Hospital in the cave
This is not a horror film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is one of the most horrific movies I can ever recall seeing. It is a war movie, but as it was made in 1953 and in black & white, there isn’t a great deal of actual gore. What makes it horrific lies in the story itself.
The Hemiyuri girls and teachers prepare to serve
When the Americans invaded Okinawa in 1945, teen-aged girls were drafted in to help in the field hospitals behind the lines. Tower of the Lilies dramatizes a real group known as the Himeyuri, the Lily Princess squadron, drawn along with their teachers from a local girls’ school. No one ever specifies the exact ages of the girls but everything seems to suggest they were about 14. In American terms, perhaps the best parallel would be older Girl Scouts. They of course were not trained as nurses, but they could and did serve as nurses’ aides — feeding, cleaning, stretcher bearing, bringing water, cooking, holding patients during surgery, and so on.
As the battle progresses, they and the wounded are packed into caves so tightly they can hardly move. There are of course almost no real medical supplies, very little light, and no release from the constant agony around them. The Japanese soldiers themselves all expect to die, and most do, despite the efforts of the staff and the girls. No one should have to see what they see, of course, but for all this agony to be daily witnessed by these children makes it much worse somehow than even movies of the WWI trench warfare or the Stalingrad fighting, for example. We don’t see severed heads or oceans of blood, but the cramped tight world and the youthfulness of the girls magnifies the horror without dwelling on its particulars.
Transporting the wounded to a new cave
Movies that try to treat the horrors of warfare often tend to end up subtly glorifying the suffering, but that is not the case here. Tadashi Imai directs with a minimum of melodrama or artificial heroics. Compared to US/British war films about “civilians” under fire, it is remarkably restrained. There are no “mad scenes” when someone “just can’t take it anymore,” nor are there any patriotic banzai shouts for the Emperor; no moralizing character tells us “war is hell” or some other easy message, because we can see it for ourselves and don’t need to be told. Interestingly, there is no particular demonization of the Americans (who are never seen) – no one hints that the Americans are rapists, for example, and the girls are even told that if they are caught alone, they should surrender because the Americans will not shoot women.
Facing the end
Nevertheless, most of the girls are killed, primarily as “collateral damage” by cave-ins, infection, shrapnel, mistakes in the dark, and so on, and it will be giving nothing away to viewers who have seen other Japanese war films to say that many of the “survivors” choose to commit suicide.
The Hemiyuri became national heroes after the war (IMDB shows at least five other movies about them since this one). There is a memorial for them on Okinawa, but it is hard to tell if they became national heroes because of their sacrifice or because of their suicides, much like the Byakkotai. More than once, the girls ask the doctor if they can commit suicide with him, so it comes as no surprise when some of the girls do eventually kill themselves. I suppose the bigger surprise is that all of the wounded left behind because they can’t be moved are given grenades to hold against their stomachs, and as the girls leave with the walking wounded, we hear the grenades going off.* According to Wikipedia, almost half of the Himeyuri did survive the war, so the deaths of the single unit followed here is something of a dramatic license, but only slightly exaggerated.
I should perhaps emphasize that though the girls march off from their school, they are not forced to do so; the movie actually opens with a young girl running because she is worried she’ll be late and left behind. And nothing holds them when things get bad except their sense of duty, their concern for each other, and an intense devotion to their female teacher who serves alongside them. Though they respect the doctor to the point of idolization, there is never the slightest hint of romance between him and the teacher, nor do any of the girls try to tempt him to a romantic moment.
This strong emotional tie between teacher and students is particularly striking, but something we will see in many other Japanese movies. In America and Europe, we often find a few students who become devoted to their teacher, but not entire classes of them. There is some mention of the racial tension between “pure-blood” Japanese and the native Okinawans, though of course I can’t see any difference, but it never becomes an issue and the Okinawan girl(s) are treated exactly the same by all.
One thing you wouldn’t find in an American movie of the time is that the girls do mention menstruation.
The movie is not told as a documentary, but there is a strong matter-of-fact-ness about it, with very little attempt to sugar-coat the situation and no exciting camera work or photography to distract from the story. It provides a much-needed counterpoint to most war movies, even those that claim to deal with the life of the nurses and wounded. (It also provides an interesting compliment to Okamoto’s Battle of Okinawa, which is told from the soldiers’ viewpoint and which I highly recommend.)
This was one of the great years for Japanese movie-making, so Tower of the Lilies is not quite so well known as Tokyo Story, Ugetsu, Nigori, A Japanese Tragedy, or Gion Bayashi which were all released in that same year. But once you see it, you will not forget it.
- * This does not happen in Fires on the Plain, for example, where the men die of their wounds or starvation, but not in mass suicides.