Originally published on March 5, 2023 for Japan 178 at UC Berkeley.

Kurosawa’s Ikiru and Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies explore the themes of agency and death. Both films make social commentaries on contemporary Japan by showing ordinary people living in flawed systems and by injecting seriousness into those commentaries using death. Grave of the Fireflies criticizes the social support system of Japan during World War II through the empty agency of Seita and Setsuko. Ikiru criticizes the public institutions of post-war Japan through Watanabe’s personal and bureaucratic transformation. Whereas the theme of death instills poignancy and defeat into Grave of the Fireflies, the theme of death points in the direction of some hope and reformation in Ikiru.

Both films highlight the flaws and in particular the apathy of contemporary Japanese social structures including family, town, work, and government. In Grave of the Fireflies, the literal deaths of two innocent children, first Setsuko and then Seita, leaves the watcher wondering who is to blame, what part of the system caused such a tragedy. Their aunt emotionally abandons them, a farmer catches Seita stealing and beats him up, and a doctor sends them away with little help or plan. The siblings fall through the safety net of their extended family, then the net of their town, and finally the net of their government. It could be argued that the obvious failures of these social structures are criticism of them but they could also be a criticism of a larger root cause like World War II itself. The criticism in Ikiru is more clear-cut: the overly bureaucratic social structure that is the post-war civil service fails to do its job and meet the needs of the people. The protagonist Watanabe embodies an archetypal salaryman, dutifully stamping through mounds of paper day after day and ignoring the pleas of local townswomen to build a park in place of the cesspool. But after finding out he has only six months left to live, he realizes he’s wasted his life. One coworker describes him as a “mummy,” literally comparing him to a dead man. At this point in the film, Watanabe is a part of a complacent and rigid system that fails to meet the needs of ordinary people, the same sort of apathetic system that failed to help Seita and Setsuko in Grave of the Fireflies.

Seita and Setsuko have an empty agency, as they survive cheerfully but unsustainably by themselves, creating dramatic irony that highlights their naivete and makes their deaths more poignant. The start of the film shows Seita’s death dramatically, first with him slouching and then him lying on his side, dead. With his outcome revealed, the film tells his story and the viewer analyzes every action through that initial tragic lens. When the siblings part with their Aunt, laughing and cheering as they walk away, the audience does not share their enthusiasm. When Seita resourcefully creates flavored water from the empty candy tin, bringing a smile to Setsuko, it is sweet but crushingly sad. The dramatic irony, made possible by the sibling’s innocence, creates a poignancy. The optimism of Seita and Setsuko is not encouraging, like the candy is not nourishing, like the fireflies light is not sustained more than one night. Setsuko’s final act drives dramatic irony, which is a mismatch between the character’s understanding and the audience’s understanding of the film’s reality, up a notch to delirium, which is a mismatch between a character’s understanding of their reality and the actual reality in the film. Lying in bed, barely conscious, Setsuko offers Seita a rock that she believes to be steamed rice. She dies moments later. The transition from dramatic irony to delirium emphasizes the naivete and innocence of the two siblings, whose agency is truly empty even when they seem cheerful. Tension is released and tragedy follows, as it becomes clear that nourishment is too late now and that any form of agency the siblings had was in fact empty.

In contrast, the agency of Watanabe in Ikiru is genuine, as he evolves personally and transforms his previously passive role in the civil service to an active one, though whether this is lasting change is an open question. Initially, Watanabe is a cog in the machine that is bureaucracy but then he rages against the dying of the light in order to build a useful park for others. After a conversation with a happy coworker who enjoys making toys for others, he is metaphorically “reborn,” as the "Happy Birthday” song plays in the background. He makes it his mission to transform a cesspool into a park. The common thread between both of their meaningful activities is that they are working for others’ wellbeing. In a system where "doing anything but nothing is radical," Watanabe becomes an impactful radical. He confronts bureaucratic red tape, authority, and death threats, ultimately completing the park just before his death. But after Watanabe passes away, his successor does not carry on his values, instead redirecting a group in need to another department and confidently staring down a dissenting worker who remembers Watanabe. Thus, Kurosawa is not just an optimist but a realist, who reminds the viewer that change is difficult and that the individual has limited power. Watanabe’s position of head of the department was a key part of his agency and the dissenting worker, who has lower status in the company, has less agency and cannot be expected to go the distances that Watanabe went, from ignoring death threats to standing up to the deputy mayor. Kurosawa emphasizes the deeply embedded power structures in post-war Japan, in spite of the United States’ short-lived attempts to replace them with democracy.

In Grave of the Fireflies, the sibling’s death leaves behind poignancy and defeat, which makes the social commentary graver. To figure out the social commentary, one has to trace the events that led to the sibling’s deaths. As previously mentioned, it could be argued that the film criticizes specific social structures, such as the town, for not helping the children but it could also be argued that no one person or structure is to blame. The root cause is the war itself. Read charitably, the aunt had a few moments of harshness and never expected the siblings to actually leave, the farmer had the law on his side, and the doctor was swamped with patients. It's partially Setsuko's hubris that convinced him not to go back to his aunt and partially a product of the larger system and its individualistic and insensitive mindset. These are ordinary imperfect people whose buttons may have been pressed in the wrong way by the scarcity and stresses of the war. Then, the sibling's fate was not set by a single mistake but by several smaller ones, a culmination of internally justifiable reasons that seem only unfortunate by themselves but turn out tragic when added together. So it can be argued that such tragedies are inevitable and all too common consequences of going to war, rather than failing social structures.

In contrast, Ikiru uses the emotional potency of death to trigger life reorientation and reflection both for Watanabe and his fellow civil service workers, creating a feeling of hope and reformation. In other words Ikiru uses death to help individuals figure out what really matters in life. Upon hearing his six-month death sentence, Watanabe first looks to pleasure, spending a night out partying with a novelist who says “We’ve got to be greedy about living,” and then, finding pleasure unfulfilling, looks to helping others, making it his mission to build a park. He accomplishes his mission and literally freezes to death there. It’s through the park that he is frozen and immortalized, showing he has found what is truly important both personally and societally. His death is made to seem natural, as if he lived a complete and meaningful life, as the policeman says that the night of his death he was on the swings “back like a child.” He comes full circle in his mission as well as his life. The same women who said “what a mockery of democracy [the civil service is]” rally behind him to build the park and then weep in appreciation for him at his funeral. In this way, Watanabe has a personal reformation himself and shows a path towards a bureaucratic reformation. The “mockery of democracy” reflects the historical time period, as the United State’s early efforts to dismantle old power structures and democratize Japan subsided around 1947 as they started focusing more on the Communist threat. Thus it was a turbulent historical time but also one where reform might have seemed genuinely achievable. In the film, the continuation of the bureaucratic reform rests on his fellow civil service members, who at his funeral are coming to terms with his surprising behavior over the past few months. At first they rationalize his actions as a self-interested attempt to improve his optics but ultimately they conclude that he was just trying to help others in his last few months of life and that they in contrast “are just worthless scum.” They make a pact to do better in his spirit, showing their philosophical reorientation.

Both films explore death through the theme of being forgotten and through the structure of revealing the protagonist’s death immediately. Pre-diagnosis Watanabe is forgotten whereas post-diagnosis Watanabe is remembered. If not for the women who helped him create the park and a few men of the civil service who question and admire his recent transformation, Watanabe would've been forgotten, in the same way that Seita and Setsuko were forgotten. Watanabe’s own family does not shed a single tear and the deputy mayor warps him into a political agenda. The final scene shows Watanabe's park full of kids on swings, playing and happy. Life goes on without him and he was happy when he died, in contrast to Grave of the Fireflies where life goes on without Seita and Setsuko and the viewer can't help but feel that something has been irreparably lost as the camera pans up to show more and more of the busy city skyline. The siblings are forgotten and their situations are not unique. Many other young boys who look just like Seita, even wearing his same clothing, are also lying dead in the opening scene. Seita died on September 21, 1945 and that same year featured mass death, from the Kobe Bombing to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There were many more unmourned deaths than just Seita, giving meaning to the phrase “history as a wound.” Both opening scenes reveal to the viewer that the protagonists will soon die, removing suspense about their outcomes and directing attention to how their deaths will unfold. Watanabe knew when he’d die whereas Seita did not. Watanabe could take action to improve himself whereas Seita was mostly cheerful up until Setusko’s death. Thus, from this structure, Watanabe achieved true agency whereas the siblings only reached an empty agency in the mind of the viewer.

Both Ikiru and Grave of the Fireflies explore the themes of agency and death to make social commentaries about contemporary Japan. Grave of the Fireflies shows the plain tragedy of World War II and criticizes the social structures at that time whereas Ikiru criticizes the bureaucracy of post-war Japan. Death creates feelings of poignancy and defeat in Grave of the Fireflies whereas it causes reflection and reorientation and creates hope and a path towards reformation in Ikiru. Both films explore death through the lens of being forgotten and the struggle of returning to normal. Taken together, the films show the tragic effects of broken systems and the humanist contemplation and perseverance that can reform them. Grave of the Fireflies provides the sad sentiment that can imaginably be transmuted into a “rage against the dying of the light” motivation to prevent the Seitas and Setsukos from being left behind and forgotten – and to create better social structures for the future.