I watched the Japanese film The Burmese Harp (1956) after it was referenced and recommended to me - I also wanted to watch the 1985 remake but I couldn’t find it anywhere.  Spoilers are ahead.  The logline is that the Japanese are fighting in Burma in World War 2, the war ends, and a soldier named Mizushima is tasked with a mission.  In the aftermath of that mission he almost dies, discovers the horrors and senselessness of war and becomes a wandering monk burying the Japanese war dead.  His captain and unit try to get him to rejoin them, but he refuses - he has seen too much.

My thoughts on the film are as follows: technically it was a simple, clear, easy to understand story, although paced too slow for my ADD-addled sensibilities from too much quick cut film and television.  I did not find it to be particularly moving emotionally, perhaps because I am so desensitized from over-saturation of emotionally manipulative media, or perhaps because I feel in some ways similar to Mizushima and am already living with and struggling with a similar journey.  I did appreciate the film’s approach to Mizushima’s Paul on the road to Damascus moment, where he is struck by the disconnect between his understanding of what war is and the actual reality of it - that piles of young dead men are left to rot and get eaten by birds, unburied and forgotten, having nothing in common with the glorification or excitement of war.  What changes in Mizushima was an ontological reorientation: abstraction collapses and “War” ceases to be a story about honor or empire and becomes decomposing flesh.

Mizushima’s response is then to abandon his unit - he can’t go back after what he has seen - and bury the dead within his role as a Buddhist monk, even though the task may take him the rest of his life and he may or may not return to Japan to see family and friends thereafter.  The film is pacifist and anti-war, but quietly so; it does not detonate a God image and replace it with another one, but it trades Mizushima’s camaraderie and warrior spirit for a quiet maintenance mode of existence, doing what he can to improve the world in his own way even if it receives no acknowledgment from anyone, including possibly from God.  He does it because he is called to do so and to go back to his prior form would be a betrayal of what he had become, so he can’t do it, even if he cares for and misses his comrades, who in turn want him to rejoin.  That aspect is decidedly painful.

I don’t really have anything bad to say about the film, but it’s also hard to review - it creates a sense of silence thereafter, which is a positive, I think.

On a personal note, I found the group dynamics to be oddly uncomfortable.  All the soldiers following whatever the captain says, tromping around play-acting soldier (although the deaths are real), not knowing what they are fighting for or why - other than the cheap nationalist slogans fed to them.  What a stupid thing to die for, but on the other hand, it's easy for me to say within my relative comfort, and if I was being actively oppressed perhaps I would feel differently.  But I have always stayed away from team sports, fraternities, group organization, etc, repelled by groupthink - the discomfort was about narrative suspension as a requirement for in-group belonging; group cohesion requires participants to suppress individual questioning and accept shared narratives. As I have a coherence-primary constitution, it’s very difficult for me to ignore contradictions for belonging.

There is also an unresolved question: is Mizushima integrating what he has seen, or retreating from human entanglement? His comrades’ grief complicates the purity of his transformation. Maintenance may preserve dignity, but it also isolates.