The Burmese Harp

1945, Burma. The war is ending and a Japanese unit is still in the jungle. Corporal Mizushima plays the harp and the unit sings as it marches. After the surrender he is given a task: to persuade another Japanese unit in the mountains to give themselves up. He fails and is left alone. What he sees on the way back changes him: everywhere there are unburied bodies of Japanese soldiers. He puts on a monk's robes and decides not to return. Kon Ichikawa directs, from Michio Takeyama's novel. The subject is not victory or defeat but the burial of the dead. Mizushima's decision is built as an obligation rather than a duty, and the tension of the narrative comes from his friends trying to take him home. The music functions inside the narrative. The songs the unit sings are both morale and communication; the sound of the harp announces a presence. It is among the best known of the films made in postwar Japan that question the war, and objects directly to the heroic account. It won an award at the 1956 Venice film festival and was nominated for the foreign language film Oscar. Ichikawa remade the same story in colour in 1985. Who it is for: viewers who follow postwar Japanese cinema and anti war films. Who it is not for: the pace is slow, the emotional pitch is high, and the narrative explains too much at times.