *****
Yoshie