Patrick McCoy Koji Wakamatsu's anti-war film Catepillar (2010) is notable for it's strong anti-nationalism stance and Shinobu Terajima's powerful performance as a long suffering wife dealt a poor hand in life (one in which she won an acting award at the Berlin Film Festival). Her husband is returned from war, as a "God of War" with decorations, without limbs, the ability to speak or hear. Her role as a good wife of a soldier of the Emperor's is to take good care of him-a thankless task for a man who only eats, sleeps, and demands sex from his wife. Furthermore, we learn that he was an abusive husband and has committed atrocities in the war in China. Wakamatsu is a member of that older generation and has an ax to grind-one that the nationalists of today wouldn't be so happy about either. It's a difficult film to watch, but perhaps necessary since most of the new generations are unaware or unbelieving of the atrocities committed at war by the Japanese in the name of the emperor due to whitewashing to history textbooks in schools.

tploomis The husband returns to his Japanese mountain village from the Sino-Japanese war without arms, legs, ability to talk or hear much, apparently brain-damaged, and badly scarred on the face and scalp. The horror of this person's existence is amplified by the contrast with the patriotic and disconnected propaganda from the Japanese government and media that the village folk all seem to swallow without question. He is proclaimed a living War God with medals and a framed laudatory news article that hang on the wall. The village people line the streets to welcome home the living War God, cheering and marching in copy of military march, and the living War God is delivered to his unbelieving wife. Taking care of this lump of flesh will be her task from here on. She tries. She puts the food in one end, sometimes sacrificing her own food to meet her husband's demands, and wipes up the other end. He eats, sleeps, eliminates, and demands sex. This goes on and on, and one can imagine the wife's life of drudgery in an endless cycle stretching into the distant future. Her husband has never been a nice person. He beat her on a daily basis before marching off to do his patriotic duty in war, and now that he is back, he continues to demand from her. At first food and sex, which he demands through grunts and facial expressions, are gratifying to him, but as time goes on, these lose all their appeal. As a soldier he had raped a woman in China, and the memory of this comes back to haunt him and interfere with any pleasure from sex. His wife puts him in a cart and parades him around the village, the limbless living War God on display. The wife is dutiful but increasingly angry and despairing, and the tour of the village with her husband in the cart becomes a kind of revenge for her. Eventually in private she is mashing raw eggs into his mouth and slapping him. All the while she is looked up to in the village for her patriotic sacrifice. This movie is a grim commentary on the discrepancy between patriotic imaginings of war and the actual brutality of war and its tragic consequences. The movie ponders the consequences of societal pressure to do one's duty on the battlefield and in marriage.

axe_hallorann I wonder why the short story of the same name is never given credit. Especially since it was written by Edugawa Rampo*, the "father of Japanese mystery". Is this blatant plagiarism or is the story so famous that it needs no reference? The film is intermediate in its adaptation, keeping the general premise of a limbless veteran and his tormented wife. The Rampo text is much darker and depicts the wife as relishing in sexually teasing her "lump of flesh". The film version adds visualizations of the "caterpillar's" war crimes in China during WWII; memories of which haunt the miserable creature. Unfortunately, the film tends to dwell on the tedium of their lives (eating, sleeping, "sex") and not the psychological/physical abuse that the wife perversely doles out.*Edugawa Rampo is a phonetical pronunciation of Edgar Allen Poe in Japanese: "Edugaw-Aram-Po"

DICK STEEL Directed by Koji Wakamatsu, Caterpillar takes a clear and hard anti-war stance with its explicit warnings, vivid images of brutality and questioning of just what war means and will result in. Complete with archived documentary film reels that come from both news and propaganda, it tells the story of the effects of war through a husband and wife, where the former has returned from his tour of duty serving in the Emperor's Asia Pacific mission, complete with 3 highly decorated medals, a major tribute printed in the newspaper, but with the price of having lost all limbs, now left with just a torso and a head.The film poses a few questions very early on about war itself. What good are commendations and medals when one is left limbless and at the mercy of others to feed, clothe, bathe you, and just about every other basic human function requires care given, as part of karmic retribution for having to survive a battle when countless of others get killed under one's hands. It's the ultimate torture for someone who once dish out punishment against helpless civilian victims, now unable to function normally, not even speak to express desires.How can someone be hailed as a war hero, when being a hero in this sense meant the killing of others, like the twist in the adage that states not to die for your country, but to make the other poor bastard die for his instead. And if put under the context of the Japanese invasion of Asia as the film portrayed, how does rampaging, pillaging, raping and killing bring one honour or glory, especially in the senselessness of war that cannot be justified, what more being hailed as a god by many others, balanced by the ultimate mockery of sorts by being put on a pedestal like a caged animal in a zoo, since Tadashi Kurokawa (Keigo Kasuya) becomes the poster boy for his dedication and sacrifice in the name of the throne.Tadashi aside, the film also takes on another more important and engrossing perspective through that of Tadashi's wife Shigeko (Shinobu Terajima, who got the Silver Bear for Best Actress at last month's Berlin Film Festival), initially shocked by the image of a husband who's more than a cripple, being maimed both physically and emotionally, and to balance that expectation set by society of the dutiful wife who will stand by her husband no matter the costs, and live the vows of being there for better or for worse. Keigo Kasuya may have the more technically challenging role of expressing himself through his eyes only, but Shinobu Terajima brings forth her character's development superbly, as one initially very reluctant and fearful of other's perception, to one who learns how to capitalize the turning of tables to dish out revenge long overdue, especially when she holds the upper hand in rewarding good behaviour brownie points to a sex-addicted husband (yeah, he can still function below the waist). In many ways, it's a close examination of the live of the Japanese woman during war, and societal pressures put on them at the time.Like the insect, Tadashi spends much of his life eating, sleeping, and requesting for plenty of sex, that it becomes nothing more than a routine cycle to feel alive, until guilt pours over him when given a chance to reflect, and us as the audience as well, the atrocities committed by troops. The other interesting aspect of the film is how Wakamatsu includes elements of how simple living Japanese folk practise for that eventuality of an air strike and invasion of enemies troops on their soil, with civil defense type drills like bayonet fighting and fire fighting being pretty much the standard lessons learnt by the villagers. Bookend by archive footage and the telling of stark statistics of WWII, Caterpillar will stick to you long after the credits roll, and it certainly doesn't detract from its intended hard messages and fluff into a narrative butterfly.