THE HERO WITHIN US ALLKagemusha (1980) A petty thief with an utter resemblance to a samurai warlord is hired asthe lord’s double. When the warlord later dies the thief is forced to take up arms in his place.12 EXCERPT: WILLPOWER CURES ALL HUMAN AILMENTS
THE HERO WITHIN US ALLdoxy, in which the Emperor was regarded as the “axis” of thenation, Gluck points to their roots in the Meiji era as an ideologicaleffort to seal fissures in the modernizing state, where “labordisputes, like socialism, were an unmistakable sign that moderneconomic life engendered conflict on a large and unacceptablydivisive scale. It was as if the unique glory-and the reassuringimmutability-of kokutai became that much more important asthe world fell away around it. This official ideology during thewar years became enmeshed with a resurgent anti-Westernismand antimodernism “Fundamentals of Our National Polity,” publishedby the Ministry of Education in 1937, was designed todescribe the contours of Imperial service. It decried the influenceof Western values centered on the worth of the individual, and itargued that socialism, communism, and social unrest were dueto the influence of the misguided individualism of the West.When people determinedly count themselves as masters andassert their egos, there is nothing but contradictions and thesetting of one against the other, and this was in contrast to theJapanese Way of harmony with family and state. A reawakening ofdevotion to the emperor was necessary to counter these harmfulinfluences. The country was a great family, and the Imperial Householdis the head family of the subjects and the nucleus of nationallife. Serving the nation can be done only by overcoming individualism,by dying to self and returning to [the] One, a process that cannever be understood from an individualistic way of thinking. Waris a means of bringing about, not destruction, but great harmony.The degree to which Imperial ideology penetrated the culture, andthe extent of cultural and state authoritarianism during the war,are debated by scholars. Daikichi Irokawa describes allegianceto the emperor system as a kind of mass cultural blindness, “anenormous black box into which the whole nation ... unknowinglywalked. Kazuo Kawai suggests that the rise of the militaristswas tied to an alleged lack of a cultural tradition of individualismand social equality. “There was as yet no widespread conceptioneither of the essential equality of all men or of the supremeworth of the individual.’:” Ben-Ami Shillony suggests, however,that there were spaces in the society where individuals andgroups could remain relatively free of wartime ideological im-George Lucasand Francis FordCoppola are creditedat the end of thefilm as executiveproducers in theinternational version.This is becausethey convinced20th Century Fox tomake up a shortfallin the film’s budgetwhen the originalproducers, TohoStudios, could notafford to completethe film. In return,20th CenturyFox received theinternationaldistribution rightsto the film.EXCERPT: WILLPOWER CURES ALL HUMAN AILMENTS13
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