Fires on the Plain 「野火」 (1959)

Three years after creating The Burmese Harp in 1956, director Ichikawa Kon came out with another anti-World War II film called Fires on the Plain (Nobi). Unlike The Burmese Harp, it takes place during February 1945 in Leyte, one of the islands located in the Visayas divisions of the Philippines’ islands. It follows the story Private First Class Tamura, who is suffering from tuberculosis, as he makes his way through Leyte in hopes of being saved – either being cured of his tuberculosis or being rescued by the Japanese Imperial government. On his journey, he runs into trouble as well as some interesting people – such as Nagamatsu and Yasuda, who later take him under their guidance. However, Tamura faces, time and time again, the death of his comrades, before finding another group of comrades to join. Under the severe conditions, lack of food, and insanity taking over the Japanese Imperial Army members, few turn to murder and cannibalism.

(When being offered the arm of an older Japanese soldier to eat after the man dies) The first thing one would notice about this film is that it is filmed in black and white. At the time of the film’s creation, it was being to become the norm to shoot films in color. In fact, Daiei Film, the company which distributed the film, were being shot in color. However, in the interview for The Burmese Harp, Ichikawa Kon admitted that he was given the option to produce the film in color rather than in black and white. However, Ichikawa responded that his choice was because “I felt like this film should not be shot in color. I wanted to shoot it in black and white. I specifically requested Eastman’s black-and-white film […] Color would have been wrong. It had to be in black and white.”  Using Eastman’s black-and-white film almost appears as if it was in honor of those films created about the war during the 1940s.

Another thing to notice is the way Tamura speaks. As second Squad Leader upon first meeting had pointed out, Tamura tends to speak using “fancy talk,” which is called Keigo in Japanese, to those higher in position than him. Even in the foreign country and upon first meeting this new Squad Leader, he follows Japanese etiquette in addressing those with a higher status than you. This showed that regardless of the harshness of the situation, he still kept his morals. Other soldiers, such as Nagamatsu, were less likely to use Keigo when addressing his elders. In fact, Nagamatsu would actually refer to Yasuda as “Pops,” which comes off very rudely.

[All the videos I recorded are in a playlist on Youtube, that is what this is the link for. The ones that were too big to upload here will be linked within the paragraph; most will be at the beginning. Also, the subtitles did not transfer well.]

In the first scene of the film, Tamura was slapped in the face and then scolded by his Squad Leader, whose name was never revealed, for returning to the base without receiving any medical care for his tuberculosis. This scene allows the viewer to see what life might have been like for those in the army – they lost two-thirds of their unit, they don’t have enough supplies or even the right supplies, they no longer have food, and so forth. Everyone involved with the war was suffering, regardless of what was being broadcasted to the civilians at the time. By the way the Squad Leader was describing their situation showed that he was very passionate about the military, but disheartened by what has become of them. As he was talking, there were hardly any noises in the background and the camera slowly zoomed in onto his mouth. Ichikawa Kon then cut to a wide, full body shot of Tamura and the Squad Leader. It wasn’t until after the Squad Leader had left the hut that the background noises – such as distant bombs going off and the sounds of nature – begin to fill in the silence. Tamura then walks over to the other person in the room – whose name and position was not revealed – and confirms his situation. This man then further explains the situation the unit is experiencing. To them, it is better for Tamura to be at the hospital than to stay with them and not able to work like the rest of them. He then gave Tamura some rations to take with him on his journey to the hospital. Unlike the Squad Leader, this man tells Tamura to only kill himself if he has to.

In the following scene, the remaining members in the unit were digging a trench while the Squad Leader was looking upon them. The Squad Leader then walks away from those in the trench to lie down in a cleared out area in the nearby jungle. While he was isolated from the group, he muttered to himself that he was hungry. He probably did this as a way of not showing weakness in front of his men and reminding them of their own suffering. It is then cut to Tamura walking closer to the men in trenches; they are all doing their work until one by one they notice Tamura approaching. The men and Tamura just look at each other before the men go back to work. The Squad Leader had told Tamura in the previous scene that he should leave before the other begin to hate him; however, judging from this scene, most of them probably were either beginning to or had already disliked Tamura. After seeing them for the last time, he goes off on his own to the hospital. Along the way, he met three soldiers and later a Pilipino man, who gave him salt and attempted to betray Tamura by warning the other villagers after saying that he would get some yams for Tamura. When talking to the soldiers, who knew Tamura previously, the one made the comment of not knowing who was better off: Tamura, suffering from tuberculosis, or them, suffering from war itself. This makes the audience truly question which situation would be better; both situations are terrible to be a part of.

Once at the hospital, Tamura was once again turned down. According to the doctor, there were only two doctors on site with seven medics; they were only going to treat those soldiers who were severely injured. The doctor belittles Tamura by saying that if Tamura was well enough to walk, then he does not need treatment as well as counting tuberculosis as a minor issue. Since Tamura was turned away, he joined a group of soldiers outside of the hospital, who were also sick and injured. One soldier, who contacted Malaria, was not even able to stand up anymore however, he was still denied entrance to the hospital; another had contacted Beriberi; and one had an injured leg. During the war, there probably were soldiers that were turned down for having a disease rather than a wound; if they were wounded, it would probably have to be a very serious wound first before being able to receive treatment. It was within this group of men where Tamura met Yasuda and Nagamatsu for the first time. These men were not even given rations from the hospital and some were selling the others’ yams for tobacco leaves from the hospital workers. Tamura gave salt to the one man, who wanted to repay Tamura by stealing yams from the hospital for him during the night. Unfortunately, he was caught by the doctors, who treated him harshly before learning that he was not a patient – and then even harsher afterwards.  During the daytime, the enemy began bombing the hospital grounds, killing those injured soldiers inside the hospital who were abandoned by the doctors. Many of the outcast group followed the doctors into the jungle. Tamura had went back to the hospital grounds, most likely with the idea of helping the injured in mind, and witnessed the injured and others in the group die from the bombing.

(Fun fact: that is Eiji Funakoshi's (Tamura) real fingernails. He grew them out for the film.)

One scene that is of particular interest occurs many days and nights after the bombing happened. Tamura finds himself at the river, where he takes his shoes off and dip his feet into the water. The camera then zooms in on an ant climbing up Tamura’s leg, which he then picks up with his hand and stares at it for some time before flinging it off his hand onto a nearby rock. Ants are generally considered the symbol of community or social interactions; when people are in isolation or separated from human interaction for a period of time, they tend to imagine a single ant in their hallucinations. Whether or not the ant in this scene was part of a hallucination caused by isolation, it is worthy of noting Tamura’s reaction to it. He looks rather gentle with the ant at first; but after picking it up and placing it in his other hand, he smiles at it as one would to a friend. Then, his emotions change to disgust right before he flings it off his hand.

After the encounter with the ant, he follows the cross that leads him to a village that is seemingly deserted. Once he got to the church, he saw a pile of dead soldiers – Japanese soldiers – lying outside the doors. He then heard a woman singing, so he goes into hiding. He watched as the Pilipino man from before and a woman enter a hut and trying to lift up one of the floorboards – where they hid the salt. Tamura confronts them and the woman kept screaming so Tamura shot her after trying to put his gun to the side. The man then runs off to the boat he came in on, successfully avoiding Tamura’s bullets. Tamura then returns to the woman’s body and looks at the cross around her neck, then adjust her skirt to keep her modesty. He then stole the salt from the hut.

(When seeing on of the soldiers lying face first into a muddy puddle. He was still alive at the moment, but has basically given up on living. To me, I feel as though here this question is more directed at the audience to think about, especially those who were extremely supportive of the war. However, it is also a self-reflection of what the soldiers might have signed up for: death in a foreign country. Also, notice in the video below, how these men are barely surviving; they appear to be like those in AMC's The Walking Dead. Their bones are showing and clothes are all torn.)

After stealing the salt, Tamura was left wandering the jungles again. He dropped his rifle into the water, perhaps out of guilty conscience. After some more wandering, he was able to meet three Japanese soldiers – one being a Squad Leader – who then took him under their guidance and using him for his salt. One of the three was able to get him a gun before they joined more members of the Japanese Imperial Army on the journey to Palompon. It was on this journey that he met up with Yasuda and Nagamatsu once again. Nagamatsu was selling the tobacco leaves for food this time and revealed to Tamura that Yasuda wanted to surrender to the Yanks. The whole army that is traveling together attempted to cross over the road (that the enemy is patrolling) at night. However, it ended in a massacre.

(The "monkey meat" and Tamura's teeth)

Once again, Tamura is left wandering on his own. He found a Japanese soldier in his lonesome, resting against a tree. He said he was waiting for an autogiro to come for him and that he was a Buddha. He is close to death and he knew it. He knew what the situation was turning out to be like for others in the military so he offered Tamura to eat him once he is dead. Tamura’s illness is visibly getting worse and being weaker. Instead of accepting the offer, Tamura runs away. He has become so weak that he passed out onto the ground, only to be found by Nagamatsu, who then nurses him back to health by giving him “monkey meat,” which we find out later is human flesh. Tamura took the meat with pleasure, but ended up spitting it out for his teeth fell out and his gums grew soft. He is no longer able to chew properly. Nagamatsu then helped carry Tamura back to where Yasuda was sitting. The tension between Nagamatsu and Yasuda was getting worse and soon they began to betray one another. Nagamatsu warned Tamura to not let Yasuda know that he (Tamura) has a grenade, which was given to him to commit suicide, for Yasuda will steal it and try to kill them for their meat. Tamura, not being so bright and being ill, let Yasuda see the grenade, to which he does steal it.

(Tamura is unsure of how he feels about murdering your comrade. His morals are telling him that this is wrong and that they should not be killing their own or others. Nagamatsu does not see it that way; to him, it is literally eat or be eaten.)

(Fun fact about this scene: this was the first one shot that they did when shooting the movie. Prior to it, the whole cast went on an extreme diet to make them look starving as well as told not to take care of their hygiene; they did have nurses for each filming to make sure everyone was okay. However, being fully committed to the role, Eiji Funakoshi/Tamura had starved himself for two months, hardly eating anything, to give himself a more authentic look. After this scene was shot, he had passed out from malnutrition and shooting was delayed for two months.)

Having enough of Yasuda, Nagamatsu came up with a plan to kill Yasuda with Tamura’s help. Their plan ended up succeeding, but once Nagamatsu cut one of the body parts off (most likely the head), Tamura’s morals kicked in. He ran back to where their rifle was placed and returned back to Nagamatsu, who was cutting Yasuda’s body to pieces and possibly eating parts as he went along. Tamura held the rifle to him without saying anything. Nagamatsu tried to talk to Tamura by saying things among the lines of, “I know what you want. I’ll help you” as he grabs the front of the rifle. Tamura shot Nagamatsu in the chest and killed him on the spot. Before dying, Nagamatsu let out a small smile, resembling that of a crazy person’s. As he fell to the ground, his body paused in a kowtow motion before falling to the side. The way he fell, especially the kowtow, almost looks as though he was apologizing to Tamura for going as low as eating your own comrade. It was an apology for everything and to everyone – to Tamura, to soldiers, to the audience – for what the war has done to everyone. Tamura then threw the rifle to the side and walked towards the fire that was burning. He knew it was dangerous, but he wanted normalcy and to longer suffer the war any longer. Although he raised his arms in the air, similar to notion a surrender, he was shot to death.

If one were compare the films directed by Ichikawa Kon, it may prove to be more difficult than not. As Donald Richie pointed out in his interview about Ichikawa Kon, Ichikawa’s style varied from film to film:

You could go through a director like Ozu [Ozu Yasujirō, Tokyo Story] or Kurosawa [Kurosawa Akira, Seven Samurai] and you could point out the similarities in their pictures. If you tried this with Ichikawa, all you end up with his the similarities in his technique. You don’t get thematic similarity coming from one picture blending into the next. As a consequence, he usually has a very opened mind about what he films.

When creating both The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain, Ichikawa Kon wanted to portray the evils of war. Since his mother and sister were living in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, he had personally seen the devastation of what war had done to Hiroshima and Japan. In an interview for Fires on the Plain being released, he said, “I felt the stories about the evils of war could never be told too often. That’s how I felt when I shot the film.”

When comparing The Burmese Harp to Fires on the Plain, some things to make note of is how the characters were reacting to their situations. In The Burmese Harp, the Japanese soldiers had surrendered to the British army and stayed at their camp where they longed for their comrade who they thought was Missing in Action. In Fires on the Plain, there were obvious members of the Japanese Imperial Army that wanted to surrender to the enemies as well as obvious members who would never give up. As one of the injured men outside the hospital said, he believed that the “Yanks” would save them and validate their efforts in the war. These two films were some of the very few that depicted the members of the Japanese Imperial Army surrendering to the enemy. Fires on the Plain brought out the worse in the soldiers – they were starving and willing to do anything for food; The Burmese Harp had more of a longing type of feeling for those who never returned.

In both films, there was no clear “bad guy.” Rather Ichikawa portrayed the extreme nationalists on both sides of the war. In The Burmese Harp, the British did not want to kill the Japanese soldiers after finding out that the war was over. The British army did not want to kill the Japanese on the mountain, but since they refused to surrender a meaningless war, they had to do what they were commanded to do; it might have saved the lives of innocent people. In Fires on the Plain, there were foreign soldiers – most likely Americans – who wanted to just kill the Japanese because they were Japanese, but there were almost the medics who checked a few of the Japanese bodies to see if any of them were still alive. It showed that there were good in the “enemy” as well.

This film was an adaptation of the novel by the same title, written by Ōoka Shōheiin in 1951. There were some changes made for the film, such as Tamura no longer being a Christian. To Ichikawa, Ōoka had the same idea when writing his novel that war was an ultimate evil.   According to Donald Richie, the novel was popular and very well-known to the Japanese citizens at the time.  It was years after the war had ended and Japan was still recovering from the aspects of war. To the audience watching this film when it was released in theaters, they would have had a more emotional relationship with the film than someone watching the film in modern day. Those people were still experiencing the effects of the war; some with family members that were pronounced dead, some with family members who were considered Missing in Action. To those people, this may have brought up the feelings that perhaps that is what happened to their beloved member.

There was a lot of information within this one film with some important symbols - such as monkey-related things, especially when it came to Nagamatsu. In the first scene where Tamura meets him, he sits down next to Tamura in a similar fashion to a monkey, when wanting to get some of Tamura's salt. When he was refused, he walked back and forth behind Tamura as though he was monkey. Not to mention, the "meat" that he attempts to give to Tamura was called "monkey meat." The final moment for Nagamatsu being similar to that of a monkey is after he killed Yasuda. When he turned his head over to Tamura, the lightning and the face itself is somewhat resembling that of a monkey's, see picture below. During World War II, it was common to depict the enemy - or those of lesser standing - as monkeys, for they are the closest animal to humans, but one step below us. Perhaps all the monkey images within the film is trying to portray what the film would have been like if it was created during the war and if there was not any regulations on what types of films were okay to produce. Tamura kept his morals throughout most of the film; he went back to those at the hospital during the bombing to help them, he did not enjoy shooting the woman, he "lost" his rifle after feeling guilty about doing so, and he refused to reach all the lowest a human being can go by eating another human being. Nagamatsu did not have those morals throughout the film and there is no telling how much worse it might have been if Tamura did not kill him first. Tamura saved others from meeting the fate as Yasuda. However, he reached his low by killing people, which is why when he died, he walked with his arms in the air, like a monkey. He viewed himself as a lesser human being for doing what he did. He realized the  wrongness of war and wanted to live like a regular person, to have normalcy once again. However, his mission from the very beginning was to die. Therefore, in the ending, he had to go out into a dangerous zone in hopes of living; he completed his final mission.

Fires on the Plain. DVD. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. New York: Janus Films, 2006.

"Donald Richie Interview." Fires on the Plain. DVD. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. New York: Janus Films, 2006.

"Ichikawa and Curtis." Fires on the Plain. DVD. Directed by Kon Ichikawa. New York: Janus Films, 2006.