The Human Condition/Ningen No Joken

So for a first post on the recently refurbished and hopefully to be reborn blog, I've decided to write about a film that deserves more attention or that at least demanded a lot of mine, Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition. This is a film that a lot of people probably haven't watched due to its length, which clocks in at over 9 hours if you treat it as a single continuous narrative. The film is actually broken up into three 3 to 3 1/2 hour parts, and was made with that in mind, so it can be viewed as 3 separate films or one large one, for the purposes of this post I want to talk about the film as one large work rather than as a trilogy. This may mean a particularly long first post, as the amount to talk about in each single film is humongous, let alone the themes and structures that recur in all of them.

The narrative itself is taken from a novel by Jumpei Gomikawa, and is the record of the life of Kaji (Tatsuya Nakadai), a man who attempts to hold on to his ideals in WWII Japan, struggling not only with the overwhelming forces of imperialism and militarism among his peers but also with his own compromises and self-described hypocrisy.

The most barebones description of the monumental plot is that it chronicles the life of Kaji, a humanist and socialist who makes various compromises with his beliefs in the very beginning of the film, some that even cost people their lives, but who remains committed to the at times painful path he has chosen, as well as to his wife Michiko (Michiyo Aratama)
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A plot summary for all three films would be incredibly long, and also I don't want to spoil the film's details, or don't feel qualified to really do justice to all of them myself. But a summation could be that Kaji becomes a supervisor at a labor camp in occupied Manchuria, is unable to realize his ideals or adequately do his work as a member of a brutal occupying force, and his attempt to live halfway between the two only results in his being drafted, as well as the execution of three men among them Kao, a young man who Kaji attempted to prove to that he "wasn't like the rest of them". He then attempts to survive in the army while trying to create some space devoid of brutal corporal punishment, yet never deserts because of his commitment to Michiko. When Manchuria is seized and most of his own unit wiped out, Kaji becomes part of a wandering group who meet various survivors of Japan's colonial project, both innocent victims and vicious opportunists. Eventually he ends up a captive in a Soviet prison camp, only to eventually escape and wander the snows, talking to a Michiko of his own imagination.


The film is incredibly bleak, but that is fitting considering its structure. In attempting to sort of encapsulate it for a blog post I've had to leave out so many secondary characters and plotlines: Kaji's co-workers and fellow soldiers, the Chinese prisoners and the comfort women, the sole surviving civilian of a group met by Kaji's band (a young Japanese prostitute), the civilians who died and how they died, the village of women met shortly before their captor, Kaji's various friends such as the general or the two different soldiers who defect to the Soviets, not to mention his young fellow soldier Terada. All of these lives are the background of Kaji's story, and the inability of his single narrative to really do them all justice, and his inability to save those among them who deserve saving (Kao, his recruits, the young woman Kirihara murders, the prostitute who gives her life warning them of an ambush) are an exploration of both the consequences of his own choices as well as simply the limits of his single human life. As Kaji says in part one, "I cannot help being Japanese, yet it is the greatest crime that I am." He cannot control the circumstances of his birth as a member of a colonial power, and his attempts to mediate rather than choose between two options, only result in tragedy. It's not only a powerful use of a single human life to examine the entirety of a historical period, enough material for volumes, but also a searing depiction of how intentions do not change the consequence of choices, Kaji himself narrating to an imaginary Michiko in part III how his situation is the price he must pay for the relevant comfort they enjoyed at the expense of Chinese labor in part I.

Throughout the film his relationship to Michiko is paralleled by the lives of men and women, particularly Kao and the comfort woman he loved, a soldier who commits suicide from bullying and his wife, the women of the village who have lost their husbands and spend the night with Kaji's soldiers. Some of these comparisons serve to illustrate the relative structural privileges inherent in Kaji's and Michiko's lives, such as how they can be together during the war that separates Kao and Chun Lan, whereas others serve to illustrate Kaji's devotion to Michiko even when it is almost certain they will never meet again, such as the treatment of women by the misogynist if not rapist Japanese camp manager or soldiers.

Visually what is most obvious about the film are the vast landscapes, which often dwarf Kaji and Michiko as much as the various forces around them do. These are most obvious during some of the climactic moments in the ending of each film, the such as Kaji and Michiko's embrace after he learns of the draft, his wandering the devastated battlefield of the border, and finally his last moments in the snow.

I don't really think I've done justice to this film, or even just one of its individual parts, but I recommend you see it, it's more than worth the time and effort.