The Greater East Asian War

"Oshima's documentary form increasingly presents ironies, develops contradictions, and proceeds by indirect telling. The epitome of this strategy is his Daitona Senso (The Greater East Asian War, 1968), which Oshima composed from reedited found footage, Japanese government propaganda, without contemporary voice-over commentary. The idea was to avoid the strategies of standard Occupation counterpropaganda, on the one hand, and leftist and particularly communist propaganda, on the other, which typically offered didactic explanations of Japanese militarism underscoring lies and deceptions. The strategy of The Greater East Asian War is one full of risks. The full weight of what the Japanese government had told its people originally was replayed for them and their children, allowing the contemporary audience to hear once again how the announcments of their military convincingly built a war consensus, if one heard these in the absence of other information. In the context of powerful rightwing revisionism that seeks to excuse the Japanese war effort, such a strategy could simply feed latent militarist nostalgia. […] If Oshima runs this risk, it is to provoke in his audiences the same sensations he had uncovering the footage in the archives and to move them through the propaganda in its own sequence, following his own logic." [Maurin Turim: The Films of Oshima Nagisa. Images of a Japanese Iconoclast]