Caterpillar (film) - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

is a 2010 Japanese

Cinema of Japan

The has a history that spans more than 100 years. Japan has one of the oldest and largest film industries in the world – as of 2009 the fourth largest by number of feature films produced. Movies have been produced in Japan since 1897, when the first foreign cameramen arrived...

drama film

Drama film

A drama film is a film genre that depends mostly on in-depth development of realistic characters dealing with emotional themes. Dramatic themes such as alcoholism, drug addiction, infidelity, moral dilemmas, racial prejudice, religious intolerance, poverty, class divisions, violence against women...

directed by Kōji Wakamatsu

Koji Wakamatsu

is a Japanese film director who directed such pinku eiga films as and . He also produced Nagisa Ōshima's controversial film In the Realm of the Senses...

, partially drawn from Edogawa Rampo

Edogawa Rampo

, better known by the pseudonym , was a Japanese author and critic who played a major role in the development of Japanese mystery fiction. Many of his novels involve the detective hero Kogorō Akechi, who in later books was the leader of a group of boy detectives known as the .Rampo was an admirer...

's banned short-story .

The film is a critique of the right-wing militarist nationalism

Nationalism

Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

that guided Japan's conduct in Asia during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Second Sino-Japanese War

The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...

and World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

. The film deals with various issues, such as war crimes, handicapped veterans, spousal abuse. The film also deals with themes of sexual perversion and features graphic sex scenes.

It was nominated for the Golden Bear

Golden Bear

According to legend, the Golden Bear was a large golden Ursus arctos. Members of the Ursus arctos species can reach masses of . The Grizzly Bear and the Kodiak Bear are North American subspecies of the Brown Bear....

at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival

60th Berlin International Film Festival

The 60th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from February 11 to February 21, 2010, with Werner Herzog as President of the Jury. The opening film of the festival was Chinese director Wang Quan'an's romantic drama Apart Together, in competition, while the closing film is Japanese...

. Shinobu Terajima received the Silver Bear for Best Actress

Silver Bear for Best Actress

The Silver Bear for Best Actress is the Berlin International Film Festival's award for achievement in performance by an actress.-Awards:- External links :*...

at the Berlin Film Festival for her portrayal of Kurokawa's wife.

Story and themes

The movie is about the relationship between a Japanese soldier, who returns home from China horribly maimed, and his wife. It is set in the late 1930's, during the Second Sino-Japanese War

Second Sino-Japanese War

. In the first scene, Lieutenant

Lieutenant

A lieutenant is a junior commissioned officer in many nations' armed forces. Typically, the rank of lieutenant in naval usage, while still a junior officer rank, is senior to the army rank...

Kurokawa scourges, rapes and disembowels Chinese people during the war. Later, he returns home a war hero, but with a horribly mutilated body. He is alive but reduced to a torso (no limbs), deaf and mute, with burns covering half of his face, but with three medals on his chest. Despite his condition, he is still constantly eager for sex, which he performs acrobatically with his wife. The sexual acts are rough and are imposed on his wife, who is repelled by him, but who nevertheless feels a duty to take care of him.

In Japan, there is a new trend, seen in fashion, cartoons and videogames, of questioning the country's fascist past

Japanese fascism

Statism in Shōwa Japan was a political syncretism of Japanese right-wing political ideologies, developed over a period of time from the Meiji Restoration...

, and Wakamatsu's movie is part of that trend. The film is the political response to and criticism of Yukio Mishima

Yukio Mishima

was the pen name of , a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor and film director, also remembered for his ritual suicide by seppuku after a failed coup d'état...

's reactionary

Reactionary

The term reactionary refers to viewpoints that seek to return to a previous state in a society. The term is meant to describe one end of a political spectrum whose opposite pole is "radical". While it has not been generally considered a term of praise it has been adopted as a self-description by...

short film Patriotism
Patriotism (film)
is a 1966 Japanese short drama film directed by Yukio Mishima and Domoto Masaki. The English-language release was originally entitled The Rite of Love and Death.Mishima wrote Yûkoku four years before his death...

. Caterpillar indicts right-wing militarist nationalism

Japanese nationalism

encompasses a broad range of ideas and sentiments harbored by the Japanese people over the last two centuries regarding their native country, its cultural nature, political form and historical destiny...

, satirically deploys Japanese propaganda, and significantly politicizes and humanizes Edogawa Rampo

Edogawa Rampo

's 1929 banned short-story. The film demystifies the glorification of war, which is used to hide war's grim reality. It also depicts the unfair demands placed on Japanese women, during war and peacetime.

Awards

It was nominated for the Golden Bear