My Review of Harakiri (1962) directed by Masaki Kobayashi

 You take an artsy idealist leftist that wants to make movies and you force him to fight for a fascist military dictatorship and you get a guy who has an axe to grind with the society that made him suffer. Masaki Kobayashi's ordeal in WWII made him the Japanese film-maker with the most cynical view of Japanese history, culture, and society. Coming off his contemporary social films and his magnum opus The Human Condition (1959-1961), he decided to do a brutal interrogation of the samurai ideology of Bushido and ask the question: "What do you think really happened during the Edo Period, given what we know about human nature?" He attempts to answer that question with one of the bleakest and existential samurai films of all time. Donald Richie calls this the "anti-samurai" film.

We start with a ronin named Tsugumo Hanshirō showing up at the doorstep of the Iyi clan House in Edo (aka Tokyo).asking if he can commit harakiri–ritual suicide–in their courthouse and the clan is baffled that another samurai from Hiroshima would come to them with this request. As this ronin–played by Tatsuya Nakadai–begins to speak, we learn that something is very off about what is going on here. The film shows how absurd the logic of Bushido is in peacetime and how the hardcore, selective application of it leads to disaster. While a few samurai clans at the top had a clean transition to the Edo Period, for many the end of the Sengoku period was more tumultuous than the strife of the warring states period they had just emerged out of. The moodiness of Toru Takemitsu's music score and the cinematography by Yoshio Miyajima makes the film feel to us the audience the doomed atmosphere of the protagonists being toyed with by the system.

Kobayashi was on a hot-streak during this time with all of his films engaging in social realism and holding institutions accountable for the mistreatment of people during the way years and the modern day. This was his first venture into period films, but he manages to interrogate recent Japanese history and contemporary society all the same. Nakadai may not have been as highly celebrated at this time as Toshiro Mifune, but he was just as commanding in his star roles―and his star never shined brighter than with Masaki Kobayashi. Kobayashi is the anti-weebo of of cinema, he uses his knowledge of Japanese art and culture against all who would try to romanticize Japan without taking into account its dark side. Every inconsistency of the code of Bushido is when presented against practical reality is presented here, but the hypocrisy and ruthlessness of the state is shown in full display at the end when it is able to brush-off all this by virtue of being able to write the history books.