This is a political blog, which may make what I’m going to write about today seem off-topic, but I hope I can prove to you that it is not. Indeed I hope to prove to you that this little diary elucidates something which is central to progressive politics, and especially to activists. Something which demonstrates the great need in our society for us to put our progressive values in action.
So, after building up your expectations so high for this piece, what exactly is it I’m writing about? Why, just a movie review is all. A review of a 1952 foreign film, shot in black and white, that is only available on DVD (although your local library may have a copy). The film in question is Ikiru and it was written and directed by Akira Kurosawa, perhaps Japan’s most renowned filmmaker.
Please follow me below the fold for my thoughts on the film, and why I believe its message is so relevant to us today.
**SPOILER ALERT: Essential plot points are revealed, so don’t continue reading if you’d like to view Ikiru without such knowledge**
Ikiru in Japanese means “to live.” More than most movies, this title is critical to understanding the central meaning of the film. For in Ikiru, Kurosawa wanted to get at the question of what does it mean to truly live.
The protagonist of the film, Kanji Watanabe, is a mid-level functionary in the municipal government of some an unnamed city (possibly Tokyo). A bureaucrat who, in thirty years of devoted service, has never missed a day of work, and who, as the narration notes in the opening scene, has made a career of keeping busy while doing nothing. As chief of the Public Affairs Department, it is his primary function to receive complaints from local citizens and then direct them to other departments. As he sits behind his desk between mounds of paper he hardly ever glances up as he stamps one form after another with his seal.
In short, he is a cipher, a mere cog in the unresponsive machine that is City Hall. This is made clear by a montage that begins with his referral to “Engineering, Desk 8” of a complaint by a group of poor mothers about the raw sewage seeping into a vacant lot where they live which is causing noxious fumes and skin rashes on the children. The mothers are seen quickly going from one uncaring bureaucrat to the next, each of whom expresses fake sympathy for their plight, but then laments that their problem is really the responsibility of another department.
In the final scene of the montage, we see the face of the Deputy Mayor, congratulating the women and mouthing meaningless platitudes as he directs them back to where they began: the Public Affairs Department. Where the whole sorry travesty begins over again with the women being directed by Watanabe’s subordinates (who clearly don’t recall the women) to take their complaint to “Engineering, Desk 8.” The women explode in anger at their treatment and storm out in a huff, only to be chased down by one of the minor functionaries, who asks them to please put their complaint in writing, as their section chief is absent, and only he can approve their request.
Which brings us to the first crucial point of the movie, for where is Watanabe-san, a man who has never taken a day off from work before in his life? He’s at the hospital getting an x-ray of his abdomen, an x-ray that will show he has inoperable stomach cancer and has only 6 months left to live. Even though the doctors only tell him he has an ulcer, Watanabe knows they are lying thanks to a too talkative patient in the waiting room who has filled him in on the “coded” language doctors use when talking to the terminally ill. [Note: This was actual medical practice in Japan at the time. It was thought that not telling patients they had a terminal disease would be better for them, both psychologically and in terms of the progression of their physical symptoms.]
The news is devastating. Watanabe walks home in a fog. Yet he tells no one, at first, not even his son and daughter-in-law who are living with him. He simply stops going to work, but even his family doesn’t discover this fact until someone from the office comes by asking where he has been for the last 5 days.
When next we see him he is in a small bar and noodle shop drinking sake, even though alcohol is poisonous to him. He finally tells a stranger, a young novelist, that he has cancer and is about to die. He goes on to explain that he has contemplated suicide but cannot go through with it. He explains that it is only now, with death staring him in the face, that he realizes what a waste he has made of his life. As he tells the young man, “Drinking this expensive sake is like paying myself back with poison for the way I lived all these years.”
The young novelist, in a surge of sympathy for Watanabe-san’s condition, decides to take him a tour of the city’s demimonde district that very evening where he can savor all the pleasures (gambling, alcohol, dancing, women) that Watanabe has forbidden himself over the course of his lifetime, and especially since the death of his wife when his son was just a small boy. As the novelist tells Watanabe, greed is a virtue, especially greed for the pleasures of the flesh.
The night turns into a disaster however, as Watanabe sinks ever deeper into an alcohol induced melancholy, that the young prostitutes the novelist has engaged for the evening cannot dispel. Finally even the young man recognizes that he has made a mistake, and that whatever Watanabe needs, all the singing and dancing, sake and strip clubs in the world cannot provide, when the appearance of Watanabe’s grim half smile after he has vomited up all that he’s drunk that evening causes the younger man to shrink back in horror.
The next day, we see Watanabe walking back to his house when suddenly he is confronted by a young, vibrant girl, Toyo Odagiri, one of the clerks who works under him in Public Affairs. She has been searching for him because only the section chief can sign the form necessary for her to resign from her job. She is bored bythe work she does at Public Affairs, and wants something more from life than a career of “doing nothing.”
Watanabe is attracted to her youthful, cheerful outlook on life. She has some indefinable quality, a certain joie di vivre that he longs to acquire for himself. After signing her resignation form, he convinces her to let him take her out for the day. They stop at Pachinko parlors, cafes and even take in a movie. He is charmed by her, and by her spirited approach to whatever life brings her. Yet, he cannot bring himself to tell her of his illness, nor of the real reason he wants to spend time with her.
Eventually she tells him the relationship cannot continue, that she wants no part of an old man’s infatuation. She finally agrees to one final “date” and it is there that Watanabe finally breaks down under her questioning and tells her of his cancer. He goes on to try to explain to her, and to himself, why exactly he needs her so badly:
You – just to look at you makes me feel better. It warms this – this mummy’s heart of mine. And you’re so kind to me. No; that’s not it. You’re so young, so healthy. No; that’s not it either… You’re so full of life. And me… I’m jealous of that. If I could be like you for just one day before I died. I won’t be able to die unless I can do that. I want to do *something*. Only you can show me. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how. Maybe you don’t know either, but, please… if you can… show me how to be like you!
But all I do is go to work, eat and sleep, she tells him. When he insists there must be something more do it than that, she pulls out one of the toy rabbits she makes each day. She tells Watanabe that making these toys gives her the feeling she is playing with each child who will someday own one of her rabbits. He laments that he could never do anything so productive back at the Public Affairs office. Then, at the true climax of the movie, you see a realization come over his face. He turns toward Toyo and the intensity of his gaze frightens her as he says that maybe there is something he can do, if he has the will. Suddenly he dashes off, never to see her again.
His co-workers are surprised the next day to see him at his desk, pouring over documents, obviously in search of something. They had believed that he was going to submit his resignation papers soon, and already begun discussing amongst themselves who will take his place. Instead, he pulls a paper out of the pile on his desk, the one written by the women we met earlier in the film, requesting the clean-up of the vacant lot that had become a waste dump, and it’s conversion into a small park for children. This is a project that the Public Affairs Department must promote he tells them, and despite their objections, they are soon running off to help him survey the site as a preliminary to writing up the proposal for the reclamation project.
The rest of the film is told in flashbacks by all of the participants at Watanabe’s wake, after he has died suddenly following the commencement ceremony for the new park the day before. Through those flashbacks we learn how, against great odds, Watanabe managed to shepherd the park project through to completion, despite the petty obstructionism of other department chiefs, the opposition of politicians such as the Deputy Mayor and even threats by local gangsters who had their own designs on the land.
To the local women who had first demanded action, Watanabe is a saint, and the grief that they display as they burn incense for him at the wake is searing, especially when contrasted with close-ups of the faces of the senior officials and the Deputy Mayor, who, now that the project has been completed, wants to take all the credit for Watanabe’s actions in geting the park completed.
After the higher-ups leave, the rest of the participants, Watanabe’s family and former co-workers try to understand what brought about his sudden change in behavior. The last scene of the movie in which Watanabe appears is described by a Policeman who discovered his body in the park. Earlier on the evening Watanabe dies, the policeman had seen him singing to himself while seated on one of the swings. Thinking him a harmless drunk, and captivated by the quality of his song, the policeman decided not to arrest him for loitering, not realizing Watanabe was about to succumb to his cancer at last. “He sounded so happy”, the policeman relates to the group of mourners.
All of the co-workers come to the conclusion that they should act more like Watanabe, and they pledge to each other that things will be different when they return to work; that they will show the same spirit and will to act that he did in getting the Park built. Yet, after their blurry alcohol-soaked camaraderie wears off the next day, everything is back to normal at the Department. Keeping busy, doing nothing. Still, in the last scene of the movie, one of the office workers on his way home passes the park that Watanabe built, and looks down on all the children playing. It’s a powerful image on which to end the film.
Ikiru is rated as one of Kurosawa’s masterpieces, and frequently turns up on lists of the best films of all time. But that is not why its important. My brief synopsis of the movie really doesn’t do it justice, so please go watch it, and when you do take its message to heart, a message that all progressives need to hear, and act upon.
In the film, Watanabe overcomes his fear of impending death, and learns to live for the first time in his life when he abandons his own small, selfish desires and acts to help others. This, of course, is the same ideal which is at the core of the progressive ethic. That acting with compassion toward others is the only way in which to live. The values displayed by Watanabe in the last months of his life in Ikiru are progressive values: concern for those less fortunate than oneself and the desire to act, whether through governmental or non-governmental means, to provide help to those who need help.
However, even more critical perhaps, is the message of the film that we must persist in our actions to bring our values to the fore, and make them the values of our government once more. Watanabe persisted, despite his setbacks in accomplishing his goal of reclaiming a waste dump and turning it into a park. All of us face obstacles each day in our attempts to change the political climate of this country. We see the wasted lives and suffering that result from the selfishness, greed and untrammeled authoritarianism which are the core principles of the Republican party, and we long to bring about a society that is truly compassionate, just and cooperative in spirit.
It is easy to despair in the face of the many obstacles to implementing our progressive values, obstacles both structural and psychological in nature. But if we are to truly live those values, we must persist. We must continue to act to bring about change, whether at the level of our local communities, or at the grander level of national politics, with its elections, campaigns and lobbying efforts. None of our accomplishments in these arenas will come easily, none without great effort and sacrifice.
But ultimately, isn’t it better to live our lives striving to put our values in action, acting with passion and compassion, than to sit back in sloth and materialistic excess, ignoring the plight of others and relegating the measure of our lives to time served in pursuit of wealth and shallow entertainments? Indeed, can we even call it a life when there is no concern for others, but only for the self? Do we want to live as Watanabe did in the last six months of his life, or as he did in all the months before learning of the death sentence his cancer proclaimed?
I hope we all will choose the answers to those questions Kurosawa gave in Ikiru.
