Militarists / Gekido no showashi: Gunbatsu (1970)

Keiju Kobayashi as Tojo

As a movie, Gunbatsu has its problems, but as a history it still has its fascinations. Though the prologue warns us that some of the characters and scenes are fictional, it is relatively easy to spot those scenes, leaving us a straightforward re-creation of General Tojo’s rise and of the war effort from 1936 to Hiroshima. In effect, it tries to provide a complete history of the war, with the political maneuverings and decision-making process interspersed with Japanese and American documentary footage and some live re-creations of battle scenes.

The movie begins with the failed coup of 1936 and an execution scene so close to Memoirs of Japanese Assassins that it looks like alternate takes (but should not be since they were made by different studios). From there we proceed step-by-step through the various governmental re-organizations and responses to the expansion of the war in China, Roosevelt’s embargo on oil, the decision to try to seize the Dutch oil in Indonesia and the preparations for Pearl Harbor to protect the Indonesian occupation and supply lines. Then we hit on the major battles with America, concluding with the mass suicides of the defenders and civilians on Saipan and Tojo’s resignation. I have not re-read my John Toland in years, but all of this part of the movie seems to be historically accurate, though much dialogue was probably invented.

Like all such historical epics, the movie needs some central figure to hold our attention, in this case General Tojo (Keiju Kobayashi). Though it chronicles his step by step rise to power, it never actually defines Tojo as a character or tries to delve into his motivations. Americans of course cast him as a Japanese Hitler and hanged him for war crimes, which are not mentioned here, and though he eventually held the same power as the old Shogun, there are no scenes of him scheming a la Richard III to take over the country. Nor is there any attempt to make him heroic or noble. There is no attempt to exonerate him, by any means, but he is initially only one among many, many others, particularly in the Army, who want the war to expand. The result is a series of committee meetings or of junior staff shouting sessions – accurate, perhaps, but not dramatic – interspersed with scenes of him bowing and walking away from the Emperor. There is also, of necessity, an enormous cast – historical figures thankfully identified for us by the detailed subtitles – but they become little more than figures in a historical pageant. Toshiro Mifune makes another appearance as Yamamoto, and even though some familiar faces like So Yamamura and Takashi Shimura pop up, there are so many faces that we don’t know which to remember in case they pop back up later and which to ignore.

By way of “human interest,” the movie introduces a reporter Arai (Yuzo Kayama) who witnesses the evacuation of Guadalcanal and other later events and, once back in Tokyo, convinces his editor to print an article pointing out the government’s lies about these disasters. The Mainichi Shimbun is shown in such a glowing hagiographic light here that I began to wonder if the newspaper had helped finance the movie.

However, in a later scene, a drunken kamikaze pilot (Toshio Kurosawa) lashes into Arai, asking where was the media’s devotion to Truth when the war started, the one really heart-felt moment of the movie. Presumably, this was the part of the movie that was fictional.

As was usual, the Emperor is shown from behind his chair or in very long shot, except for one moment in which we see a close-up from the front of the actor. This may be the first such portrayal of a living Emperor in Japanese film.* The scenes set on Saipan are powerful despite any particular differentiation of the characters, simply because of the dramatic power of the situation itself.

Saipan commanders commit suicide together

Young women prepare to leap from the “Banzai Cliff,” where 1000 Japanese civilians committed suicide

There is not as much model work as in some of Toho’s earlier war movies, or the model work has much improved. Many scenes appear to be using real airplanes, and the Saipan scenes have borrowed American tanks for some extra verisimilitude. There is a kind of strange fascination in watching the continual infighting and jockeying for power between Army and Navy, even when the Americans are knocking on the door.** It is also striking that Tojo was a General and from his position in the Army was one of the major voices for expanding the war, but after Pearl Harbor, the movie concentrates only on the sea war with the US. From an American viewpoint, of course, this is the way we saw the war, but most of the Army that were in Manchuria, China, Burma, the Philippines, and New Guinea are completely forgotten.

By the late sixties, a full generation after the war and several years after Ichikawa’s Fires on the Plain and Kobayashi’s Human Condition,  Japanese movie-makers had begun to put the war on the big screen on a fairly regular basis. Since they had lost, they were more constrained by factual history than, for example, the Americans or the Russians, who found heroes everywhere, even in places they had never been.*** Thus, we have only a few movies that feature war heroes, such as Admiral Yamamoto or Falcon Fighters about Colonel Kato (who both conveniently died before the end of the war),  Col. Genda, or Retreat from Kiska’s admiral. Toho Studio in particular concentrated on the spectacle of historical re-creation, with their experienced Godzilla effects unit providing the model work necessary to re-create air and sea battles, like Storm Over the Pacific’s recreation of Pearl Harbor and Midway. As a general rule, these are more fact-oriented than similar American movies before Patton. More personal and idiosyncratic views using fictional characters were also made, like Okamoto’s Human Bullet and Fort Graveyard, Fukasaku’s Under the Flag of the Rising Sun, or the strange Hoodlum Soldier series, while 1970 saw the beginning of Satsuo Yamamoto’s highly regarded Men and War trilogy, still sadly not available in the US. For Americans, Gunbatsu provides insight into the war from the Japanese government’s level that for the most part only historians delve into, while managing to provide more dramatic force than a purely documentary re-creation.

* At least in clips available, there were many close-ups of the Emperor in The Emperor Meiji and the Russo-Japanese War and there are some of  the Emperor in council meetings of Battle of the Sea of Japan, but that Emperor was dead.  Curiously, I don’t recall any other movies in which the Emperor’s face was seen even in period films set as far back as Tale of Genji, though my memory is imprecise on the matter. In most of the jidai-geki, the Emperor was a shadowy presence at best, even in the sonno-joi era of the 1860s, and when we saw in-fighting among the true wife and the concubines, for example, the Emperor himself usually stayed off-screen. After the Meiji restoration, the Emperor’s portrait was kept in every classroom but was covered and only briefly revealed for the daily recitation of the oath of loyalty. The Empress is physically portrayed in Wandering Princess.

** Such a rivalry was not unknown in other nations, of course. Nimitz and MacArthur hardly saw eye-to-eye during the war, and much of the Pentagon in-fighting to this day is about making sure your own service gets as much money and equipment as any of the others. In Japan, however, this rivalry ran deeper than in many other countries, because the two clans who finally spear-headed the overthrow of the Shogun immediately fell out afterwards, with the bulk of the new Army officers coming from the Choshu clan and with the Satsuma, whose territory had included the major sea-port of Nagasaki, dominating the new Navy.

*** For only a couple of examples, see U-571 in which Matthew McConaughey not only captures the first Enigma machine but does it before the American Navy was even in the war, or Sahara, in which Humphrey Bogart and his American tank hold off Rommel before the Americans even landed in North Africa.