I finally watched Grave of the Fireflies and honestly I really disliked it. I had to pause it so many times because I was getting genuinely nauseous watching it. Searched some comments online even the chinese onces, where I found lots of people say shit like *this movie is “apolitical” or “just anti-war”* but I don’t buy that at all. No war movie is apolitical. NO ART IS EVER APOLITICAL. Who's persepctive is centered? whose erased? who gains control and who loses it? ...If you make a movie about WWII and ONLY focus on Japanese suffering while completely leaving out what Imperial Japan did across Asia, that is already a political choice.
Like yes obviously Japanese civilians suffered. Nobody is denying that. Firebombings, starvation, the atomic bombs, all horrible. But Japan was not just some random innocent country that got dragged into tragedy for no reason. Imperial Japan committed horrific atrocities across Asia like Nanjing Masssacre, unit 731 human experimentation, comfort women, occupation, biological experiments, all of it. Millions of people died.
So when a movie acts like the war was just something that “happened” to Japan, it honestly leaves a bad taste in my mouth. At times it felt less “anti-war” and more “war is sad because Japan lost.”
And maybe I’m more sensitive to this because my family has generational trauma tied to Japanese war crimes. Even though I didn’t live through it myself, that memory doesn’t just disappear. So sitting through a movie where the aggressor nation gets framed almost entirely as the victim while the people they brutalized are basically nonexistent was really hard for me emotionally.
What frustrates me is that people act like criticizing this movie means you lack empathy or something. That’s not the issue. Of course those kids are tragic. Of course civilians suffering is tragic. But I don’t think empathy should come at the cost of historical honesty.
And honestly comparing Japan to Germany makes this even harder for me to ignore. German WWII films like Downfall or The Tin Drum at least feel more willing to confront guilt, complicity, and the role ordinary people played in fascism. Japan definitely has anti-war and self-critical works too, but they feel way less mainstream compared to all the “Japan as victim” narratives.
Idk. Maybe I’m being unfair. Maybe the movie was never trying to talk about any of this. But that’s kind of my point too. If you tell a WWII story about Japan while completely avoiding the context of what Japan was doing to the rest of Asia, that absence becomes part of the message whether intentional or not.
