Category Archives: Blog

The Burmese Harp

November 26, 2014

Also present on a mid-1950s Oscar shortlist (for the new category of best foreign language film) was The Burmese Harp (Biruma no tategoto), a roughly two-hour, black-and-white Japanese movie directed by Kon Ichikawa and released in 1956. In contrast to The Bridge on the River Kwai, this film did not find favour with the Academy. Back home in Japan, though, it was a major hit, built on the success of Michio Takeyama’s equally important 1946 novel Harp of Burma. Indeed, so deep was the combined cultural impact of the book and the film that Ichikawa was able to remake the movie (in colour) in 1985 and register Japan’s highest-grossing title for that year.

The film opens in July 1945 with a company of about 30 Japanese soldiers beating a retreat through the mountains that separate Burma from Thailand. Learning a little later that the war has ended, they surrender to the British and are soon charged with securing the capitulation of a small Japanese force lodged in Triangle Mountain. Private Mizushima, known to us already for his skill in playing the Burmese harp, is given 30 minutes to accomplish the task. He fails in his mission, however, and is beaten unconscious by the enraged hold-outs, all of whom die in the ensuing battle. Helped to recover by a Burmese monk, Mizushima adopts this identity as a means of rejoining his company. Along the way, though, he encounters the corpses of many Japanese soldiers and decides to bury them. Before long this becomes his vocation, and in a farewell letter to his former comrades read at the close of the film he explains that he will devote his life to Buddhism and only consider returning to Japan when there are no more bodies to bury. “The soil of Burma is red, and so are its rocks,” states a message run at both the start and the finish of the film.

This is a spare, lyrical, elegiac movie purveying an anti-war message and promoting harmony among peoples. One of the loveliest scenes (close to the hour mark) sees a group of villagers wordlessly help Mizushima with his project of burying the war dead that litter the Burmese countryside. That landscape, featuring mainly mountains and temples, is beautifully shot, and the music that drifts over it, both played and sung, is haunting. As with The Bridge on the River Kwai, the soldiers all look fit and well fed (though they do say about 10 minutes in that finding food is their greatest worry). But that can be overlooked. Set the pacifism of Ichikawa’s movie against the bombast of Lean’s, and it takes little time to decide which is the greater accomplishment.

The Bridge on the River Kwai

November 25, 2014

I suggested yesterday that The Narrow Road to the Deep North invites comparison with The Bridge on the River Kwai. David Lean’s 1957 film garnered no fewer than seven Oscars (in 1958), including best picture, best director and best actor (for Alec Guinness). To many, its whistled theme tune, the Colonel Bogey March, remains instantly recognizable. However, when the issue is what can be learnt from these fictional accounts of Japanese use of Allied POWs and Asian coolies to build the Bangkok to Rangoon railway, the advantage lies wholly with Flanagan’s novel.

It’s easy to see why Lean’s epic has a secure place as one of the greatest movies of all time – it’s a stirring World War II drama placed against a backdrop of Oriental exoticism. In dealing with a dark historical record, though, the film is largely nonsensical. It does make a decent start, with makeshift graves dotting the jungle railway shown as part of the opening credits, and early scenes focusing on the brutality of the POWs’ experience. Thereafter, though, the narrative focuses on a battle of wills between Japanese camp commander Colonel Saito and British camp leader Colonel Nicholson (played by Guinness). Nicholson not only wins, but then moves to direct efforts to build the bridge. In the process he both supplants Japanese engineers, and corrals Japanese troops. No more than a few hints of the suffering experienced by ordinary soldiers are ever given, and from start to finish the POWs present a picture of rugged good health. Asian coolies are nowhere to be seen.

When set against what actually happened in Thailand in 1942-43, none of this has any credibility. Flanagan has therefore performed an important service in correcting this aspect of Hollywood’s writing of modern history.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

November 24, 2014

I read Richard Flanagan’s 2014 Man Booker Prize winner, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, mostly for the light it sheds on construction, during World War II, of the “death railway” between Burma and Thailand. For sure it’s an important novel focused on a powerful love story going well beyond the events of 1942-43 – but this was my main interest.

Flanagan’s account of life on “the Line” is graphic, visceral and moving. Between the fall of Singapore on February 15, 1942 and the journey of locomotive C5631 pulling three carriages of Japanese and Thai dignitaries the full length of the track on October 25, 1943, 60,000 mainly Australian and English prisoners of war and 250,000 mostly Burmese, Chinese and Tamil coolies laboured in truly horrific conditions. Nobody knows how many died, but the total lies somewhere between 50,000 and 200,000. Of the 9000 Australians around whom the novel revolves, 3000 perished. “But the railway, Colonel Kota said, is no less a battlefield than the front line in Burma.” (p.88)

Especially convincing to me is depiction of the Japanese military mind – not that I’m in any sense expert. This is Kota again on the “larger point”: “It is that this railway is the great epoch-making construction of our century. Without European machinery, within a time considered extraordinary, we will build what the Europeans said it was not possible to build over many years. This railway is the moment when we and our outlook become the new drivers of world progress.” (p.88) A little later comes an exchange between Kota and his subordinate Major Nakamura: “It’s not just about the railway, Colonel Kota said, though the railway must be built. Or even the war, though the war must be won. It’s about the Europeans learning that they are not the superior race, Nakamura said. And us learning that we are, Colonel Kota said.” (p.94) Both provide clear perspectives on what Nakamura calls “our motto, The Whole World Under One Roof“. (p.87)

All good, then. Moreover, strictly on the topic that most interested me and indeed motivated me to read the book, one issue that surely arises is this: Do we learn much more than we already know from David Lean’s epic, Oscar-laden 1957 movie The Bridge on the River Kwai (itself based on Pierre Boulle’s 1952 French novel)? That’s a question I’ll pick up on tomorrow.

Tales by Japanese Soldiers

November 21, 2014

On the subject of the Japanese military in Burma during World War II, a wonderful set of 62 brief stories by regular troops is brought together in Tales by Japanese Soldiers, edited by Kazuo Tamayama and John Nunneley, and published in 2000. The most basic fact about this collective experience is conveyed in a single sentence on the back jacket: “Over 305,000 Japanese soldiers fought in Burma between 1942 and 1945; 180,000 of them died.” The arc the narrative can be expected to take is therefore clear from the outset – open euphoria at the start giving way to utter despair at the finish. But the interest of the book lies in the detail it sheds on life in the Imperial Japanese Army in the Burmese theatre. By far the most poignant parts come at the end as ordinary soldiers face up to retreat and, ultimately, defeat. I’ll cite just one wrenching passage from “Those forsaken by God” (tale 56), the testimony of Staff Sergeant Yasumasa Nishiji:

“We called the road the ‘Human Remains Highway’. What happened here was beyond the bounds of acceptable human behaviour. It was a vision of hell.

Those struggling along this road were almost all in their twenties yet they stooped like old men. The sight was one of total misery. Nobody could have believed that these men had once possessed the strength to survive a series of intense battles.

Many enemy soldiers were deterred from pursuing us on this road; they did not want to witness such an atrocious scene; they made a detour instead.”

Comfort women in Burma

November 20, 2014

What knowledge do we have of comfort women in Burma during more than three years of Japanese occupation in the early 1940s? The matter is clearly of historical interest, in that it is important for the record to be as complete and accurate as possible. It also has contemporary resonance, for charges of sexual abuse are often leveled at Myanmar’s tatmadaw and can be most fully addressed in a country prepared to trace such issues all the way back. I therefore decided to see what I could unearth online. The answer is not much. Certainly military comfort stations were established in Burma during World War II, but direct testimony is hard to find.

One excellent source is a set of interviews conducted by a US psychological warfare team working at the Ledo Stockade towards the end of the war. Following the Allies’ recapture of Myitkyina in August 1944, this team talked with 20 Korean “comfort girls” and two Japanese civilians. Its brief report testifies that in early May 1942 Japanese agents arrived in Korea to recruit around 800 women for vaguely-specified “comfort service” in Southeast Asia. At least 700 women reached Rangoon around August 20, 1942, and were distributed mostly to towns close to Japanese Army camps. In the houses where they lived and worked, separate blocks of visiting time were scheduled for soldiers, NCOs and officers, together with graduated prices. Slots were also sometimes allocated to particular units to deal with problems of congestion. Matters of hygiene were managed through weekly visits by army doctors. Contraceptives were widely available. In late 1943, some women were allowed to return to Korea. Those remaining were released by Kachin soldiers led by an English officer on August 10, 1942.

Another source is Video Juku, a women’s group that creates documentaries with the aim of building a society free of violence and discrimination against women. On its list are two short films focused on the Burma theatre in World War II, though neither is accessible through the Video Juku site (and neither turns up on a YouTube search). One from 1999, running to 22 minutes in length, is entitled “Burma’s Vanished ‘Comfort Women’: Record of the Field Research from May 1997 to September 1998”. Another from 2000, running to 40 minutes, is entitled “‘Comfort Women’ of Japanese Army in Burma: The Record of Inquiry during 1997-2000”. Both documentaries reportedly contain testimony from South Korean women, plus in the latter case some mention of Burmese women – but I haven’t been able to view either of them.

This is all valuable material, and I’d like to gather further information about the hundreds of Korean comfort women taken to work in Burma in the early 1940s. Still more, I’m keen to know about Burmese victims of this brutal Japanese military practice.

Comfort women

November 19, 2014

In the New York Times, Mindy Kotler has a powerful article about comfort women and Japan’s war on truth. She notes that for many years the issue was so uncontroversial in Japan that Yasuhiro Nakasone could describe in a 1978 memoir his role in setting up a military comfort station in Borneo in 1942, and still go on to serve as prime minister from 1982 to 1987. Thereafter, though, democratization in South Korea (coterminous with the end of Nakasone’s premiership) generated a backlash from one of the societies most heavily affected by a practice thought to have ensnared between 50,000 and 200,000 women. The eventual result was that Chief Cabinet Secretary Yohei Kono in August 1993 issued a formal acknowledgement of and apology for the Japanese military’s direction of the comfort women system – the Kono Statement. Two years later the Japanese government established the Asian Women’s Fund to handle compensation payments to the small number of comfort women still alive and prepared to detail the abuse they had suffered.

Serious pushback by the Japanese government dates from Shinzo Abe’s first 12-month premiership in 2006-07. It has become still more serious during his current premiership, which began at the end of December 2012. Kotler describes the significant consequences of determined efforts now being made to dilute the 1993 Kono Statement. One can be seen in the domestic arena: “The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as it seeks to cast the Japanese people – rather than the comfort women of the Asia-Pacific theater – as the victims of this story.” Another has global ramifications: “In March, Japan became the only Group of 7 country to withhold support from a United Nations investigation into possible war crimes in Sri Lanka, when it abstained from voting to authorize the inquiry.” Her conclusion is therefore entirely merited: “If we do not speak out, we will be complicit not only in Japanese denialism, but also in undermining today’s international efforts to end war crimes involving sexual violence.”

Arts of resistance in Hong Kong

November 18, 2014

Joyce Lau has a neat piece in the New York Times about the voluminous street art spawned by Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement – and, as the endgame gathers speed, what can be done to safeguard it for posterity. That’s no easy task when the Lennon Wall in Admiralty comprises literally thousands of Post-it notes, and many other parts of the city’s occupied territories are also festooned with a multitude of artistic artefacts. This being Hong Kong, absolutely everything has certainly been captured many times over on mobile phones, uploaded to Facebook and Instagram, and spread around the world. If ever put together, the digital archive would be massive and pretty comprehensive. Still, though, there are the actual works of street art themselves. Help is at hand in the form of UMAP – Umbrella Movement Art Preservation. But recovering as much as possible will be a huge task once the clampdown takes place, and Admiralty, Causeway Bay and Mong Kok return to normal life.

Mobile Library: Myanmar

November 17, 2014

Congratulations to Hong Kong’s Asia Art Archive and the recently-founded Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive for last Friday launching the Mobile Library: Myanmar project. From now until March 2015, more than 450 publications on art theory, philosophy, spaces, curating and archiving will move around a series of venues in Yangon and Mandalay. Previously, AAA undertook the Mobile Library: Vietnam project in 2011 in collaboration with Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City, and the Mobile Library: Sri Lanka project in 2013 in collaboration with Raking Leaves in Jaffna and Colombo.

In the long run, MARCA “aims to become the largest bilingual digital resource on the history and current state of Myanmar arts; to stimulate and nourish creative teaching and learning as well as provide research materials for students, teachers, artists, and the greater public”. Founded by artists Khin Zaw Latt and Zon Sapal Phyu together with researcher Nathalie Johnston, it looks like being an important initiative in a still emergent local art scene.

Eain Aye Kyaw, 1981-2014

November 14, 2014

Eain Aye Kyaw passed away on Wednesday. I didn’t know him well, though I did know him a bit – mainly from running into each other in the Pansodan from time to time, very occasionally meeting in Nawaday Tharlar, and once or twice watching him at work in borrowed spaces. So I can’t say much about the man, beyond sensing a shy friendliness and warmth whenever our paths crossed. I can say something about the art. I still remember seeing the 2012 painting “Farm truck” hanging on the back wall of the Pansodan and falling in love with it. It was my second purchase from the gallery, my first purchase of anything by an artist then unknown to me, and it set me on an exciting journey that seems unlikely to end anytime soon. Along the way I’ve bought quite a few paintings by Eain Aye Kyaw – 33, in fact, one for each year of his life. I’m drawn to the slightly stylized manner in which they capture something both current and timeless about Myanmar. Eain Aye Kyaw possessed a rare talent. I’ll always regret that the life sustaining it was cut short so shockingly early.

Lady of No Fear

November 13, 2014

Today marks four years since Aung San Suu Kyi was released from her third and, hopefully, final spell of house arrest. It took a few months for the Nobel Peace laureate to find her feet in the transitional Myanmar taking shape beyond the walls of her Yangon home. Once she had decided to work with President Thein Sein’s reform agenda, however, it became another very interesting period in a signal life. To celebrate today’s anniversary, I focus on a film completed in the closing months of Daw Suu’s detention, and issued soon thereafter – Anne Gyrithe Bonne’s Aung San Suu Kyi: Lady of No Fear, released in 2010.

There’s really a great deal to like about this movie. Images and footage from every important phase in its subject’s life are terrific. Interviews with key figures are truly insightful. Analysis of both the private and the public lives is tremendous. There are also several very special moments (all timings approximate). At 04:00, in response to a question about the dilemma of leaving her husband and two sons for Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi says she never answers personal questions (not entirely true). At 21:30, she makes the critical point that her motivating mission in life is to finish the work left undone by her father, Aung San, at the time of his July 1947 assassination. At 35:50, she states that it was her decision in late 1990 to stop writing letters to close family members in the UK because she did not wish to communicate through the authorities (who routinely inspected her correspondence). At 43:10, she cites the four key ingredients of success as taught by Buddhism: will, right attitude, perseverance and wisdom. At 55:00, Kim Aris gives a wonderful oration at his father’s funeral. At 57:45, Michael Aris lists the four (rather quixotic) conditions laid down by Aung San Suu Kyi for leaving the country (as wished by her jailers): release all political prisoners, transfer power to the elected civilian government, allow her to make a 50-minute radio and TV broadcast, and permit her to walk to the airport.

All in all, it’s a terrific one-hour documentary marred only by a slew of typos in the text appearing from time to time on-screen (something I’ve said directly to Anne Gyrithe). This film is readily available on YouTube (view count: 22,400). Do take a look.