“In community, security”: The modernist militarism of Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies

Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies has attained quasi-mythological status through its depiction of children’s suffering in wartime and audience accounts of emotional distress. For this reason it is conventionally described as an exemplary “anti-war” film. More critical views of the film highlight how the narrowly focused pathos of the narrative obfuscates a critical engagement with the history of the Asia-Pacific War. The following analysis expands upon this relative scepticism by focusing on the film’s ideological implications rather than its affective potency. The theoretical framework used here will draw heavily on theories concerning military affairs, particularly those developed by Morris Janowitz and Samuel P. Huntington. The film’s portrayal of social and individual behaviour is read here in relation to the demands of militarism: a concept that is clarified through a comparison between feudal or fascistic models of militarism, on the one hand, and an American vision of modern militarism as formulated by Huntington, on the other. Through this lens, this article investigates the ways in which Grave of the Fireflies is legible as a reorientation of Japanese militarism towards a modernist qua postwar American model of military professionalism, concerned with collectivist rather than heroic military conduct.