Few screenwriters have the talent to create a fictional anti-hero as riveting and chilling as Kenzo Okuzaki, the real-life protagonist of The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On. A veteran of Japan's World War II campaign in New Guinea, he spent the '80s on a quest to investigate an execution that may have been a cover-up for cannibalism by officers. His methods were unconventional, crossing the line from verbal argument to physical assault, always against frail, elderly men. In the film, Okuzaki shows a disturbing ability to step over the line from politeness to blunt rage in an instant. He has served jail time for murder, as well as the lesser crimes of attacking the Emperor with a slingshot and distributing pornographic flyers mocking him.
No article on documentarian Kazuo Hara fails to quote his statement "I make bitter films. I hate mainstream society." In Okuzaki, Hara found the perfect foil for his radical aesthetic. The complicity between the two is implicit, even when Okuzaki asks him to stop filming one of his beatings because it might be used as evidence in court. Hara captures confrontations in tightly framed, claustrophobically intense medium shots — in documentaries, the use of the square fullscreen frame has rarely seemed so deliberate. The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On treats Okuzaki's quest with respect and sympathy but makes no attempt whatsoever to flatter him. Okuzaki reveals a system where the vulnerable are preyed upon by the privileged in the most literal manner possible, but his willingness to use violence suggests that he too is a part of that system. Hara's film focuses tightly on Okuzaki and his obsessions, but it implies a larger critique of the limits of dissent.
Although made entirely from footage shot in the '80s, The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On rests alongside films like Kon Ichikawa's Fires on the Plain and Kinji Fukasaku's Under the Flag of the Rising Sun as a devastating denunciation of Japan's participation in war. Here, Hara suggests that combat can corrupt even those who protest against it. — Steve Erickson
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