Disturbing the peace to dispel the fog of war

One of the first things we notice in The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a slogan painted on a car belonging to anarchist Kenzō Okuzaki: “To kill ex-prime minister Kakuei Tanaka”. A few minutes later, Okuzaki, 62, officiating as the go-between at a wedding, tells the guests how he killed a broker, shot a sling at Emperor Hirohito and went to jail. “Nation is a wall between men,” he says. “I also consider family a wall… it’s against the divine law. So I intend to continue attacking it.”

As character introductions go, this one is perfect. Every behaviour Okuzaki exhibits in Kazuo Hara’s 1987 documentary is hinted at here: the directness, the dissident mentality, the complete disregard of propriety and occasion, the ever-present threat of violence. I can’t think of another character in cinema quite like him, this gaunt old man promising violence while trying to right historic wrongs.

In the end days of World War II, Okuzaki served in the emperor’s army, stationed on an island in New Guinea. He was one of the few in his unit who made it out alive, a guilt he carried with him all his life. After the war, he started looking into the events leading up to the deaths of Nomura and Yoshizawa, members of his unit who faced the firing squad for desertion. Even this official explanation arrives in fragments, as Okuzaki confronts one survivor after another, probing for the slightest incriminating detail. Under his unflagging barrage of questions, further disturbing possibilities emerge: that the order to execute was given after the war had ended—which made it a crime—and that it may have been a cover up for cannibalism.

Had Okuzaki been a likeable, principled man fighting Japan’s militaristic institutions, Hara’s film might have taken the more recognisable shape of an underdog story. But Okuzaki is exceptionally hard to root for. The first man he confronts, ex-sergeant Yamada, is in a hospital bed, with little time left to live. Okuzaki nevertheless tells him his medical woes are divine retribution. “People like you…shall not be allowed to live in peace like nothing happened,” he says. Later in the film, he visits the same man at his home and reiterates this pitiless statement. He then attacks him, punching and kicking until even the director has to intervene.

We’re used to Okuzaki’s rages by then—he’s already attacked another interviewee earlier in the film. That didn’t go well for him; the man’s family gang up on Okuzaki, who yells from the floor, “Stop filming, I’m being beat up.” But this doesn’t stop him from using the threat of violence in other interviews. He enlists the brother and sister of one of the victims on a few of his expeditions. One rattled man agrees to tell the whole truth, but off-camera, to the siblings. Okuzaki immediately protests, shooting down the offer. It’s clear that Okuzaki’s pursuit of the truth has come at some personal cost, but moments like these point to his need to be the central player in the denouement.

Eventually, the relatives drop out of Okuzaki’s crusade. “They are not committed enough to see this through,” is his assessment, before enlisting his clearly uncomfortable wife and a friend to pose as the brother and sister. Okuzaki thus becomes casting director; in an earlier scene, he handles the blocking, briefly assuming the part of on set director. These are fascinating wrinkles in a film that pushes the viewer to think about the responsibility of artists recording real life. “You film this and do nothing,” Yamada’s wife accuses the director as Okuzaki attacks him.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On might not be a widely known film outside Japan, but it’s highly regarded in documentary circles (it was voted the 23rd greatest documentary of all time by critics in Sight & Sound’s August 2014 issue). You can draw a direct line from Hara’s film to later landmarks in non-fiction cinema. Michael Moore’s investigative films like Bowling for Columbine (2002) and Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) channel the film’s brash energy, though with one difference: Moore is both filmmaker and star, doing the hectoring himself instead of through someone else. Even more closely aligned is Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012), in which retired Indonesian militia members revisit their reign of terror in the 1960s through surreal reenactments of their crimes. There’s even a hint in Nathan Fielder’s artful provocations of Okuzaki getting his wife to play a role, and her getting injured while trying to defend the sergeant from her husband.

There’s a small moment untouched by ugliness—though this too is a sad one. Okuzaki visits the mother of a former member of his unit who died in New Guinea. He breaks down as he tells her, “I came to console his soul in my way.” They visit his grave, where the old woman sings an elegy that begins with, “Your mother has come to the pier.” She gets the words wrong and stops in embarrassment, but Okuzaki gently encourages her to begin again.

Throughout the film, Okuzaki reiterates how he’s trying to bring peace to the souls of his departed comrades. There’s a lot going on within this strange man, but his quest is a necessary one: to dispel the fog of war, even if it’s decades later. “The public has to know the truth to prevent wars,” he tells Yamada. As the information wars that accompanied the fighting on our borders last week showed, truth is often the first casualty in armed conflict. Cold clarity can be demoralising or even seem unpatriotic. But in the darkest times, it becomes all the more important to shine a light.

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