Wow!

This film was made just after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Toshiro Mifune plays an old man who wants to move his family to Brazil to keep them safe from the effects of an H-Bomb.  His family thinks he is insane and doesn’t want to move.   Really, they don’t want to move because they will lose their ineheritance.  So they declare the old man financially incompetent in order to maintain it and the courts reluctantly agree.

Clearly, the man isn’t incompetent, he’s shrewd.  And if you get right down to it, every Japanese citizen has irrational (but possibly completely rational) fears about the destructiveness of the H-bomb.

It’s silly, perhaps, but those were my thoughts when I was very young.  Why would man create such a thing?  I was of the generation that was taught to “duck and cover”.    I  remember seeing a man shot in the head on a news cast when I was very young.  It must have been something very new because my mother was very upset that I witnessed it.   We hadn’t been immune to that sort of media coverage, yet.

I think that may be the point of Kurosawa’s film.  We become immune to what we should experience as completely outrageous.   Nakajima’s family has become complacent about living in fear and thinks their father insane that he hasn’t managed to obtain this same complacency.  The father can’t understand this complacency.

It is an interesting thought that Nakajima’s family can afford the complacency because of what Nakajima, himself, built.   Kurosawa welcomed Democracy.  What he didn’t welcome was the materialism that came along with the capitalism that came to Japan through Western Democracy.   Life itself was made less important than material abundance.

Think about 9/11.  We are far enough away from it to be somewhat rational about it now.  We gave up our freedom in order to secure our materialism.  Bush told us to go out and shop, go to Disney Land.  Distract yourself from the reality of what was really going on.

How much absurdity are we capable of rationalizing rather than seeing it for what it is?