August 22, 2025 • 35 mins
In this episode of Rosie the Reviewer, we discuss Grave of the Fireflies (1988), the harrowing Studio Ghibli animation that left us emotionally wrecked. We follow the story of Seita and Setsuko, two siblings trying to survive in Kobe, Japan during the final months of World War II. We discuss the film’s gut-wrenching portrayal of innocence lost and being forgotten, and why this is possibly the greatest movie you'll never want to watch again.
🖥️ Visit our website: www.rosiethereviewer.com
📸 Follow us on Instagram: @rosiethereviewerpodcast
💬 Join the conversation and leave a review — we’d love to hear your thoughts!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm married you.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosa Day reviewer.
This week we are discussing Grave of the Fireflies which
came out in 1988. It is a Japanese animated war
(00:24):
film. It was written and directed by
ISO Takahata and produced by Studio Ghibli or Ghibli if you
will. It's based on the 1967 semi
autobiographical short story which is also called Grave of
the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka and instead in the city of Kabi,
(00:46):
Japan. And it tells the story of two
siblings called Saita and Cisco and a struggle to survive during
the final ones of the opportunity in Japan.
Your best question to choose because it's really, really sad.
And it was supposedly written asan apology to his younger
adoptive sister called Kaiko whodied of malnutrition in similar
(01:07):
circumstances. You can watch this movie if you
dare to on Netflux. What did you think of this
movie? It's beautifully animated.
I saw someone on Reddit refer toit as the best movie they'll
never watch again. It's a really heartbreaking
story. I feel like it depicts this
relationship between siblings with this kind of like
(01:28):
simplicity and realness. And there's moments where it's
full of childhood whimsy. There's moments where it's
absolutely heartbreaking. And I got this sense from it
that reminded me of Never Let MeGo, which is also by a Japanese
author, where it's just this pervasive hopelessness because
you know that the ending can't end well.
(01:50):
And yeah, that's kind of the feeling I got from this movie.
It's a really beautiful movie. It's a really sad movie.
What did you think of it? I knew going in that it was
going to be sad because I read just a little bit about it
beforehand. It's got that Japanese magic
that I think Western movies never have.
(02:11):
In that sense, it's like you said, it's a little bit magical,
but it's also very brutally honest in a way you wouldn't
expect an animated movie to be. I don't think this is a
children's movie at all, like the way the Japanese use
animation to tell difficult stories, something I don't think
we do very much in the West. And it's got a little bit of
(02:34):
ghost story going on as well, which I always enjoy.
But there is no light. Well, there is light in this
movie, but it's not very helpfulby the end of the movie.
And I never thought I would enjoy an animated movie about
Open 2 as much as I did this one, even though I don't think
I'll be watching it again just because it breaks my heart.
(02:57):
But it also gave me a chance to learn a little bit more about
Japan, and especially about the civilians in Japan, which I feel
are almost more harshly judged in this movie than the Americans
are who are attacking our city. It's not meant to be an anti war
movie, but for not an anti war movie, it's for the anti.
(03:19):
War, Yeah, I wasn't able to readthe short story.
I had a quick cursory look for it.
I could only find it available in Japanese, but I gather from
just hearing other people talk about it or reading other people
talking about it, this movie even adds more light into the
story than there was in real life.
I mean, if if possible, real life was even grimmer than this
(03:40):
movie depicts it as being. So yeah, I just thought it was a
super interesting choice. I agree.
For an animated feature. For people wanting to read the
story in English, you're going to have to wait until September
because Penguin is releasing it in September so we can read it
then hopefully. Let's get into.
(04:07):
The movie starts with a quote. The main character says,
September 21st, 1945. That was the night I died.
And we're introduced to you, a young man named Seita, played by
Tsutomo Tatsumi. He's starving to death in a
train station. And we are kind of getting the
end of the story here. And then we're going to circle
(04:28):
back and find out a little more about how he got into this
situation. But we hear him mutter one word.
His sister's name, Setsuko, She's played by Ayanu Shiraishi.
And a station worker discovers acandy tin that that Seita has
been carrying around. The station worker throws it
away because it doesn't seem to be valuable in any way, and it
spills open on the ground, revealing Sepsico's ashes.
(04:51):
And in this sort of magical realism moment, her spirit
emerges from it. Yeah, at this point you're kind
of like, oh, that's kind of cute, but then also you just
watch someone literally just starve.
I do wonder though, did you watch it in Japanese or did you
watch it in the English version on Netflix?
Oh, I watched it in Japanese with subtitles I.
(05:13):
Watched it in English because I was watching it at night in bed
and I was like, if I watch it inJapanese, I'm not going to be
able to follow it because I'll fall asleep.
So I've listened to the English version.
So I wonder if our pronunciations are also going to
be based a little bit on the Japanese versus American version
of it. But the only thing that kind of
(05:34):
disrupted the viewing experiencefor me in the very beginning is
that the movie's almost a void of music.
Like there's not a whole lot of music.
So your side effects, it's quitea bit, but there's not a lot of
music and at the beginning and that kind of took me out of it.
But you get used to it fairly quickly.
And these scenes of of them as spirits, because they end up
(05:57):
being spirits together, they look very magical.
They're like orangey and like you're watching a fairy tale,
almost. Yeah, and we get introduced to
the thematic fireflies from the title and this as well.
They're flying all over the place.
There are these like little glimmers of light all around
them Which. Is why I thought initially it
might be slightly hopeful, but again, there's no hope in this.
(06:19):
Anyway. We flashback to the American
bombing of Kobe to work, the endto open for two and the
siblings, his mother, played by or voiced by Yoshikoshino Hara.
He separated from them as they tried to make their way to a
bomb shelter. The subjects invade the bombing,
but they lose their home. And their home is not the only
(06:42):
one to be lost. SATA and voiceover mentions the
black rain after an air raid andblack rain is.
I don't know if it's a popular theme in post war Japanese
media, but I did see a few different references to it when
I was doing a bit of background research into this.
So due to intense fires generated by the bombing,
massive amounts of ash released into the atmosphere would seed
(07:04):
the clouds resulting in a tar like quote UN quote black rain
that would fall after the explosions.
And this effect is best known for occurring after the bombing
of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, during which the black rain also
contained radioactive fallout and could cause radioactive
burns. So.
Just to give you a little bit ofbackground about the bombing of
Kirby. Kirby was bombed a number of
(07:27):
times by the Americans, but the first air raid on Kobe was on
February 4th of 1945. And they in the US there's a
training ground called the Japanese village which is said
on the dark way proven gardens in Utah in Gratis Lemay.
You may remember us talking about him before of the USA Air
(07:48):
Force ordered B29 Super Fortressbombers to drop incendiary bombs
to burn Japan's mostly wooden paper houses in an experiment
carpet bombing against Kirby. So the first raid was just
practice, which is, you know, pretty rough.
And actually the training ground, it's called the Japanese
village because they literally built an entire Japanese village
(08:12):
on it, like a rebuilding and rebuilding to see how they could
do the most damage to these structures, which I think is a
horrible thing to think about ifyou want to think about it.
Yeah, always when you hear aboutthe technical advancements and
research driven by warfare is always just like so grim because
(08:32):
the sort of methods that they were using when they were
dropping bombs on Japan, when they really ramped up their
bombing in 1945, these methods were actually originally
developed by the Germans during the Blitz.
So basically what they would do is they would drop a combination
of high explosive bombs and incendiaries, and they would
drop the explosives which were intended to destroy roofs and
(08:54):
walls, and that would open homesand buildings up to their sort
of vulnerable, very flammable interior.
And then they would drop the incendiaries and they would fall
into these open roofs and through open walls, and then
that would cause whole streets to go up in flames.
So after Curtis Lemay ordered the little testing raid, they
bombed Kobe again on March 16 and 17 of 1945.
(09:19):
And this time, 331-B29 bombers launched a fire bombing attack
against the city of Kobe. Again, 88141 people were
confirmed to have been killed inthe resulting firestorms.
If you're wondering what a firestorm is, it's when the fire
gets so bad that it becomes it'san ecosystem with winds and
(09:41):
stuff, and that'll keep the fireburning for a long, long time.
And these firestorms destroyed 3square miles of city, about the
fifth of its entire urban area. More than 650,000 people's homes
were destroyed, and the homes ofanother million people were
damaged. So that's a big bombing raid.
(10:01):
And then on June 5th of the sameyear, Kobe was bombed to town,
and this time there were 530 bombers and they destroyed 3.8
square miles. So that's almost 10 square
kilometers of the city. And 51% of what they were
rebuilding was destroyed again. So they literally had no chance.
(10:22):
Yeah, we really can't underestimate the destructive
power of these bombing raids. More people died during the fire
bombing of Tokyo that spring than during the immediate
aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yeah, We also saw fire bombing raids on the city of Justin, as
you might recall, if you've readthe slot Hearts 5, I think is 7
(10:43):
Justin, and it's, I think, one of the most destructive ways of
warfare. You've not really seen a movie
about firebombing, thankfully. I don't really want to see
another movie about firebombing,if I'm very honest.
But the movie does something that I find really interesting,
which is the fact that the Americans are almost anonymous
(11:04):
in this. You see the plans, you see a
little bit of the bombing, but you mostly see the results of
it. You don't really see a lot of
actual warfare going on, but youdo see the fallout.
Yeah. And I think it's pretty
effective in the sense that the person who wrote the short story
upon which this movie is based, he was 14 in 1945, I believe.
(11:26):
And so his impression of the warand the ending of the war is
really like a child becoming a teenager.
And so his impression of it would be very narrowed to his
own survival and his sister survival and less focused on,
you know, sort of the broader factors at play.
Yeah. When they reached the emergency
(11:48):
gathering point where she set upat the school, Saita learns that
his mother has been critically injured.
She goes to see her and she's wrapped in all kinds of
bandages, and you can't really see anything off her body except
for her closed eyes. But she dies.
And when she dies, Saita keeps it from his sister, so he
doesn't tell her. He wants to spare her the grief
(12:09):
of having lost their home and their mother.
Yeah, and this idea of letting her be innocent a little while
longer, although as we'll see, that's largely ends up being
outside of his control. I wonder how old Saita and
Satsuki are meant to be. Well, I think in real life,
Saita, quote UN quote, was 14 and his sister was 16 months
(12:29):
old. She was less than two years old,
I think. Right.
Too young? Yeah, for sure.
So the siblings go to live with their distant relatives.
They call her Auntie. She's voiced by Akimi Yamaguchi.
They write letters to their father, a naval officer, but he
never applies. So he's completely out of the
picture. They don't know what's happened
to him, But you know, Saita has this hope in his heart that his
(12:52):
father is going to come back andsort of make everything all
right again. Spoiler he doesn't.
Yeah, nothing good happens at the end.
No, the relationship they have with their aunt, if they stay
with her, deteriorates from being kind of pleasant to being
really unpleasant. She accuses them of doing
nothing to help with the more effort, but then she's only too
(13:14):
willing to eat all their provisions that they are
providing. So they're staying there, but
they're not really welcome. So even though they're being
treated as though they're dead guys by their aunt, they do try
and engage in some very cute childhood in the middle of a
very terrible situation. Yeah, I think that at this
(13:38):
point, so much of the Japanese population is almost sort of
immunized against this death andsuffering and everything.
They're seeing so much of it around them that the aunties
took them in because she feels some sense of family obligation.
But really, she doesn't really want them around.
No one is really looking out forthem or willing to help them
(13:58):
out, and everyone around them isjust almost too shell shocked to
really perceive their suffering as anything special or something
that should be helped. Yeah, I've found it really sad
how they're just wandering around trying to play while
nobody pays them any mind. Like they're pretty much being
ignored by just about everybody.It's one of those cliches, and
(14:21):
then we're going to say it's hard to watch.
This makes me really sad to see that children can be so
abandoned. So Seika finds warm dry cave
that seems like a refuge from their aunts household.
And you almost get the impression of like, you know,
when you're a kid and you think maybe you'll run away and the
first few hours seem easy because you have your snacks and
(14:45):
you you're hiding out in a tree house or something.
And you're like, oh, you know, Ican do this.
It's me against the world. And then sort of night comes and
reality sets in and then you go home to your family, except in
this case, they don't have a family to go home to.
So I think Seika's sort of living in this world where he's
like, all right, we're going to go hang out in this cave and
(15:06):
everything's going to be fine. And, you know, obviously that
doesn't happen. So the two children move out.
They go and live in The Cave, and at first they're able to
feed themselves using money thattheir mother has left them, as
well as rice that they acquire by trading her kimonos.
And again, they're having some moments of childhood whimsy, and
that almost makes it harder. To me, the scenes of The Cave
(15:30):
feel like the most Japanese to me, in the sense that it's like
your typical anime imagery whereit's all cute and beautiful and
you're like, yeah, and they're happy and everybody's joyful.
And then you are quickly reminded that it's not as joyful
as sighted. The next morning finds his
(15:51):
sister digging her crave for thefireflies.
Hence the title, which is a bit of a mass grave imagery there.
And it's revealed that her aunt also had told her that her
mother was dead. So Saita had been trying to keep
it from her, but she knew all along, and she seemed this
really wise dude, really Like she's supposed to be a kid, and
(16:13):
yet she's handling the death of her mother pretty calmly.
It's one of those things where she has been through way too
much for a child her age, to thepoint where she's sort of
accepted it, but she doesn't really understand it.
Yeah, she would be too young even to understand.
The fireflies just made me so sad because you realize that's
(16:35):
where the toucher comes from. And it's also almost a little
bit like the death of innocence in that moment when the
fireflies die. It's like, all right, I guess it
just went from straight to hopeful to never mind that hope.
Yeah, exactly. They get there and there's all
these beautiful fireflies flyingaround and they're kids, so
(16:56):
they're quite excited by this. And then you know they can't.
Last Nope, nothing lasts. So as time goes on, the Theta is
forced to begin stealing food tosurvive.
They are having a tough time. His sister's not doing well.
He takes sets ago to a Doctor Who diagnosis her with
malnutrition. She has this really bad rash all
(17:16):
over her body that he thinks is from the heat, but it's not
getting better. And the doctor's like, no, she's
super vitamin deficient, dude. Like, this is what happens when
you live in a cave and you only eat rice.
Yeah. And then he just lets them go
just like that, like it's no bigdeal.
He's probably seen this before. That's the sense that you get.
I feel like in the rest, we're at least kind of used to.
(17:38):
I don't know what it was like atthe time, even in the rest, but
at least if you go to the hospital, you'll be given some
sanctuary or you'll be sort of safe, but they're just sent back
out onto the street. It doesn't bode well for sets go
for sure. They're just simply aren't the
resources to look after them. And it would have been like that
(17:58):
probably in a lot of places at the end of the war.
There's just a lot of the infrastructure is gone.
People just, you know, they're out of sympathy for strangers
because so much terrible shit has happened to them and their
families, you know, Yeah. The imagery of Kobe after it's
been bombed at the very beginning of the movies, pretty
terrifying to look at. It's very desolate and there's
(18:20):
like nothing left. And site, site.
I was like, oh, look, that's thebuilding you already used to eat
rice soup or whatever, he says. And it's still very innocent.
And you're like, oh boy, oh, he's not going to.
Just the destruction is complete.
You know, you look at the city and you're like, wow, they
should probably just go somewhere else and try again.
(18:41):
You just can't imagine that scale of destruction and how
they're going to come back from that.
You know, everything that you know is gone.
I also think we don't really understand, or at least here, I
don't think we have it like quite like that, where the
houses were literally almost made of paper.
Everything ended up in his house, was flammable.
(19:02):
There's no chance. There's no putting it out,
Cytler. Instead, Japan has surrendered
and extrapolates from that that his father must be dead because
he's not replied to any of his letters and he's not returned,
so he must be dead. He takes the remainder of what
they have left from their family's savings out of the bank
and uses it to buy food. And it's not a whole lot, but it
(19:24):
feels really hopeful again in the moment, Like it's like, I'm
going to buy food and I'm going to make food for Satska.
But. Yeah.
And there's really this sort of young person's mentality of
like, he takes the rest of the money out of the bank and it's
sort of his big last push for survival.
He's like, OK, well, I'm going to buy a bunch of food and we're
going to have a meal. And I don't know what the plan
(19:45):
is after that, but that's the only thing I know to do now that
my last hope of my father comingback and fixing everything has
gone away. Also, throughout this entire
movie, the chin of candies such guys been slowly eating the
lettuce hurricanes from it and before he goes to buy her food,
(20:05):
she's been eating the little buttons that are in it and it's
like, no, you can't eat those orjust their buttons.
So. She really is starving, which
kind of becomes evident when he returns to The Cave to make her
food and he's brought her this watermelon that she kind of
socks on for a second. But it's too late for her and
(20:26):
she dies of starvation in The Cave.
And it's the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life because
slightly then has to cremate her.
And as we've seen from the very beginning, he gathers her
answers into the little candy tan.
No child should ever have to do that.
Yeah. And then we return to the post
(20:47):
war scene that we were at in thebeginning, and this time Saita
has passed away and we see Cesico Spirit sort of curling up
next to him as they overlook thecity.
And it's the modern day Kobe I think we're looking at with them
as if they've been there the entire time as ghosts.
It's quite beautiful, the endingof that, even though it's really
(21:08):
sad. Yeah, definitely one of those
movies where nothing really happens, quote UN quote.
It's really just sort of a powerful emotional journey that
you go on with these two characters.
Yeah, and the cremation scene, Ithink nobody should ever have to
(21:31):
watch that, to be very honest with you.
It's beautiful, but also you shouldn't have to watch it.
Yeah, when I was reading about the details of the short story
after I had watched the movie, The author was talking about how
there were times when they wouldget food and instead of giving
it to his sister, he would eat it because he was so hungry.
And, you know, when she would cry, sometimes he would lose his
(21:54):
patience and he would hit her. And so he obviously felt hugely
guilty for what happened to her because of course, his real life
sister did also starve to death and similar circumstances.
It's so awful because this is like a 14 year old kid.
If you put anyone in a high stress situation like that,
they're going to probably not doa great job of taking care of
other people if they can't even take care of themselves.
(22:16):
And so you understand why he feels this guilt.
And the story is awful. But at the same time, and you're
like, how many people would do better in that scenario?
It's this incredible pressure toput on somebody.
It is like putting the oxygen mask on in a plane.
You have to put it on yourself first before you can do it to
(22:36):
someone else. But Jesus, if your sister is
that small and she can't really help herself, what are you going
to do, right? Yeah, yeah.
I had read somewhere that when they made this into a movie, the
sort of thought behind it was, as you said at the beginning,
it's not really meant to be an anti war film like it is
incidentally. But really the author meant it
(22:59):
to be a story about people. And particularly in the 1980s in
Japan, I think there was this sense from the post war
generation that these people whohadn't been through the war, who
didn't have those memories in 1945 were sort of young and
spoiled. And, you know, they didn't
understand the suffering that other people had been through.
(23:19):
And so he wrote these two child characters who do go into this
situation very naive and innocent and spoiled in some
ways, and they have no idea how to survive without the help of
their parents, etcetera. Yeah, it does make me wonder if
this man, this author of this story who has a similar
experience, if he blames the Japanese people for what
(23:43):
happened to him and his sister, because in the movie you get the
sound that that. But these people are the biggest
disappointment in this because it starts with him dying and
being abandoned in this translation and this janitors or
cleaners, whatever they are kindof Speaking of them with such
little respect as they lie dying.
(24:05):
The first one says there's another one over here.
He's also dying as if it's nothing.
And it's probably was like that because so many children were
dying and even non children, what do you call them?
Adults were dying. But yeah, it's not a short
movie. It feels like it because we've
only been talking for about 30 minutes about this.
(24:26):
It's not a short movie. So even though not a lot
happens, you still have to kind of hang in there quite a bit
because it's it's just a really sad watch.
Yeah, for sure. And even in the moments of
lightheartedness and whimsy, youfeel that pervasive
hopelessness. You know what's coming.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I looked into this movie a little bit because I was
(24:50):
curious. It seems like it's kind of part
of a almost a genre of movies inJapan, or a genre of media, I
suppose, people writing about their wartime experiences in the
decades afterwards. This movie is apparently shown
on television in Japan around August 15th, which is the day
that the Japanese celebrate as end of the war day and which is
(25:12):
known in the West as BJ Day, Victory over Japan.
And the genre is kind of interesting because of course,
like every country that was involved in World War 2, the
Japanese do have a collective memory of it.
And there's this sort of sense, I think, that regular soldiers
were deceived by the wealthy andpowerful.
(25:34):
And so there was, you know, the institution of the emperor.
There were these old laws in place where people felt like
they had to obey the emperor. They were almost like tricked
into engaging in this war that was unwinnable.
And there is kind of a sense of Japan as victims.
And there have been in recent years, I would say, a bit more
(25:58):
broadening of the popular knowledge about the atrocities
that were committed by the Japanese Army in the years
leading up to and during World War 2.
But I do think that a lot of thepopular memory is really
centered around 1945, because for the Japanese, really they
sort of started expanding imperialistically towards the
(26:20):
end of the 19th century. And then there weren't really
battles fought on Japanese soil until right at the end of the
war. And so for a lot of Japanese
people, it was like, we're winning, we're doing great,
everything is fine. The war is not impacting us
directly very much. And then all of a sudden in
1945, you have these massive incendiary bombings, you have
(26:40):
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you have the massive
surrender, the soldiers coming home or not coming home, as the
case may be. And so a lot of Japanese people,
1945 looms larger in their imagination than the rest of the
years of the war. And so there is this sense of
Japanese victimhood. And there's also, I think this
really big sense of, of this anti war feeling of pacifism of
(27:03):
we don't want to go there again kind of saying, there's this
quote that I borrowed from asianstudies.org where they say
numerous post war authors, film makers, TV producers and
educators have sought to preserve the painful memories of
1945 as a means of teaching younger generations the precious
value of peace and to quell any resurgence of militarism.
That's interesting. I do wonder there because there
(27:26):
are so many civilian casualties.Can you feel anything other than
a victim as a collective? I mean, I guess if you were in a
Japanese army it would be different, but also so many
civilians. Died.
Yeah. Well, and I think in the past 30
or 40 years, I was reading abouthow there have been choices made
(27:47):
about Japanese school books, forexample, where countries like
China and Korea have lodged formal complaints basically
saying that have you guys forgotten the Rape of Nanjing?
Like have you forgotten that youforce drafted people in Korea,
that you made Korean women into comfort women?
That all of this sort of colonial shit was happening in
(28:09):
the years leading up to and during World War 2.
So I think there is this real sense from a lot of the
countries that did directly interact with Japan during World
War 2 that they don't take accountability for a lot of the
things that their army did and instead.
Look in the mirror. Yeah, their own experience as
civilians, as victims in 19, 45 sort of supersedes the memory of
(28:31):
all the other stuff. And so I mean, it's just super
interesting to read about. Definitely.
And I didn't know a lot about Japan.
Like, we've had some specific stuff going on, but it's always
in relation to the Americans in this case.
So it's quite interesting to read about and to watch a movie
(28:52):
about Japan as a country during World War 2, because obviously
not a lot happens in Japan itself.
So definitely interesting and also surprisingly refreshing to
see it animated. I just didn't think I would like
it very much, but I did. Is this time for us to read it,
you think? Yeah, I suppose.
Yeah. How many dead fireflies out of
(29:13):
10 or would you like to read it?Man, I would rate this movie.
Probably. It's tough because I don't want
to watch it again and it was so sad, but it was a really well
made movie so I think I'm going to rate it 8 1/2 Dead Fireflies
out of 10. It's really gorgeous to watch.
It's this very tight lens on sort of gets you learn more
(29:37):
about these two characters and anything else.
And it's this like tight lines on their lives.
And then what's happening in World War 2 is sort of the
backdrop. And really what's most important
is the arc of these characters. And I always do like to have,
you know, a character driven drama.
And in this case, I thought the sibling relationship was really
(29:59):
well articulated. Some of the dialogue was really
lovely. It's a great movie, but it's a
huge bummer is I guess what I'llleave it with.
But it was kind of an interesting jumping off point to
exploring the post war collective memory of the
Japanese. Well, you've pretty much said
everything I wanted to say, and so I'm going to reach it. 8 Dead
(30:23):
Farm flies out of 10 I think. I also thought it was just a
beautiful story. I don't think it's meant to be a
movie that you watch over and over.
I think it's kind of A1 and donekind of movie to watch.
But it made me change my mind about anime, which I'm not
really a fan of. Usually I don't really like
(30:43):
Japanese animation very much, but if it's used in this way, I
find it very effective. And I thought it might make it
less emotional, but it definitely almost makes it more
emotional to see it. So it gets a lot of those points
just for like form and style andstory.
(31:05):
But like you said, please don't make me watch it again because I
will cry. I think I read online somewhere
that it has gained such popularity, particularly in
Japan. But of course Studio Jubilee is
famous around the world for making really high quality
animated films. But I think I've read somewhere
that it's been adapted a couple of times and they even did a
(31:26):
live action I think. Oh no.
And I'm like, I'm like, I'm good.
You shared an image of a Japanese child carrying his dead
sister or dad sibling on his back, waiting for the sibling to
be cremated. And just that image is making me
beg not to turn it into some sick Hollywood movie ever.
(31:49):
Like please don't Hollywood, please leave it alone.
It's not how are you love the Japanese handle it.
I do think the Japanese handle this with quite a lot of
respect. In that sense, I don't want to
see this life action that it would just be sensationalism
that we don't need. I know it's especially so long
after the war when it's not necessarily part of the actual
(32:12):
living public memory anymore. You do run the risk sometimes of
it becoming like torture porn kind of thing.
Like you said, a bit sensationalized.
Like, I don't really need to seepeople running from the fire and
jumping into water that they don't realize is boiling.
Like, I don't really need all the, you know, if you do read
Slaughterhouse 5, the author, Kurt Vonnegut, who's a POW at
(32:34):
Dresden during the firebombing. And though it's a novel, he
talks about some of the things that he saw.
And it's just like, yeah, I'm good.
I don't need to see. I don't need to see a live
version of that. No thanks.
No, I agree. I think everybody should make me
watch this film just once and respected for what it is and
(32:55):
then leave it. Alone, yeah.
Are you reading anything new? I just started this book called
Unmask Alice, LSD, Satanic Panicin the Imposter Behind the
World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson and there was a
(33:19):
book that was pretty famous, or at least it was like in the 90s
and early 2000s when I probably read it.
It was called Go Ask Alice and it was supposedly A memoir
written by a teenager who had been addicted to drugs and all
kinds of terrible shit happened to her.
(33:39):
And then apparently it turns outthat it was basically just a
cautionary tale written by some Mormon.
Like, it's not really a memoir at all.
And so I'm really excited to read this book and find out more
details about it. So when you say LSD, is that LSD
as in the letter of LSD? Yeah, right.
(34:01):
As in the drug acid. Right, that sounds interesting
and different once again. How do you do it, Sam?
I can't. I'm not reading anything but
right. But I am watching lots of movies
and doing lots of research. That is pretty interesting.
We've got some fun movies comingup.
And I guess I'll be reading TonyRushmore's biography of Rat
(34:24):
Sequence soon, because we might have a guest soon.
Yes, that's up on my docket as well.
I'm really looking forward to it.
You've got a physical copy of that, don't you?
I'm jealous. You know, I got it from SAS
Rogue Heroes correspondent George.
Oh, I'm not jealous at all, likeat all.
But incident, of course I'm jealous.
(34:44):
I'm always jealous of Brooks. Anyway, thank you everybody for
listening. You can find us wherever you
find your podcast. You can rate US five stars.
We would very much like it. You can also comment on this
episode. Actually, nobody ever does this,
but you can. And you can tell us what we
should watch next. You can send this officer to
(35:04):
your friend who would like to press for this funny thing.
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie Reviewer Podcast and
you can visit our website rosiereviewer.com.
See you next week. Bye.
Welcome to Rosie the Reviewer. We're your host.
I'm Sam. And I'm married you.
And we like World War 2 media and we want to talk about it.
Welcome back to Rosa Day reviewer.
This week we are discussing Grave of the Fireflies which
came out in 1988. It is a Japanese animated war
(00:24):
film. It was written and directed by
ISO Takahata and produced by Studio Ghibli or Ghibli if you
will. It's based on the 1967 semi
autobiographical short story which is also called Grave of
the Fireflies by Akiyuki Nosaka and instead in the city of Kabi,
(00:46):
Japan. And it tells the story of two
siblings called Saita and Cisco and a struggle to survive during
the final ones of the opportunity in Japan.
Your best question to choose because it's really, really sad.
And it was supposedly written asan apology to his younger
adoptive sister called Kaiko whodied of malnutrition in similar
(01:07):
circumstances. You can watch this movie if you
dare to on Netflux. What did you think of this
movie? It's beautifully animated.
I saw someone on Reddit refer toit as the best movie they'll
never watch again. It's a really heartbreaking
story. I feel like it depicts this
relationship between siblings with this kind of like
(01:28):
simplicity and realness. And there's moments where it's
full of childhood whimsy. There's moments where it's
absolutely heartbreaking. And I got this sense from it
that reminded me of Never Let MeGo, which is also by a Japanese
author, where it's just this pervasive hopelessness because
you know that the ending can't end well.
(01:50):
And yeah, that's kind of the feeling I got from this movie.
It's a really beautiful movie. It's a really sad movie.
What did you think of it? I knew going in that it was
going to be sad because I read just a little bit about it
beforehand. It's got that Japanese magic
that I think Western movies never have.
(02:11):
In that sense, it's like you said, it's a little bit magical,
but it's also very brutally honest in a way you wouldn't
expect an animated movie to be. I don't think this is a
children's movie at all, like the way the Japanese use
animation to tell difficult stories, something I don't think
we do very much in the West. And it's got a little bit of
(02:34):
ghost story going on as well, which I always enjoy.
But there is no light. Well, there is light in this
movie, but it's not very helpfulby the end of the movie.
And I never thought I would enjoy an animated movie about
Open 2 as much as I did this one, even though I don't think
I'll be watching it again just because it breaks my heart.
(02:57):
But it also gave me a chance to learn a little bit more about
Japan, and especially about the civilians in Japan, which I feel
are almost more harshly judged in this movie than the Americans
are who are attacking our city. It's not meant to be an anti war
movie, but for not an anti war movie, it's for the anti.
(03:19):
War, Yeah, I wasn't able to readthe short story.
I had a quick cursory look for it.
I could only find it available in Japanese, but I gather from
just hearing other people talk about it or reading other people
talking about it, this movie even adds more light into the
story than there was in real life.
I mean, if if possible, real life was even grimmer than this
(03:40):
movie depicts it as being. So yeah, I just thought it was a
super interesting choice. I agree.
For an animated feature. For people wanting to read the
story in English, you're going to have to wait until September
because Penguin is releasing it in September so we can read it
then hopefully. Let's get into.
(04:07):
The movie starts with a quote. The main character says,
September 21st, 1945. That was the night I died.
And we're introduced to you, a young man named Seita, played by
Tsutomo Tatsumi. He's starving to death in a
train station. And we are kind of getting the
end of the story here. And then we're going to circle
(04:28):
back and find out a little more about how he got into this
situation. But we hear him mutter one word.
His sister's name, Setsuko, She's played by Ayanu Shiraishi.
And a station worker discovers acandy tin that that Seita has
been carrying around. The station worker throws it
away because it doesn't seem to be valuable in any way, and it
spills open on the ground, revealing Sepsico's ashes.
(04:51):
And in this sort of magical realism moment, her spirit
emerges from it. Yeah, at this point you're kind
of like, oh, that's kind of cute, but then also you just
watch someone literally just starve.
I do wonder though, did you watch it in Japanese or did you
watch it in the English version on Netflix?
Oh, I watched it in Japanese with subtitles I.
(05:13):
Watched it in English because I was watching it at night in bed
and I was like, if I watch it inJapanese, I'm not going to be
able to follow it because I'll fall asleep.
So I've listened to the English version.
So I wonder if our pronunciations are also going to
be based a little bit on the Japanese versus American version
of it. But the only thing that kind of
(05:34):
disrupted the viewing experiencefor me in the very beginning is
that the movie's almost a void of music.
Like there's not a whole lot of music.
So your side effects, it's quitea bit, but there's not a lot of
music and at the beginning and that kind of took me out of it.
But you get used to it fairly quickly.
And these scenes of of them as spirits, because they end up
(05:57):
being spirits together, they look very magical.
They're like orangey and like you're watching a fairy tale,
almost. Yeah, and we get introduced to
the thematic fireflies from the title and this as well.
They're flying all over the place.
There are these like little glimmers of light all around
them Which. Is why I thought initially it
might be slightly hopeful, but again, there's no hope in this.
(06:19):
Anyway. We flashback to the American
bombing of Kobe to work, the endto open for two and the
siblings, his mother, played by or voiced by Yoshikoshino Hara.
He separated from them as they tried to make their way to a
bomb shelter. The subjects invade the bombing,
but they lose their home. And their home is not the only
(06:42):
one to be lost. SATA and voiceover mentions the
black rain after an air raid andblack rain is.
I don't know if it's a popular theme in post war Japanese
media, but I did see a few different references to it when
I was doing a bit of background research into this.
So due to intense fires generated by the bombing,
massive amounts of ash released into the atmosphere would seed
(07:04):
the clouds resulting in a tar like quote UN quote black rain
that would fall after the explosions.
And this effect is best known for occurring after the bombing
of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, during which the black rain also
contained radioactive fallout and could cause radioactive
burns. So.
Just to give you a little bit ofbackground about the bombing of
Kirby. Kirby was bombed a number of
(07:27):
times by the Americans, but the first air raid on Kobe was on
February 4th of 1945. And they in the US there's a
training ground called the Japanese village which is said
on the dark way proven gardens in Utah in Gratis Lemay.
You may remember us talking about him before of the USA Air
(07:48):
Force ordered B29 Super Fortressbombers to drop incendiary bombs
to burn Japan's mostly wooden paper houses in an experiment
carpet bombing against Kirby. So the first raid was just
practice, which is, you know, pretty rough.
And actually the training ground, it's called the Japanese
village because they literally built an entire Japanese village
(08:12):
on it, like a rebuilding and rebuilding to see how they could
do the most damage to these structures, which I think is a
horrible thing to think about ifyou want to think about it.
Yeah, always when you hear aboutthe technical advancements and
research driven by warfare is always just like so grim because
(08:32):
the sort of methods that they were using when they were
dropping bombs on Japan, when they really ramped up their
bombing in 1945, these methods were actually originally
developed by the Germans during the Blitz.
So basically what they would do is they would drop a combination
of high explosive bombs and incendiaries, and they would
drop the explosives which were intended to destroy roofs and
(08:54):
walls, and that would open homesand buildings up to their sort
of vulnerable, very flammable interior.
And then they would drop the incendiaries and they would fall
into these open roofs and through open walls, and then
that would cause whole streets to go up in flames.
So after Curtis Lemay ordered the little testing raid, they
bombed Kobe again on March 16 and 17 of 1945.
(09:19):
And this time, 331-B29 bombers launched a fire bombing attack
against the city of Kobe. Again, 88141 people were
confirmed to have been killed inthe resulting firestorms.
If you're wondering what a firestorm is, it's when the fire
gets so bad that it becomes it'san ecosystem with winds and
(09:41):
stuff, and that'll keep the fireburning for a long, long time.
And these firestorms destroyed 3square miles of city, about the
fifth of its entire urban area. More than 650,000 people's homes
were destroyed, and the homes ofanother million people were
damaged. So that's a big bombing raid.
(10:01):
And then on June 5th of the sameyear, Kobe was bombed to town,
and this time there were 530 bombers and they destroyed 3.8
square miles. So that's almost 10 square
kilometers of the city. And 51% of what they were
rebuilding was destroyed again. So they literally had no chance.
(10:22):
Yeah, we really can't underestimate the destructive
power of these bombing raids. More people died during the fire
bombing of Tokyo that spring than during the immediate
aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yeah, We also saw fire bombing raids on the city of Justin, as
you might recall, if you've readthe slot Hearts 5, I think is 7
(10:43):
Justin, and it's, I think, one of the most destructive ways of
warfare. You've not really seen a movie
about firebombing, thankfully. I don't really want to see
another movie about firebombing,if I'm very honest.
But the movie does something that I find really interesting,
which is the fact that the Americans are almost anonymous
(11:04):
in this. You see the plans, you see a
little bit of the bombing, but you mostly see the results of
it. You don't really see a lot of
actual warfare going on, but youdo see the fallout.
Yeah. And I think it's pretty
effective in the sense that the person who wrote the short story
upon which this movie is based, he was 14 in 1945, I believe.
(11:26):
And so his impression of the warand the ending of the war is
really like a child becoming a teenager.
And so his impression of it would be very narrowed to his
own survival and his sister survival and less focused on,
you know, sort of the broader factors at play.
Yeah. When they reached the emergency
(11:48):
gathering point where she set upat the school, Saita learns that
his mother has been critically injured.
She goes to see her and she's wrapped in all kinds of
bandages, and you can't really see anything off her body except
for her closed eyes. But she dies.
And when she dies, Saita keeps it from his sister, so he
doesn't tell her. He wants to spare her the grief
(12:09):
of having lost their home and their mother.
Yeah, and this idea of letting her be innocent a little while
longer, although as we'll see, that's largely ends up being
outside of his control. I wonder how old Saita and
Satsuki are meant to be. Well, I think in real life,
Saita, quote UN quote, was 14 and his sister was 16 months
(12:29):
old. She was less than two years old,
I think. Right.
Too young? Yeah, for sure.
So the siblings go to live with their distant relatives.
They call her Auntie. She's voiced by Akimi Yamaguchi.
They write letters to their father, a naval officer, but he
never applies. So he's completely out of the
picture. They don't know what's happened
to him, But you know, Saita has this hope in his heart that his
(12:52):
father is going to come back andsort of make everything all
right again. Spoiler he doesn't.
Yeah, nothing good happens at the end.
No, the relationship they have with their aunt, if they stay
with her, deteriorates from being kind of pleasant to being
really unpleasant. She accuses them of doing
nothing to help with the more effort, but then she's only too
(13:14):
willing to eat all their provisions that they are
providing. So they're staying there, but
they're not really welcome. So even though they're being
treated as though they're dead guys by their aunt, they do try
and engage in some very cute childhood in the middle of a
very terrible situation. Yeah, I think that at this
(13:38):
point, so much of the Japanese population is almost sort of
immunized against this death andsuffering and everything.
They're seeing so much of it around them that the aunties
took them in because she feels some sense of family obligation.
But really, she doesn't really want them around.
No one is really looking out forthem or willing to help them
(13:58):
out, and everyone around them isjust almost too shell shocked to
really perceive their suffering as anything special or something
that should be helped. Yeah, I've found it really sad
how they're just wandering around trying to play while
nobody pays them any mind. Like they're pretty much being
ignored by just about everybody.It's one of those cliches, and
(14:21):
then we're going to say it's hard to watch.
This makes me really sad to see that children can be so
abandoned. So Seika finds warm dry cave
that seems like a refuge from their aunts household.
And you almost get the impression of like, you know,
when you're a kid and you think maybe you'll run away and the
first few hours seem easy because you have your snacks and
(14:45):
you you're hiding out in a tree house or something.
And you're like, oh, you know, Ican do this.
It's me against the world. And then sort of night comes and
reality sets in and then you go home to your family, except in
this case, they don't have a family to go home to.
So I think Seika's sort of living in this world where he's
like, all right, we're going to go hang out in this cave and
(15:06):
everything's going to be fine. And, you know, obviously that
doesn't happen. So the two children move out.
They go and live in The Cave, and at first they're able to
feed themselves using money thattheir mother has left them, as
well as rice that they acquire by trading her kimonos.
And again, they're having some moments of childhood whimsy, and
that almost makes it harder. To me, the scenes of The Cave
(15:30):
feel like the most Japanese to me, in the sense that it's like
your typical anime imagery whereit's all cute and beautiful and
you're like, yeah, and they're happy and everybody's joyful.
And then you are quickly reminded that it's not as joyful
as sighted. The next morning finds his
(15:51):
sister digging her crave for thefireflies.
Hence the title, which is a bit of a mass grave imagery there.
And it's revealed that her aunt also had told her that her
mother was dead. So Saita had been trying to keep
it from her, but she knew all along, and she seemed this
really wise dude, really Like she's supposed to be a kid, and
(16:13):
yet she's handling the death of her mother pretty calmly.
It's one of those things where she has been through way too
much for a child her age, to thepoint where she's sort of
accepted it, but she doesn't really understand it.
Yeah, she would be too young even to understand.
The fireflies just made me so sad because you realize that's
(16:35):
where the toucher comes from. And it's also almost a little
bit like the death of innocence in that moment when the
fireflies die. It's like, all right, I guess it
just went from straight to hopeful to never mind that hope.
Yeah, exactly. They get there and there's all
these beautiful fireflies flyingaround and they're kids, so
(16:56):
they're quite excited by this. And then you know they can't.
Last Nope, nothing lasts. So as time goes on, the Theta is
forced to begin stealing food tosurvive.
They are having a tough time. His sister's not doing well.
He takes sets ago to a Doctor Who diagnosis her with
malnutrition. She has this really bad rash all
(17:16):
over her body that he thinks is from the heat, but it's not
getting better. And the doctor's like, no, she's
super vitamin deficient, dude. Like, this is what happens when
you live in a cave and you only eat rice.
Yeah. And then he just lets them go
just like that, like it's no bigdeal.
He's probably seen this before. That's the sense that you get.
I feel like in the rest, we're at least kind of used to.
(17:38):
I don't know what it was like atthe time, even in the rest, but
at least if you go to the hospital, you'll be given some
sanctuary or you'll be sort of safe, but they're just sent back
out onto the street. It doesn't bode well for sets go
for sure. They're just simply aren't the
resources to look after them. And it would have been like that
(17:58):
probably in a lot of places at the end of the war.
There's just a lot of the infrastructure is gone.
People just, you know, they're out of sympathy for strangers
because so much terrible shit has happened to them and their
families, you know, Yeah. The imagery of Kobe after it's
been bombed at the very beginning of the movies, pretty
terrifying to look at. It's very desolate and there's
(18:20):
like nothing left. And site, site.
I was like, oh, look, that's thebuilding you already used to eat
rice soup or whatever, he says. And it's still very innocent.
And you're like, oh boy, oh, he's not going to.
Just the destruction is complete.
You know, you look at the city and you're like, wow, they
should probably just go somewhere else and try again.
(18:41):
You just can't imagine that scale of destruction and how
they're going to come back from that.
You know, everything that you know is gone.
I also think we don't really understand, or at least here, I
don't think we have it like quite like that, where the
houses were literally almost made of paper.
Everything ended up in his house, was flammable.
(19:02):
There's no chance. There's no putting it out,
Cytler. Instead, Japan has surrendered
and extrapolates from that that his father must be dead because
he's not replied to any of his letters and he's not returned,
so he must be dead. He takes the remainder of what
they have left from their family's savings out of the bank
and uses it to buy food. And it's not a whole lot, but it
(19:24):
feels really hopeful again in the moment, Like it's like, I'm
going to buy food and I'm going to make food for Satska.
But. Yeah.
And there's really this sort of young person's mentality of
like, he takes the rest of the money out of the bank and it's
sort of his big last push for survival.
He's like, OK, well, I'm going to buy a bunch of food and we're
going to have a meal. And I don't know what the plan
(19:45):
is after that, but that's the only thing I know to do now that
my last hope of my father comingback and fixing everything has
gone away. Also, throughout this entire
movie, the chin of candies such guys been slowly eating the
lettuce hurricanes from it and before he goes to buy her food,
(20:05):
she's been eating the little buttons that are in it and it's
like, no, you can't eat those orjust their buttons.
So. She really is starving, which
kind of becomes evident when he returns to The Cave to make her
food and he's brought her this watermelon that she kind of
socks on for a second. But it's too late for her and
(20:26):
she dies of starvation in The Cave.
And it's the saddest thing I've ever seen in my life because
slightly then has to cremate her.
And as we've seen from the very beginning, he gathers her
answers into the little candy tan.
No child should ever have to do that.
Yeah. And then we return to the post
(20:47):
war scene that we were at in thebeginning, and this time Saita
has passed away and we see Cesico Spirit sort of curling up
next to him as they overlook thecity.
And it's the modern day Kobe I think we're looking at with them
as if they've been there the entire time as ghosts.
It's quite beautiful, the endingof that, even though it's really
(21:08):
sad. Yeah, definitely one of those
movies where nothing really happens, quote UN quote.
It's really just sort of a powerful emotional journey that
you go on with these two characters.
Yeah, and the cremation scene, Ithink nobody should ever have to
(21:31):
watch that, to be very honest with you.
It's beautiful, but also you shouldn't have to watch it.
Yeah, when I was reading about the details of the short story
after I had watched the movie, The author was talking about how
there were times when they wouldget food and instead of giving
it to his sister, he would eat it because he was so hungry.
And, you know, when she would cry, sometimes he would lose his
(21:54):
patience and he would hit her. And so he obviously felt hugely
guilty for what happened to her because of course, his real life
sister did also starve to death and similar circumstances.
It's so awful because this is like a 14 year old kid.
If you put anyone in a high stress situation like that,
they're going to probably not doa great job of taking care of
other people if they can't even take care of themselves.
(22:16):
And so you understand why he feels this guilt.
And the story is awful. But at the same time, and you're
like, how many people would do better in that scenario?
It's this incredible pressure toput on somebody.
It is like putting the oxygen mask on in a plane.
You have to put it on yourself first before you can do it to
(22:36):
someone else. But Jesus, if your sister is
that small and she can't really help herself, what are you going
to do, right? Yeah, yeah.
I had read somewhere that when they made this into a movie, the
sort of thought behind it was, as you said at the beginning,
it's not really meant to be an anti war film like it is
incidentally. But really the author meant it
(22:59):
to be a story about people. And particularly in the 1980s in
Japan, I think there was this sense from the post war
generation that these people whohadn't been through the war, who
didn't have those memories in 1945 were sort of young and
spoiled. And, you know, they didn't
understand the suffering that other people had been through.
(23:19):
And so he wrote these two child characters who do go into this
situation very naive and innocent and spoiled in some
ways, and they have no idea how to survive without the help of
their parents, etcetera. Yeah, it does make me wonder if
this man, this author of this story who has a similar
experience, if he blames the Japanese people for what
(23:43):
happened to him and his sister, because in the movie you get the
sound that that. But these people are the biggest
disappointment in this because it starts with him dying and
being abandoned in this translation and this janitors or
cleaners, whatever they are kindof Speaking of them with such
little respect as they lie dying.
(24:05):
The first one says there's another one over here.
He's also dying as if it's nothing.
And it's probably was like that because so many children were
dying and even non children, what do you call them?
Adults were dying. But yeah, it's not a short
movie. It feels like it because we've
only been talking for about 30 minutes about this.
(24:26):
It's not a short movie. So even though not a lot
happens, you still have to kind of hang in there quite a bit
because it's it's just a really sad watch.
Yeah, for sure. And even in the moments of
lightheartedness and whimsy, youfeel that pervasive
hopelessness. You know what's coming.
Yeah. Yeah.
So I looked into this movie a little bit because I was
(24:50):
curious. It seems like it's kind of part
of a almost a genre of movies inJapan, or a genre of media, I
suppose, people writing about their wartime experiences in the
decades afterwards. This movie is apparently shown
on television in Japan around August 15th, which is the day
that the Japanese celebrate as end of the war day and which is
(25:12):
known in the West as BJ Day, Victory over Japan.
And the genre is kind of interesting because of course,
like every country that was involved in World War 2, the
Japanese do have a collective memory of it.
And there's this sort of sense, I think, that regular soldiers
were deceived by the wealthy andpowerful.
(25:34):
And so there was, you know, the institution of the emperor.
There were these old laws in place where people felt like
they had to obey the emperor. They were almost like tricked
into engaging in this war that was unwinnable.
And there is kind of a sense of Japan as victims.
And there have been in recent years, I would say, a bit more
(25:58):
broadening of the popular knowledge about the atrocities
that were committed by the Japanese Army in the years
leading up to and during World War 2.
But I do think that a lot of thepopular memory is really
centered around 1945, because for the Japanese, really they
sort of started expanding imperialistically towards the
(26:20):
end of the 19th century. And then there weren't really
battles fought on Japanese soil until right at the end of the
war. And so for a lot of Japanese
people, it was like, we're winning, we're doing great,
everything is fine. The war is not impacting us
directly very much. And then all of a sudden in
1945, you have these massive incendiary bombings, you have
(26:40):
the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you have the massive
surrender, the soldiers coming home or not coming home, as the
case may be. And so a lot of Japanese people,
1945 looms larger in their imagination than the rest of the
years of the war. And so there is this sense of
Japanese victimhood. And there's also, I think this
really big sense of, of this anti war feeling of pacifism of
(27:03):
we don't want to go there again kind of saying, there's this
quote that I borrowed from asianstudies.org where they say
numerous post war authors, film makers, TV producers and
educators have sought to preserve the painful memories of
1945 as a means of teaching younger generations the precious
value of peace and to quell any resurgence of militarism.
That's interesting. I do wonder there because there
(27:26):
are so many civilian casualties.Can you feel anything other than
a victim as a collective? I mean, I guess if you were in a
Japanese army it would be different, but also so many
civilians. Died.
Yeah. Well, and I think in the past 30
or 40 years, I was reading abouthow there have been choices made
(27:47):
about Japanese school books, forexample, where countries like
China and Korea have lodged formal complaints basically
saying that have you guys forgotten the Rape of Nanjing?
Like have you forgotten that youforce drafted people in Korea,
that you made Korean women into comfort women?
That all of this sort of colonial shit was happening in
(28:09):
the years leading up to and during World War 2.
So I think there is this real sense from a lot of the
countries that did directly interact with Japan during World
War 2 that they don't take accountability for a lot of the
things that their army did and instead.
Look in the mirror. Yeah, their own experience as
civilians, as victims in 19, 45 sort of supersedes the memory of
(28:31):
all the other stuff. And so I mean, it's just super
interesting to read about. Definitely.
And I didn't know a lot about Japan.
Like, we've had some specific stuff going on, but it's always
in relation to the Americans in this case.
So it's quite interesting to read about and to watch a movie
(28:52):
about Japan as a country during World War 2, because obviously
not a lot happens in Japan itself.
So definitely interesting and also surprisingly refreshing to
see it animated. I just didn't think I would like
it very much, but I did. Is this time for us to read it,
you think? Yeah, I suppose.
Yeah. How many dead fireflies out of
(29:13):
10 or would you like to read it?Man, I would rate this movie.
Probably. It's tough because I don't want
to watch it again and it was so sad, but it was a really well
made movie so I think I'm going to rate it 8 1/2 Dead Fireflies
out of 10. It's really gorgeous to watch.
It's this very tight lens on sort of gets you learn more
(29:37):
about these two characters and anything else.
And it's this like tight lines on their lives.
And then what's happening in World War 2 is sort of the
backdrop. And really what's most important
is the arc of these characters. And I always do like to have,
you know, a character driven drama.
And in this case, I thought the sibling relationship was really
(29:59):
well articulated. Some of the dialogue was really
lovely. It's a great movie, but it's a
huge bummer is I guess what I'llleave it with.
But it was kind of an interesting jumping off point to
exploring the post war collective memory of the
Japanese. Well, you've pretty much said
everything I wanted to say, and so I'm going to reach it. 8 Dead
(30:23):
Farm flies out of 10 I think. I also thought it was just a
beautiful story. I don't think it's meant to be a
movie that you watch over and over.
I think it's kind of A1 and donekind of movie to watch.
But it made me change my mind about anime, which I'm not
really a fan of. Usually I don't really like
(30:43):
Japanese animation very much, but if it's used in this way, I
find it very effective. And I thought it might make it
less emotional, but it definitely almost makes it more
emotional to see it. So it gets a lot of those points
just for like form and style andstory.
(31:05):
But like you said, please don't make me watch it again because I
will cry. I think I read online somewhere
that it has gained such popularity, particularly in
Japan. But of course Studio Jubilee is
famous around the world for making really high quality
animated films. But I think I've read somewhere
that it's been adapted a couple of times and they even did a
(31:26):
live action I think. Oh no.
And I'm like, I'm like, I'm good.
You shared an image of a Japanese child carrying his dead
sister or dad sibling on his back, waiting for the sibling to
be cremated. And just that image is making me
beg not to turn it into some sick Hollywood movie ever.
(31:49):
Like please don't Hollywood, please leave it alone.
It's not how are you love the Japanese handle it.
I do think the Japanese handle this with quite a lot of
respect. In that sense, I don't want to
see this life action that it would just be sensationalism
that we don't need. I know it's especially so long
after the war when it's not necessarily part of the actual
(32:12):
living public memory anymore. You do run the risk sometimes of
it becoming like torture porn kind of thing.
Like you said, a bit sensationalized.
Like, I don't really need to seepeople running from the fire and
jumping into water that they don't realize is boiling.
Like, I don't really need all the, you know, if you do read
Slaughterhouse 5, the author, Kurt Vonnegut, who's a POW at
(32:34):
Dresden during the firebombing. And though it's a novel, he
talks about some of the things that he saw.
And it's just like, yeah, I'm good.
I don't need to see. I don't need to see a live
version of that. No thanks.
No, I agree. I think everybody should make me
watch this film just once and respected for what it is and
(32:55):
then leave it. Alone, yeah.
Are you reading anything new? I just started this book called
Unmask Alice, LSD, Satanic Panicin the Imposter Behind the
World's Most Notorious Diaries by Rick Emerson and there was a
(33:19):
book that was pretty famous, or at least it was like in the 90s
and early 2000s when I probably read it.
It was called Go Ask Alice and it was supposedly A memoir
written by a teenager who had been addicted to drugs and all
kinds of terrible shit happened to her.
(33:39):
And then apparently it turns outthat it was basically just a
cautionary tale written by some Mormon.
Like, it's not really a memoir at all.
And so I'm really excited to read this book and find out more
details about it. So when you say LSD, is that LSD
as in the letter of LSD? Yeah, right.
(34:01):
As in the drug acid. Right, that sounds interesting
and different once again. How do you do it, Sam?
I can't. I'm not reading anything but
right. But I am watching lots of movies
and doing lots of research. That is pretty interesting.
We've got some fun movies comingup.
And I guess I'll be reading TonyRushmore's biography of Rat
(34:24):
Sequence soon, because we might have a guest soon.
Yes, that's up on my docket as well.
I'm really looking forward to it.
You've got a physical copy of that, don't you?
I'm jealous. You know, I got it from SAS
Rogue Heroes correspondent George.
Oh, I'm not jealous at all, likeat all.
But incident, of course I'm jealous.
(34:44):
I'm always jealous of Brooks. Anyway, thank you everybody for
listening. You can find us wherever you
find your podcast. You can rate US five stars.
We would very much like it. You can also comment on this
episode. Actually, nobody ever does this,
but you can. And you can tell us what we
should watch next. You can send this officer to
(35:04):
your friend who would like to press for this funny thing.
You can follow us on Instagram at Rosie Reviewer Podcast and
you can visit our website rosiereviewer.com.
See you next week. Bye.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.