The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by David Neary

Produced by Sachiko Kobayashi, Shôhei Imamura, Yunoshin Moiyoshi, and Yasuko Tokunaga; directed by Kazuo Hara; cinematography by Kazuo Hara; edited by Jun Nabeshima; sound recorded by Toyohiko Kuribayashi; featuring Kenzo Okuzaki, Shizumi Okuzaki. Region-free Blu-ray and DVD, color, 121 min., Japanese dialogue with English subtitles. A Second Run DVD release.

To the outsider it may have looked like there had not been a reckoning. Japan, in the decades following World War II, left cowered but unconquered, made a recovery (economic, social, diplomatic) unprecedented in all of human history. Compared to erstwhile ally Germany, invaded from east and west and then riven by the Cold War, Japan humbly accepted a brief period of occupation and the IMTFE war crimes tribunal, and then turned inward to rebuild. The incomprehensible scale of the Holocaust left little room in the popular consciousness of the West to consider the Rape of Nanjing, the plight of the “comfort women,” the Bataan death march, and other massacres of ethnic and indigenous groups—it may be argued the fact the victims were mostly nonwhites contributes to this also. Survivors in Asia and Oceania have not forgotten.

From a historical standpoint, perhaps the most shocking result of the surrender of Japan was that the Emperor Hirohito was allowed to retain his throne, albeit only by sacrificing his claims to divinity. The decision was made under General MacArthur’s authority—an attempt to placate the Japanese in a new era—and resulted in his exculpation of responsibility for the Imperial Army’s actions over the preceding decade. Hirohito would reign for nearly forty-five more years, a beloved figure in a period that would see Japan become the second largest economy in the world. 

Kenzo Okuzaki was having none of it. An anarchist and veteran of the Imperial Army in New Guinea, Okuzaki held the Emperor responsible for the fates and crimes of his comrades during the War (during which nearly 150,000 Japanese died in New Guinea alone during the war). His “one-man political protest movement” would see him spend more than two decades in prison, much of it in solitary. In 1969 he was arrested following a half-baked or half-hearted assassination attempt on Hirohito, launching four pachinko balls from a slingshot at the Imperial Palace as the emperor greeted visitors from a balcony. He turned himself in immediately and used his subsequent trial as a soapbox to protest the constitutionality of the Emperor, an equally unsuccessful venture. He would subsequently serve further time for distributing pamphlets featuring a pornographic cartoon of the Emperor. Other convictions included a sentence for manslaughter over the death of a real-estate broker in the 1950s (no more details are offered), and an attempted murder charge for the shooting of the son of Masao Koshimizu, a former colonel in the Imperial Army, an incident documented in the 1987 film The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On. 

In many ways Okuzaki was the perfect subject for Kazuo Hara, Japan’s most infamous and influential documentarian, but his story was initially the passion project of legendary filmmaker Shôhei Imamura—whose 1979 true crime, docudrama thriller Vengeance Is Mine Hara had worked behind the camera on. Imamura had wanted to film Okuzaki’s 1969 trial with hidden cameras, but the impossibility of this left him wavering on the project. He would ultimately turn producer and hand the directorial reins to Hara; a film about an obsessive quest for justice would thus have an equally obsessive filmmaker shooting it. Hara’s 1972 debut, Sayonara CP, was a vérité work that closely and unflinchingly followed the daily lives of sufferers of cerebral palsy. His follow-up, Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974, remains one of cinema’s most unprecedented works, as the director follows his ex-wife’s passionate pursuit of a bohemian lifestyle that defies traditional Japanese gender roles, demonstrating his own troubling obsession and fixation. The film culminates in Hara and his new wife/producer/sound recordist Sachiko Kobayashi filming his ex giving birth at home, adamantly unattended by a single soul, in a single take, a sequence that challenges our conceptions of documentary ethics; the filmmaker’s passive viewing of his subject (to whom he is too tied to be so passive) clashes with his ex’s need for assistance during the lengthy labor, assistance she steadfastly, arrogantly does not want.

Similarly an anti-establishment rebel, Okuzaki is sixty-two in the early 1980s when Hara begins following him, operating his justice campaign out of a billboard-bedecked car carrying anti-government slogans, such as “Kill ex-Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka.” Okuzaki, with his aggrieved wife Shizumi in tow, travels across Japan meeting with former members of his own WWII company, the 36th Independent Engineering Regiment, who had been stationed at the Wewak Garrison in New Guinea, conducting interviews and sparking confrontations to gather evidence of war crimes perpetrated by soldiers under the Imperial banner. Okuzaki is a fearsomely righteous man, who wears (and reiterates) his political crimes as a badge of honor. When he is halted by police for disrupting traffic, he demands to be taken to prison so he can take measurements of a cell; he says he plans to build a replica in his home to protest the prison system. While some of his interactions are tinged with humor, there is great tragedy overshadowing the entire venture. Visiting the grave of his comrade-in-arms Yamazaki (whose name he cried as he pelted marbles at the emperor), a victim of starvation in the latest days of the war, he reflects on the fact that his friend’s body was returned to his homeland and he was afforded a proper burial. “He was lucky,” Okuzaki states. The horrifying fates of other soldiers are soon to be revealed.

The chief focus of Okuzaki’s crusade revolves around the lives and deaths of Privates Nomura and Yoshizawa, fellow members of the 36th Regiment, although not men he had personally known. Through a series of increasingly tense confrontations with elderly veterans, we learn that the men were put to death by firing squad under the orders of Colonel Koshimizu, supposedly for desertion—however, the date of the deaths problematically lands twenty-three days after the end of the war, when authority to execute should no longer have existed. Further details emerge. Koshimizu finished off one of the shot men with a sword in the style of a hara-kiri “second” (he will later claim he used a pistol). Two medics attended the scene, both with very different recollections of the events forty years earlier. One member of the firing squad arranges oranges on a table to demonstrate to Okuzaki and Hara who was where. When one man gives an answer that amounts to “we were just following orders,” Okuzaki lashes out, grabbing the man and pinning him to the ground, slapping and kicking, as the man’s family tries to pry Okuzaki away. Hara maintains his slight distance, filming everything, indeed adding a slo-mo effect in the edit to capitalize on this flash of real-life action. 

Some of Okuzaki’s tactics are more sophisticated. In an act of psychological sabotage against his interviewees, he brings with him the brother of the late Nomura and the sister of the late Yoshizawa. “Your siblings did nothing wrong,” weeps one member of the firing squad to the largely silent pair, each carrying their sibling’s portrait. Whether his recollection was distorted or misremembered, it is contradicted by the next interviewee, who insists that the living conditions at the garrison, swamped by malnutrition and malaria, had led the two murdered men to commit acts of cannibalism in order to survive. As vile retribution, and for the same reasons of survival, it seems the soldiers were in turn consumed after death by their fellow officers.

These revelations burst the film wide open. The victims we were journeying to avenge are now seen to be guilty of the of the most heinous sins imaginable. (Okuzaki seems unfazed, in his eyes the guilt lies solely at the feet of the emperor and his government.) The language used to describe the acts redefines barbarism, with terms echoing the most bilious racial verbiage of that era differentiating between the meat of Japanese and white men, and that of Papuan natives. All of it is too much for the siblings of the shot soldiers, who quit the quest and quit the movie. Again, nothing can deter Okuzaki (“They are not committed enough to see this through,” he snarks); fully aware of what an effective, affecting bargaining tool the siblings were, he undauntedly hires two actors to play them, who silently, mournfully accompany him for much of the rest of the film. A fateful confrontation with Koshimizu is built up to—“I can beat up Koshimizu, no problem,” Okuzaki says—but the meeting itself is oddly formal, the former colonel confirms much of what has already been heard; in the midst of the discussion his elderly wife walks in with a camera and takes a photo of the group and camera crew. 

The final third of the film sees Okuzaki chase a new lead he learned about while searching for justice for Nomura and Yoshizawa, the case of a soldier named Hagamoto, apparently similarly put to death to address a food shortage. He immediately rolls out his best trick, bringing along a friend (a fellow anarchist and attempted assassin of the emperor) to play Hagamoto’s brother. A visit to an infirm witness goes predictably: an argument, a fight, a visit from the police. “You just film it and do nothing?!” a relative yells at Hara, who does exactly that. Shortly after this incident, off camera and demonstrated through news clippings, Okuzaki tries to attack or perhaps murder Koshimizu, shooting his son in the process, an act that would leave him in prison for much of the remainder of his life.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is a film as complex as its subject. Kenzo Okuzaki is a whirligig of energy on screen, a thorough showman and self-promoter who makes his fight for justice his whole life. (One can only imagine, were he alive still today, how fascinating his Twitter presence could be.) And yet his surges of violence, his vehement belief in a divine power to whom he is a servant if not an instrument, are all frightening aspects of a dangerous personality. During one of the film’s scuffles, Mrs. Okuzaki is injured, a victim of her husband’s iconoclastic campaign; he seems more surprised than sorry, a troubling lack of empathy from a man so driven for justice. Kazuo Hara has confessed he came to greatly dislike Okuzaki, claiming any appearance of clarity in his speechifying is on behalf of clever editing.

So to what degree is Hara responsible for what unfolds on camera? Surely he knew he was dealing with a political powder keg of a man, and that his constant boasts and threats of violence were putting interviewees in danger. The horror that unfolded in the jungle of New Guinea leaves us sympathetic to their drubbing, but the symbiotic relationship between filmmaker and subject, each offering reason for the other to keep going, to keep pushing, is on full display here. What has come to be known as one of the greatest of all documentary films is also one of the greatest questioners of the ethics of the form. Where the likes of Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran) and Buñuel (Land Without Bread) had pushed the limits of documentary toward fiction, Hara was pushing the other way, taking the vérité style of Pennebaker and Rouch to a different, unquestioning extreme. This leaves the role of filmmaker as enabler, the very presence of whom (and of their camera) causes the narcissist to further indulge their worst behavior.

The effect of The Emperor’s Naked Army can be seen throughout the documentaries that followed. Michael Moore does not physically assault Charlton Heston at the close of Bowling for Columbine, but the interview’s bruising of the frail man (and decimation of his legacy) sees Hara’s (and Okuzaki’s) shadow stretched across it. Joshua Oppenheimer’s sensational The Act of Killing (2012) similarly addresses the legacy of war crimes (in this case the genocide in Indonesia in the mid-Sixties), managing to make divas of the perpetrators in the process. In Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami’s 2016 film Sonita, about the Afghan rapper and activist Sonita Alizadeh, a conversation between Ghaemmaghami and a bureaucrat who cannot help Sonita with funding to move to America for school—thereby escaping a targeted life as an outspoken young woman in an oppressive society—is interrupted by a frustrated boom mic operator who seems to crack at the injustice he is witnessing, sparking a debate about documentary ethics within the film itself. 

What is harder to recapture is the skill of Hara’s craft, his calmly maintained distance, his sharp cuts and minimal use of intertitles. When one of the on screen arguments becomes overbearing, Hara zooms slowly in on the wife of Okuzaki’s current target, an ex-corporal, wishing she couldn’t hear, wishing it was all over. When the film does not go his way, Hara’s improvisation proves unbeatable, maintaining the rhythms of the film through scraps and police interference. When Okuzaki and Hara travel to New Guinea to visit the sites discussed and pay respects to the dead, an intertitle matter-of-factly states that the footage was confiscated by the Indonesian government, a traumatizing artistic loss the film immediately shrugs off.

Newly restored and presented on Blu-ray for the first time by Second Run (a U.K. distributor who primarily deal in region-free discs), Hara’s 16mm footage looks impressively clear here, compared to previous standard def releases that gave the film a made-for-TV look. Special features include two lengthy and very recent interviews with the filmmaker, while an accompanying booklet is made up of fabulous snapshot essays by Tony Rayns, Jason Wood, and Abé Mark Nomes. Few film collections and no documentary collections will be complete without this, a work that is both challenging and harrowing, a riveting character study and exposé, unveiling unspeakable criminality. While it cannot answer if the ends justify the means as Kenzo Okuzaki believes, it offers hope that biting away at individual injustices is a means to making some kind of peace with a terrifying past. 

David Neary is a writer, editor, archivist, and curator from Ireland, now living in Brooklyn.

Copyright © 2019 by Cineaste, Inc. 

Cineaste, Vol. XLV, No. 2