Real-life horror
Director Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s new flick
Director, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, is best known for horror movies depicting the dark undercurrents of life in modern Japan and the vengeful ghosts that haunt it.
But the evil spirits lurking in the background of his latest film are a real-life horror from the country’s past: the Imperial Army’s testing of biological and chemical weapons on human subjects in Manchuria before and during World War II.
The movie Wife of a Spy garnered Kurosawa the award for best director at the Venice Film Festival last month. When the film is released in Japan this month, it is likely to cause a stir in the country, where wartime atrocities remain the subject of intense controversy and are rarely seen on the big screen.
Winning a top prize at an international film festival is a major victory for Japan, which has invested heavily in promoting its culture through its Cool Japan programme. But Kurosawa’s honour may prove awkward; the nation portrayed in Wife of a Spy is one that Japan’s vocal right wing, including members of the government’s upper echelons, would rather be forgotten and have worked to erase.
Japanese missions abroad routinely criticise depictions of the Imperial Army’s wartime brothel system, in which women were often forced into sexual slavery. In Tokyo, black vans often prowl the streets spouting propaganda that rewrites the country’s role in the war. And publishers churn out books disputing the most basic facts about atrocities.
No matter their ideological lens, Japan’s war movies have largely ignored the victims of Japan’s imperialism. The right fetishises the country’s martial spirit and quiet endurance, while the left tends to deplore the suffering of soldiers in the field and civilians at home.
In a recent interview, Kurosawa, 65 — no relation to famed director Akira Kurosawa — said he found it hard to understand why Japan’s war crimes remained almost taboo among the country’s filmmakers 75 years after the end of the conflict.
Other countries make “lots of movies that skillfully talk about the war without ignoring the awful events that occurred,” he said, in a rented Tokyo office space where harried assistants wrangled TV crews and photographers.
“Wife of a Spy,” he added, is “absolutely not a film that is attempting to brew up controversy or intended to be something scandalous, but you can’t make a movie that tries to make history disappear.”
Kurosawa was drawn to the war era, he said, because it made an ideal palette for exploring the tension between the needs of individuals and the demands of society. That is a frequent theme in his films, in which characters often find themselves at the mercy of social pressures they can neither understand nor control.
“In modern times, there is a conflict, a sort of rivalry between society and the individual, but at least on the surface there’s a freedom to do as you like,” he said. But in the war era, the demands to conform “take a shape you can clearly see. You can’t do this. You must do that. You have to wear these kinds of clothes, have this kind of hairstyle.”
In Wife of a Spy, that conflict takes shape in a twisty period drama that owes more to the thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock than to Kurosawa’s ow wn horror genre.
The movie, which begins in th he lead-up to the war, tells the story of a Japanese woman’s s efforts to help her merchant husband expose the milita ary’s human experiments after he stumbles on them during g a business trip to China.
Thousands of victims, primaril ly Chinese — euphemistically described as “logs” — died d in the ghastly research efforts into bioweapons by the ar my’s Unit 731. Some were deliberately infected with pathog gens like plague and then vivisected without anesthetic to o study the results. After the war, the United States helpe ed cover up the research in part because it wanted the da ata.
Kurosawa’s film leaves most of o that horror off-screen. Evidence of the atrocities is lim mited to a short speech, a pair of medical files and a brief f reel of footage showing smiling Japanese doctors presidi ing over inhuman scenes reminiscent of Nazi concentrati on camps.
As in real life, the efforts are never n exposed while they are still underway. The couple’s attempts at exposure are opposed at every turn by a ruthle ess officer in Japan’s secret military police. But their presen nce is felt in a deeper narrative that threads through the e plot’s twists and turns, one that speaks to the costs to th he nation’s soul of hiding its horrors.
Part of the attraction of setting the movie during the war, Kurosawa said, was the challeng ge of making a film where the audience already knows the e ending: Japan defeated and in flames.
The movie’s conclusion will seem familiar to fans of Kurosawa’s works, which often finish f in apocalypse. For the director, however, that destru uction does not necessarily signal the end of the world, s o much as the beginning of a new one.
Faced with a scene of chaos an nd destruction more hellish than anything portrayed in Kurosawa’s horror films, the heroine sees a country clean nsed by fire and declares it “a beautiful thing”.
The success of Wife of a Spy in n Venice has earned Kurosawa, who is well respected in Japan J but by no means a household name, a new measur re of fame.
His start in the movie business s offered little hint of what lay ahead. His first film, made in n 1983, was soft-core porn called Kandagawa Pervert Wa ars. For years, he pieced together a living with television commercials and magazine writing, making movies on the side.
In the 1990s, at the age of 40 0, he began churning out direct-to-video movies. By the e nd of the decade, he had built a reputation as a workman nlike director specialising in the kind of films that are not t often taken seriously in places like Cannes.
Still, his artistry gained accla aim. In the late 1990s, he won international attention with h his movie Cure, a chillingly bleak detective story abo out a series of gruesome murders that spread through To okyo like a virus.
The film was praised for its bro ooding atmospherics and unsettling sound design, now c onsidered trademarks of Kurosawa’s style. In 2001, he debu uted at Cannes with Pulse, an uncannily prescient story abo out a world driven insane by vengeful ghosts that haunt th he internet. A US remake followed in 2006.
In the years since, Kurosawa has largely turned away from the horror genre, winning recognition r at Cannes for his work on the 2008 family dram ma Tokyo Sonata and on Journey to the Shore, a ghostly lov ve story released in 2015.
But Wife of a Spy, which has yet y to secure an American distributor, can be seen as a sort t of prequel to Kurosawa’s horror films, many of which are e set in a decaying Tokyo, where the ghosts of past sins exe ert a spectral, corrupting influence on the present.
He first began to seriously co onsider exploring the war era while working on Retribut tion, a 2006 horror film examining how the spirit of rep pressed tragedy animates modern violence.
Although the movie is set in n contemporary Tokyo,
Kurosawa said he could not escape the feeling that the story
“at its root was really about the war”.
As entertainment, the project “failed on many levels”, he said, but it led to an epiphany.
“If I wanted to write about the war, its effects,
I couldn’t force it into a modern setting, I had to put the era in its era,” he said.
Kurosawa’s fans see his films as laden with meaning but at heart he views himself as an entertainer, not an auteur. His true ambition is to make an American-style blockbuster, something with the kind of stratospheric budget that is rarely afforded to Japanese filmmakers.
He wishes he could make a movie that just allows the audience to “enjoy themselves, to cry and laugh,” he said. But “things are never that simple”.
When you make a drama about “certain realities,” he said, “the social and political aspects that have always existed in the period, its people, its events inevitably appear.”
He added: “You can’t make something that hides that.”
No matter their ideological lens, Japan’s war movies have largely ignored the victims of Japan’s imperialism.