Under the Flag of the Rising Sun

Twenty six years after the war a woman is still trying to clear her husband's name. He was tried by a military court on the New Guinea front on a charge of desertion and shot. The state says the official records burned and refuses her a widow's pension. She finds the four men from her husband's unit who survived. All four tell the same event entirely differently. Kinji Fukasaku's film is adapted from Yuki Shoji's stories and builds its structure like Rashomon: each testimony contradicts the last and the truth keeps slipping away. Fukasaku uses colour and black and white, freeze frames, negative images and real documentary photographs in the same film. What he is describing is not only one man's story but Japan reckoning with what it did in the war and what it kept quiet afterwards. Sachiko Hidari plays the woman.