The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987, Kazuo Hara)
Monday 2nd of December, 5pm in the Media Research Building 05 (Screen 1)
Join us on Monday the 2nd of December from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) in the Media Research Building room 05 (Screen 1) for a screening of Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987). The film is 2 hours 2 minutes long so the screening will finish around 7:20pm.
The best case for watching the film comes from the writer Andrew Key (@rolandbarfs), who wrote about it for his film diary in 2020. This is what he said:
This is, without a doubt, the single most intense documentary I have ever seen, and very feasibly the most deranged film of any kind I’ve seen. I don’t know where to begin. The pace doesn’t let up for over two hours, and the content is extremely shocking and surprising. It’s enormously uncomfortable, absolutely incredible. It’s probably a masterpiece of the documentary form, but it is by no means an easy watch. The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is about Kenzo Okuzaki. Kenzo Okuzaki is a veteran of the Japanese Campaign in New Guinea during World War Two. He’s 62 now, and after a spell in prison for murder, and a spell in prison for firing a pachinko ball at Emperor Hirohito, he is going around to find the surviving members of his unit who were involved in the execution (which took place after the end of the war, so was in fact a murder) of two privates. Nobody really wants to talk to him, but that doesn’t stop him. He is aggressive. He uses violence. We watch a man in his 60s whaling on other men in their 60s as he forces them to dredge up some of the most shameful acts of their lives; acts which they have tried desperately to repress. About half way through the film cannibalism is brought up and it takes over the rest of the story. It is truly horrifying. For a while, Okuzaki is travelling around haranguing these ex-soldiers with the relatives of the two murdered soldiers, but he has a falling out with them. So he starts to take his wife along and some friends, and gets them to pretend to be the relatives. It is fucked up, but you can’t help kind of respect him. What these people did was horrific, and Okuzaki wants the truth to be told because he can feel the anti-military tendency in Japanese culture fading and he wants there to never be another war. He uses violence in the name of non-violence. There are a lot of contradictions and ambiguities in the film, unsurprisingly. Hara never intervenes or judges, he just tries to get as close as possible. We are given very little context or narrative intervention, beyond an epilogue which reports that Okuzaki has gone to prison for shooting the son of one of the people he had previously interviewed. He wanted to shoot the ex-soldier but decides the son will do. His actions are motivated by God: he sees anything bad that happens to any Japanese veteran as a sign of divine retribution. It is totally gripping. A really intense interrogation of trauma, secrecy, grief, political rage, determination, desperation. If you liked Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing or The Look of Silence then this is for you (“liked“ is perhaps the wrong word here). The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is an enormously important film about war, because it is one of the very few that I’ve seen which are about someone trying to account for the atrocities committed by their own country—not just a kind of suggestion that war is hell for everyone. There’s an excellent interview in BOMB magazine between Kazuo Hara and Ken Jacobs in which Hara critiques Oppenheimer’s films for not reflecting on the role of the US in the horrors of Indonesia, and which contains some really clarifying insights into Japanese culture which explain some of the shock of The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. It’s well worth reading, even if you can’t stomach the film. But if you can stomach it, it is a truly mind-blowing experience, and one which will probably affect all documentaries I watch from now on. Incredible.