Kuroki Kazuo’s requiem for war

The above extract from Kuroki Kazuo’s Watashi no sensō (My War) shows that as a film director and member of the yakeato generation Kuroki strongly believed he had an important contribution to make through his portrayal of the war experience in film. Analysis of Kuroki’s trilogy of war requiem films – Tomorrow / 明日 (1988), Utsukushii natsu Kirishima (Beautiful Summer Kirishima, 2002) and Chichi to kuraseba (The Face of Jizō, 2004)2 – shows that Kuroki hoped that the creation of these films would help him assuage some of the survivor guilt he carried throughout his life, and come to terms with feelings of ongoing embarrassment at his own powerlessness and inaction during the war years. These films would help not only him and his generation come to terms with their war experience but would also – he hoped – encourage contemporary Japan to reassess the cultural and historical impact of World War II on the Japanese psyche and to learn more about the antiwar sentiment of post-war Japan. By fictionalizing his and others’ real experiences and focusing on the daily life of those living through the war and its aftermath he hoped to provide a taste of wartime Japan of interest to generations to come: I wanted to leave something for future generations, to create films that depicted the Japan of that time … and although I was only a boy during the war, I wanted to create movies as a member of the generation who experienced the war.