Ningen no joken II

“At some point, all my films deal with resistance to entrenched power. I think I've always questioned authority. That was true for my own life too, including my time in the military. After the war, there was finally a time when we were able to address these issues directly,” says Masaki Kobabyashi and began working on NINGEN NO JOKEN at the end of the 1950s, a nine-hour relentless indictment of the inhumane actions of the Japanese army in occupied Manchuria during the Second World War. Based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Junpei Gomikawa published in the mid-50s and produced by the Ninjin Club, the three-part epic depicts the path of naive-idealistic Kaji from a conscientious objector of a forced labor camp to a soldier and finally to a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp.NINGEN NO JOKEN II: 1944/45: His humanist convictions bring the forced recruit Kaji soon came into conflict with merciless officers who were the recruits in the training camp Bully and humiliate. The result of a complaint about a military man is Kaji's transfer to the front. Here he is assigned a group of young recruits, whom he tries to protect from seasoned artillerymen. During a mission of several weeks to excavate shelters, his small unit is overrun by the advancing Red Army. Kobayashi paints the blatantly devastating image of a cruel Japanese military leadership, which made him the target of hostility from ultra-conservative revisionists who accused him of slandering the Japanese army. (mg)