ABSTRACT
In recent years, scholars and commentators have argued that a victim consciousness or mentality (higaisha ishiki) took hold in postwar Japan, through which Japanese came to see themselves primarily as victims, rather than aggressors, during the Pacific War. The horrific accounts of cannibalism in the latter stages of the war – a common outcome of abandonment and starvation, and committed by Japanese troops against Allied soldiers, prisoners-of-war, civilians, and each other – sit uneasily within this discourse of victimhood because the line between victim and perpetrator is often ambiguous or exists on multiple fronts. Depending on the context, victim status can be spread widely, and even a soldier who practiced cannibalism may be perceived to be a victim, a perpetrator, or both simultaneously.
The tiny number of Japanese films to foreground war cannibalism likewise blurs the distinction between victim and victimizer; as such, they are well equipped to examine the competing notions of wartime Japan as aggressors and as victim at the same time. This chapter studies four of those films – Ichikawa Kon’s Fires on the Plain (Nobi, 1959), Tsukamoto Shinya’s eponymous 2014 remake, Fukasaku Kinji’s Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (Gunki hatameku moto ni, 1972), and Hara Kazuo’s documentary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yukiyukite shingun, 1987) – which tackle the issue of war cannibalism and the complexity of victimhood it entails. In these works, cannibalism extends well beyond a theme, image, or narrative device used to evoke horror or express antiwar sentiment. They all engage with the horrors of cannibalism to consider what the war meant, how it ought to be remembered, and why defining victimhood in such extraordinary circumstances can be an elusive pursuit.
