Year: 1983 Country: United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan Director: Nagisa Ôshima Cast: David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Takeshi Kitano IMDB: Link Language : English, Japanese Subtitles : English, Chinese, Danish, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese (Forced), Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Swedish War films as a genre tend to personalize the history of the conflicts they depict. Often only one army is individuated and granted subjectivity, while its enemy makes shadowy appearances as a monolithic evil force to be eradiicated. Yet many war films qualify their partisan ideologies with humanist concerns and even antiwar sentiments; if the enemy is dehumanized and opposing forces do not necessarily meet face-to-face, still the face of the individual in a political and historical context is the focus of these narratives. For the Japanese in the postwar period films directly representing World War II are few, the most famous being Kobayashi’s antiwar trilogy, The Human Condition and Kurosawa’s brilliant look at the homefront, No Regrets for Our Youth. Part of the reason for this may be Occupation censorship. Even oblique references to the war that might feed militarism were forbidden during the Occupation, as Hirano Kyoko shows in her book, Mr. Smith Goes to Tokyo ( 1992). “The American censors allowed no sympathetic, indeed no noncondemnatory, mention of japanese militarism,†she states, and goes on to examine how instances of censored films indicate that even references that would be interpreted as condemnatory were construed as too dangerous to permit discusses at length the censorship battle Tanigushi Senkichi faced in 1950 over his film, Akatsuki no dasso (Desertion at Dawn). It is in the context of these years of carefully monitored discourse that war films after the Occupation may be seen; with the curtain drawn so that the Japanese could stage their own reaction to the war, one question a post-Occupation filmmaker confronts is how to react both to the history of the war and to the history of the Occupation’s control over discourse on the war. For those writers and directors wishing to condemn Japanese militarism, but to do so in their own terms, the period following the Occupation was one of opportunity fraught with much historical and ideological resonance. Oshima made two films, more than twenty years apart, directly set in the war period. Both are adapted from literary works, and both choose to focus on relationships between the Japanese and prisoners of war. The first is his 1961 adaptation of the short story “Shiiku†by the writer Oe Kenzaburo. The second, Senjo no Merry Christmas (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, 1983), is an adaptation of a novel by a South African, Laurens van der Post. Oshima sees in each of his adaptations a potential vehicle for a critique of the Japanese state. This critique needed to be made in such a manner that would avoid what Oshima has termed the postwar “victimiza