Tank Commander Nishizumi / Nishizumi senshacho-den (1940)

Very few of the Japanese movies made during the war have survived the effects of bombings and Occupation, so Tank Commander Nishizumi joins a very small group of available movies about soldiers made during the war years. As with so many Japanese movies, it is remarkable for what it is not.

It can be called a propaganda film, of course, about one of Our Heroes and obviously made with the participation of the Army. Yet, compared to American war movies of the WWII era, it is both understated and unheroic. Nishizumi does not even appear until almost twenty minutes into the movie, and then he is cleaning up his tank, not rushing to the rescue. Like Col. Kato, Nishizumi is a model leader of his men, an officer who cares for them and is deeply admired and respected by all in his unit. He is not given to speech-making or Banzai charges, he sees that his men are well taken care of when not fighting, he gives his own blanket to a soldier suffering with chills in the rain, he is even wounded after pausing his tank’s advance to help a wounded infantryman out of the road. When there is an especially dangerous bit of scouting to do, he does it himself rather than risk his crewmen, even though they all volunteer.

When the crew comes across a Chinese woman who has been left behind to give birth, he speaks to her in Chinese and sees that she and the baby get care from a doctor and extra blankets and food.

Strikingly, it makes no attempt to demonize the enemy. While the movie follows Nishizumi from the Shanghai battles to his eventual death in the spring of 1938, there is no narration explaining why Japan is there or why the Chinese are resisting. A narrator tells us each time Chiang Kai-shek moves his forces and where, but we see no scenes depicting Chiang or any other potential villains. The Chinese woman does not turn out to be a spy. When we do see actual Chinese soldiers, they are just doing what soldiers do, and even the soldier who eventually shoots Nishizumi is a wounded man getting off his last shot rather than a devious sniper lying in wait.

Though we see many recurring characters, all carefully identified, there is no serious attempt to individualize them. Goto, the cook, has five kids at home, but we know next to nothing about any of the others. We see the unit-wide joy of mail call, but we never see any of the men reading out their letters, or talking about the parents, wives, fiancees, or baseball teams,  scenes that were all but required by law in American war movies. Even Nishizumi is barely characterized – he is a good man, a quiet man, but he never talks of home or his family (though the narrator tells us where he is from and that his father served in the war with Russia) and he has no past or plans for the future, no woman left behind or writing to him now. The only picture carried by him is a photo of a classmate in officer school who died before graduation.

No one makes speeches about dying gladly for the Emperor. One of Nishizumi’s crew is killed rather pointlessly planting a flag, but other than that there are none of the expected heroics of western war films. There are no John Waynes here: No one grabs a machine gun and single-handedly fights off a charge, no one volunteers to hold them off while the others escape, no one circles around behind the enemy by himself. In this, it is very similar to Five Scouts (1938). Battles are fought the Army way, not the Movie way, mostly in noise and confusion and no clear idea what is going on. The film-makers must have had close co-operation with the Army, for there are many real tanks involved and enough explosions and ammunition expended to fight a real engagement, not to mention the large number of extras. The blend of documentary footage and staged scenes is almost seamless, and only the night scenes in camp during rain or snow and when treating Nishizumi’s wound by lamplight betray the studio. This seamless blending of actors and documentary reality reminded me of that unique American war movie made during the war itself,

The Story of G. I. Joe, though that movie devotes more time to the individual characters in the unit, mostly still stereotypes, and, since it deals with infantry is much grittier in its non-combat scenes. Like Robert Mitchum’s Lt. Walker, Nishizumi actually dies off-screen. The big death scene is given to another officer whom we have barely met, though the surviving crew members carry Nishizumi’s body in upright as if he might make his final report after his death.

Aside from the one Chinese woman, we see no civilians, and we pass through Nanking with hardly a mention as the tanks roll on to other battles elsewhere. In one surprising scene, the cook asks Nishizumi if they will go home after they capture Shanghai. Nishizumi replies that the war will go on for another 7-8 years, for there will be war with Britain and Russia and maybe others yet to come, an unusually prescient comment for a movie shot in 1939. One wonders how the scene got into the script, much less how it got past the censors, though it was made before the tightening of censorship in 1940.

Despite the understatement and the documentary approach that insists on just following Nishizumi through fight after fight, the movie does have three very tense scenes, each built around the battlefield tension of not knowing – the battalion commander unable to make contact with any of his troops that opens the movie, and two scenes of Nishizumi testing the depth of water they reach to see if the tanks can ford there. The last of these introduces a genuine threat, the wounded Chinese soldier, but Nishizumi is finally shot only when everyone thinks he is safely back ashore. These scenes are so well done, and Ken Uehara’s quiet characterization of Nishizumi is so plausible that the movie can hold the interest of people not particularly concerned with Japan’s own view of the war or war movies in general.

The movie was directed by Kozaburo Yoshimura, who after the war shied away completely from any action movies of any kind. His deft handling of sympathetic portrayals of women within beautifully composed photography would cause many to consider him to be the heir of Mizoguchi. Much of the straightforward, understated, “it is what it is” approach of the movie certainly owes a great deal to its screenwriter Kogo Noda, a most unexpected choice for a war movie filled with action and battles. Noda spent most of his career working with Ozu, paring down every story to absolute essentials and letting the emotions work by implication rather than by open expression, and that experience seems to have carried over here. Tank Commander Nishizumi was second on Kinema Junpo’s best film list in 1940, and I thought it had disappeared along with every other movie on that list until I stumbled on a DVD issued in 2020.