Mightier Than the Sword: Shinobu Hashimoto at 100

Perhaps these latter qualities appealed to Hashimoto, who described the Japanese army as a blister growing during the war. But the project’s backstory was a checkered one. It originated as a novel written by Tetsutaro Kato, a convicted war criminal who had been the commandant of a POW camp in Niigata City. Kato had been sentenced to death for executing an American POW with a bayonet, but the sentence was commuted. His novel can be taken as a spirited effort to exonerate war criminals and lay their guilt onto the war itself. Hashimoto’s curious attachment to this project illustrates the ambiguities surrounding the war in Japanese culture and the great difficulty filmmakers experienced in breaking with the military heritage that had helped to spawn it. In his films, for example, Kurosawa never connected the samurai culture and heritage with the twentieth-century militarism that led the country into the abyss. Few filmmakers could do so and work with a clear conscience because many had made propaganda films during the war.  Even so staunchly antimilitarist a filmmaker as Masaki Kobayashi suggests in several films that ordinary soldiers accused of war crimes were often innocent, just as Kato implied in his novel.

Cinema after the war, then, was rife with ideological contradictions. But while Hashimoto seemed drawn to the fictional work of a war criminal, some of his finest screenwriting is more ideologically subversive and can be found in a pair of films he wrote for Masaki Kobayashi, Harakiri (1962) and Samurai Rebellion (1967). The films he made from Hashimoto’s scripts savagely deconstruct the nation’s military heritage in ways that go well beyond anything seen on-screen to that date. Surprisingly, considering Rashomon’s layering of past and present, Hashimoto always professed to dislike flashbacks. Nevertheless, he also used the device magisterially in Harakiri. The efforts of the film’s hero, Tsugumo (Tatsuya Nakadai), to expose the corruption and inhumanity of a military clan are conveyed in flashback, but these are negated by the lies of history as recorded in the official clan journal in the present tense of the story. The journal’s account of Tsugumo and his fate brutally suppresses the truth of what he has tried to accomplish in the name of humanity. The counterpoint structure gives the film its exceptionally keen and clear analysis of how lies about the past become the myths and ideology of the present. 

Hashimoto had joined the front rank of screenwriters with the flashback structure of Rashomon and had surpassed that design in Harakiri. Though a screenplay furnishes a film with its scaffolding and a completed film necessarily goes beyond the script, it remains true, as Mansaku Itami and Kurosawa knew, that to make a good film one must have a good script. Hashimoto’s passionate writing helped burnish Japanese cinema with the golden luster it enjoyed for two decades after the war. He believed that a good script was self-sufficient, that it was like a musical score in its written form, and he felt when writing as if he was composing a symphony. Although he grew rueful about the possibility that his collaborative training in Kurosawa’s inner circle of writers might have inhibited him from developing a robust and distinctive authorial voice, the wonderful movies that resulted from his writing give us the best measure of his literary talent and its enduring contributions.