Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Down in Burma, soil is red. So are rocks.
Historical Background: Kon Ichikawa (1915-?) made his first big splash as a director with this film gem, The Burmese Harp, in 1956. He followed later with some other films worthy of the attention of Western audiences, including An Actor’s Revenge (1963), and Tokyo Olympiad (1965). The Burmese Harp was based on a novel by Michio Takeyama.
For those not up on their geography, Burma is located in Southeast Asia west of Thailand and east of India. It was part of the China-Burma-India theater in World War II. In brief, Japan had seized Manchuria in China as early as 1931 (the real beginning of World War II) and took control of most of eastern China in 1937/8. The day after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese also struck Hong Kong and invaded Thailand, which surrendered within hours. Japan reached its furthest territorial expanse in mid-1942, at which time it held much of eastern and southern China and virtually all of Burma. The strategic importance of Burma was mainly the Burma Road, which provided the overland supply route between India and the Chinese forces in central China. It was critical to the war effort to keep China supplied and in the war because the stalemate in China kept innumerable Japanese troops occupied. After the closing of the Burma Road by the Japanese in 1942, the Allies supplied China via difficult airdrops over the Himalayan Mountains. The Allied campaign to regain Burma was especially brutal. The British played the foremost role in Burma for the Allies. British Admiral Louis Mountbatten was the supreme Allied commander there beginning in August 1943. The jungle fighting was fearsome and brutal and it was not until January of 1945 that a supply route to China was reopened through northern Burma. By then, the Japanese homeland was starting to take a beating as well, as the Allies gained full superiority in the air and on the seas, effectively stranding the innumerable Japanese soldiers scattered around the Pacific. The story of The Burmese Harp begins in July of 1945, just days before the dropping of the first atomic bomb, which soon led to Japan’s surrender.
The Story: In the closing days of World War II, a platoon of Japanese soldiers is slogging through the Burmese jungle. The commanding officer, Captain Inouye (Rentaro Mikune), had been a music teacher before the war. In order to improve the morale of his unit, he has taught them to sing choral music. One of the soldiers in the platoon, Corporal Mizushima (Shoji Yasui), has made himself a Burmese-style harp and has taught himself to play it admirably well. Not only is he able to accompany or entertain his fellow soldiers, but he also used the harp to signal information to his comrades. Sometimes he is sent to scout ahead, dressed to appear Burmese. He then signals either danger or all-clear via the choice of harp music
The platoon reaches a remote Burmese village where they are welcomed and treated hospitably. As they are about to repay their hosts with some musical entertainment, the Burmese villagers beat a hasty retreat and the Japanese soldiers realize that some British soldiers are lurking in the surrounding woods and have spied them. The Japanese soldiers are ill-prepared for battle and decide to sing while getting ready as a decoy. They are amazed when they hear the British soldiers joining in with their song, which is a variation of “Home Sweet Home.” It seems that the sentiment imbued in that song is something that all soldiers in the Burmese jungle feel. The British have another reason for singing, however, and that is because the Japanese central command has already surrendered, marking the end of the War. They have arrived to inform this Japanese unit of the news, to accept their arms in surrender, and to transport them to a POW camp in Mudon. The soldiers of the Japanese platoon have developed much loyalty to one another and they swear to stick together whether they are imprisoned, shot, or returned home.
There is another Japanese unit dug in up in the mountains that refuses to surrender. The British are willing to allow one of the Japanese soldiers who has already surrendered to meet with the resisting unit and reason with them. Captain Inouye asks Corporal Mizuchima if he will accept the assignment. Mizuchima agrees. He is given just a half-hour to reach the intransigent Japanese unit and finds them unresponsive to his pleas. They will fight to the death. As it happens, they will simply die. When the time expires, they are bombed into oblivion by artillery shells, without so much as laying eyes on their enemy. So much for blind courage and stubborn honor. Mizuchima alone survives and only barely at that. He is found by a Burmese Buddhist monk, who nurses him back to health. Once recovered, Mizuchima steals the monk’s robe while he is bathing, shaves his own head, and effectively assumes the disguise of a Buddhist monk. He sets out on foot, intending to rejoin his unit in Mudon.
As he journeys, Mizuchima is emotionally overwhelmed by what he encounters. In the mountains, he comes across a large number of unburied dead Japanese soldiers, where a platoon had been destroyed. Later, in the woods, he passes a solitary corpse of another Japanese soldier, in an advanced state of decay, but still propped up against a tree with a bony hand holding a photograph of loved ones back home. Still later, he comes to a virtual mound of unburied Japanese corpses on a beach. He buries or incinerates a few of the corpses, but the task is just too overwhelming to complete. Near his destination, he comes to a British hospital where he observes the nurses honoring a Japanese patient they were unable to save with a proper burial in an unknown soldier grave. Suddenly, he is struck by a sense of his personal destiny. He turns around because, as he later explains in a letter to his comrades, “I cannot leave the bones lying scattered on the hills.”
Mizuchima’s fellow soldiers are tormented by memories of their harp player and wonder if he has survived. Sometimes they hear one of the tunes he used to play because a young Burmese boy has been taught to play in that manner by Mizuchima. Sometimes they spot the Buddhist monk (who is Mizuchima) but are uncertain if it is their old associate. They are baffled as to why Mizuchima would abandon them and not return home with them, when the time comes for repatriation. On the ship heading back to Japan, Captain Inouye reads the moving letter from Mizuchima that explains why.
Themes: The primary theme of The Burmese Harp is the terrible waste and absurdity of war. Win or lose, war is a terrible waste, but it is perhaps all the more evident to the side that loses. These Japanese soldiers have seen countless of their comrades die to no good purpose. Those that survived will return to a devastated homeland and many will learn that some of their loved ones have died as well. One unit even chooses to die fighting rather than surrender, even after their country has surrendered and the war has been lost beyond all doubt. A generation of young men has been sacrificed to the imperial ambitions of a few old men at the head of the Japanese government and military. The stupidity of this destructive and self-destructive warrior mentality is further highlighted by the contrast with the other extreme of human nature: the sublime beauty of men singing together and playing an instrument to produce poignant and stirring music. The brilliance of The Burmese Harp is in juxtaposing these extremes of human nature, one against the other.
Some reviewers of this film have difficulty with it because it deals with the perspective of the Japanese, with whom the Allies were engaged in mortal combat. Certainly this film deals with an unusual platoon of Japanese infantrymen – what with their propensity for amusing themselves with choral music. These soldiers are presented in a favorable light as basically decent, caring, and sensitive human beings. Personally, I have no difficulty with that at all. Common soldiers, especially during a major war, are pretty much a cross-section of the young men of that nationality. They’re just ordinary human beings like you or me who have responded to the nationalistic fervor stirred up by the so-called leaders of their respective countries. And the fact of the matter is that the futility of war is more effectively portrayed from the vantage point of the losing side than the triumphant one. The nationality of these soldiers is irrelevant to the point of the film. So too is the nationality of the viewer.
There is a second powerful theme raised in this film as well and that is the meaning of loyalty and friendship. Some of the soldiers in Mizuchima’s former platoon felt somewhat betrayed (before the reading of the letter) that Mizuchima had abandoned them despite their vow to all either die together or return home together. Was this disloyal of Mizuchima? Not at all. Mizuchima had acquired a higher loyalty – to the souls of the many Japanese soldiers who had died needlessly in the jungles of Burma. He would remain in Burma to bury the remains of any and all Japanese casualties he could find; then, he would remain some more to tend to their souls.
Still another issue broached in an intriguing way in this film is the nature of service to one’s fellow man. We can see in this film a contrasting of three kinds of service or activism. First, we see violent activism in the form of military service motivated by patriotism and nationalistic fervor. We see ample evidence of where that leads. Then we observe the soldiers after their surrender talking about returning home and helping to rebuild their homeland. History records that the Japanese set to that task with vigor and have built themselves a new Japan that is peaceful but something of an economic marvel for a country of its size. Then, thirdly, we see the kind of selfless service based on renunciation as manifested by Mizuchima’s decision to devote himself to training as a Buddhist monk. “As I climbed mountains and crossed rivers,” he writes to his comrades, “burying bodies and bones, always, doubts assailed me. Why, why this awful tragedy? Why this terrible sorrow. As the days passed, I learned. I learned that the ‘why’ of tragedy was not for humans to know. That our work was to relieve the suffering of the world. To have courage, to not fear, to have strength.” This model of service, typical of priests, monks, pastors, nuns and the like, is built not on forcing change on the world, but on improving oneself, finding enlightenment, finding grace, and then modeling those traits for others to either follow or not follow as their own wills dictate.
Production Values: Ultimately, the strength of this film lies in its script, which reaches to lofty realms in its humanity and universality. There is skillful use of symbolism, especially of a geographic and geologic variety. The red dirt and stones of Burma (the opening line of the film quoted at the top of this review) is readily seen as symbolizing human blood and the human soul. The expansive mountain vistas and dense jungle provokes thoughts of the existential loneliness of man. The Burmese Harp was beautifully filmed, back in 1956, in striking black-and-white. Ichikawa loved this story so well that he remade it in 1985, despite the 1956 film being held up as a masterpiece. There are gorgeous shots of Buddhist statues and ornate Burmese buildings as well as incredible natural environment sequences in the Burmese mountains and jungles. The soundtrack is superlative, notably the harp music and singing, but the environmental sounds as well.
The performers are not ones that Western viewers are likely to recognize, though Rentaro Mikuni (who played Captain Inouye) later appeared in the interesting film Kwaidan (1964). Despite the paucity of major credits for the performers, the characters had a credible realism about them. None of the performances were distractingly weak.
Bottom-Line: America would do well, these days, to remember what it was that carried the nation of Japan, in the 1930’s and early 1940’s, to the brink of doom. Japan had developed military and industrial might that had no rival in its part of the world in those years. The leaders of Japan realized that they could take what they wanted – Manchuria, then China, Thailand, and so forth. The bombing of Pearl Harbor seemingly ensured that even the relatively distant threat posed by America would be obviated. Japan permitted itself the arrogance of believing that its power was supreme and could not be checked. The world, today, is in a similarly precarious state of imbalance, with America the one remaining superpower. The reality in the world today is that no other country can check whatever aggressive initiative America might choose to undertake. So long as America played the role of the essentially benevolent peacekeeper and policeman, in cooperation with the U.N., most of the world would have been content to let stand the one superpower model. Once America revealed its readiness to abuse its unmatched and unparalleled military capacity, the world instantly became an unstable place. A country with power that no other can effectively resist and which openly claims the right to preemptive and unilateral military action in pursuit of its interests (eschewing the United Nations) is a scary country indeed. Every country whose interests compete with those of America (which is every country) will now reassess their military strategies in relation to America’s new aggressive posture. Every country at risk of invasion by the United States, for example, will want to covertly develop weapons of mass destructive as quickly as possible as the ultimate hedge against invasion. The world will then be a much more dangerous place. As the Japanese proved in the 1930’s and 1940’s, national hubris is the most destabilizing influence of all.
The Burmese Harp is an exceptional film with a potent message – as important today as at any time in the history of the world. It is a powerful film that speaks to the issue of human conscience. Win or die contests in today’s world can only lead to disaster. This film is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a running time of 116 minutes. I highly recommend it.
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