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Japan's Long Reckoning With War

Watch these when you want Japanese cinema turning its unflinching gaze on its own war — the conscript's conscience, the retreat, the survivor who won't let the officers forget — each film picking up the moral wreckage the last one left.

Revered festival-and-canon anti-war cinema, and heavy going: it includes a nearly ten-hour trilogy and a confrontational documentary, so save this for when you have the patience and the stomach for it.

• The Human Condition I: No Greater Love (1959)
• The Human Condition II: Road to Eternity (1959)
• The Human Condition III: A Soldier's Prayer (1961)
• The Burmese Harp (1956)
• The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On (1987)
• Fires on the Plain (1959) — The overlooked companion piece that rhymes hardest with these — Ichikawa, who gave you The Burmese Harp, films the same army disintegrating on the same Philippine ground, following a tubercular conscript into starvation and cannibalism; if the trilogy landed, this is the one to finally pull down.
• Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) — The one on your list you keep meaning to watch — a doomed Iwo Jima garrison told entirely from the Japanese soldier's side, the conscript's conscience and futile last stand these films are built on, just in a more accessible register.
• Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) — The under-seen Oshima that turns the same unflinching gaze inward — a Java POW camp where Japan's wartime code of honor and cruelty is put on trial from within; pull it down when the moral reckoning of these is what you're after.