Myth and Masculinity in the Japanese Cinema by Standish Isolde

Author:Standish, Isolde. [Standish Isolde]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Figure 25: Ningen no jōken 1959-1961

Throughout the remainder of the film, the relationship between Kaji and Michiko provides the reference point against which all other male-female relationships are measured and found wanting. According to the film, the wartime ideologies distorted men by sublimating a ‘natural’ sexual desire (as defined by the Kaji and Michiko relationship) on to violence. This then results in the abuse of the weak, whether in the humiliation which leads to the suicide of the soldier, Obara, or in the cynical use of ‘comfort women’ by the manager of the mine to keep his Chinese labourers docile and compliant. Violence in such circumstances becomes purely functional to obliterate fear of weakness associated with the feminine in the perpetrator. This is obvious in the scene in part three of the film when Michiko visits Kaji at the training camp. The officers are hostile in their attitude to her; she is entering a masculine world systematically designed to deny the feminine. Even so, she is allowed to spend one night with Kaji. In this scene, the film again reasserts the physical nature of their union when Kaji asks Michiko to stand naked in the soft light from the window. This is the last time they meet and it is this naked image of Michiko that Kaji will carry in his mind through the subsequent battle and his wanderings in Manchuria. The next morning during kendō practice, he is severely beaten. In the final part of the film a ‘comfort woman’ who has resorted to sleeping with Russian soldiers explains to Kaji, ‘There is no hope of going home is there, or of meeting my husband again. We don’t even know how long we can stay alive. It’s the same for everyone. Our lives have been wrecked (mecha mecha). All that concerns us is eating and keeping our strength up.’ Kaji again refuses to give in to this moral decay. Whereas the other members of his group avail themselves of the prostitutes, Kaji prefers to sleep outside alone, clinging to his belief in Michiko.

The Human Condition depicts the disintegration of the ideologies of the kokutai which were based on utilitarian panoptic social relations. There was no alternative metaphysical morality against which people could measure their actions since the social mechanisms for control had broken down and, as the ‘comfort woman’s’ speech implies, a feeling of hopelessness pervaded all, hence the emphasis on the epizeuxis ‘mecha mecha’ which is onomatopoeic for ‘wreck, destruction or mess’. This word is repeated over and over in Kaji’s mind in voice-overs as the camera pans through the house where soldiers lie in the embraces of the prostitutes. The picture this scene portrays is Hobbesian in its bleakness; the meaning of life has been reduced to the satisfaction of bodily needs at the lowest level.

Despite the fact that the relationship between Kaji and Michiko is portrayed as liberating and an ideal against which all other male-female relationships are measured and found wanting, the character of Michiko

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