Fires on the plain directed by Kon Ichikawa and written by Shohei Ooka and Natto Wada is a World War two movie which is finally not showing the allies fighting the axis powers, but the Japanese fighting and struggling for their lives on the Philippines. The main characters name is Tamura , played by Eiji Funakoshi, and he is a soldier leaving his regiment because of him being sick. All he has on him is a hand grenade, his gun and some potatoes. Like this, he is trying to make his way to the hospital in order to get a doctor and a cure for his disease. But since the hospital turned him away and gets destroyed, he begins a long walk. Throughout the whole movie, Tamura remains a bit cowardish, but very civil, when the other soldiers become more like animals by using their basic instincts for survival Tamura is still remaining human and would not degrade. A scene which has influenced me a lot to think positively and different about this war movie is, when Tamura comes into a Phillipino village which is completely deserted. There, he fights a dog and finds a lot of corpses of Japanese soldiers stacked up in front of a church. This makes Tamura think and even more scared than he already is. That shows that the soldier is not a brave killing machine, but a servant to higher beings and human most importantly. After he turns away from the corpses, two Phillipinos (a couple or brother and sister : very close relationship) return to the village in order to get their stash of salt back. The main character of the movie wants to be friendly at first, although he walked up to them with his gun, but shoots the woman once she starts screaming. Her brother/boyfriend/husband then runs away in fear and after a moment Tamura follows him and shoots wildly at the fleeing Filipino. He does not hit him. After Tamura picks up the bag of salt , something very precious , he drops his gun into a river. This gesture is very important in order to understand Kon Ichikawa's/Shohei Ooka's profiling of Tamura and the war. Comparing this movie to other World War 2 movies, it is not typical at all. Of course all movies have suffering heroes, but their heroes are more heroic than Tamura. He expresses everything that is human: he is getting manipulated , he is weak , he gets scared , he has hope. This is typical for Japanese World War two movies and for Japanese society. Since World War two is not a discussed theme in Japanese society, Japanese are likely to put Japanese in the second World War in the role of the victim. This victimisation is also very visual in this movie. One of the examples is Tamura, another one the piled up bodies of Japanese soldiers in front of the church and another important one is, when the Japanese soldiers are trying to cross a street and the Americans are already waiting there for them and shooting all of the Japanese soldiers which have worse equipment and are fed worse and have no health equipment or anything alike. In my personal conclusion I have to say that it is worth seeing this film in order to finally see a movie from the other side than usual. It also has no nationalistic propaganda which could've been easily built in. Once you have watched the movie fully, you will be able to see the horrors of the second World War to its total extent.
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