No Regrets for the Enlightened

Almost a year ago, I was taking a course on body politics in Japan and a fellow graduate student criticized our readings for the week which dealt with post-war humanism. His contention was that humanism was utilized as a masked form of nationalism during the post-war period. Although his comment was too general for me to completely agree with, I felt that he did have an interesting point. I should also note that he finds pleasure in pushing ones buttons – so I believe that he presented his concept in an oversimplified way just to offend certain members of the seminar.

Anyway, I was reminded of his idea while watching Kurosawa Akira’s No Regrets For Our Youth (1946, Waga seishun ni kuinashi). Although the liners for the DVD of No Regrets… (released by Eclispe/Criterion’s Postwar Kurosawa set) address the anti-nationalist content of the film, I felt that, akin to my peer’s beliefs, what Kurosawa presented in this film was not anti-nationalism but a counter-nationalism. What was posited in this film was the conflict between an unenlightened majority (those accepting the ‘official’ agenda) and the enlightened minority (anti-imperialism), which results in the progression of this minority into the majority after Japan’s defeat. I remember a scene in Okabe Michio’s Crazy Love (1968), screened in Irvine last year, where a police officer reminisces with a student activist about his days as a leftist – after which the student sings The Beatles’ Yesterday and they venture out on the street, holdings hands. While that scene appeared to humorously comment on the similar mob mentalities and age-specific obligations inherent in both conservative authority and leftist activism, Kurosawa’s presentation of both is simplified into factions of the ethical and the corrupt and he is light on the criticism of those shifting to the humanistic paradigm at the end of the film. A historical narrative is portrayed where the progression to a humanist-collective is valorized as the true and contemporary spirit of the nation in wake of the US occupation. Of course, we have to also consider the constraints put on this film by the occupying nation’s review board and other outside influences. Nonetheless, a great degree of the ideological suggestions found in No Regrets… is in harmony with the bulk of Kurosawa’s output. It is a shame as well, since formally No Regrets… is one of Kurosawa’s most adventurous films.