The Human Condition was a massive work
that in today's terms became a huge bestseller.
Ninjin Club and Shochiku...
decided to turn it into a film.
At the time...
there was a lot of hubbub in the press
about who would play the lead, Kaji.
Some actors nominated themselves, others were nominated by others,
but the names of all the leading actors in Japan were tossed around.
I had worked with Kobayashi before,
on a film called Black River,
in which I just played a simple gangster.
Playing a real humanist like Kaji in The Human Condition
seemed like entirely the wrong role for me.
Nobody had put my name forward for the role,
and I sort of gave up on the whole thing.
Preproduction took a very long time,
but the question of who would play Kaji
still hadn't been decided by the end of it.
Then at some point,
I was told that it would be me, that the director had made up his mind.
The film is set in China,
but Japan had no diplomatic relations with China at the time.
Kobayashi decided to shoot most of it in Hokkaido,
so he had to go scout locations.
He and his crew went all over Hokkaido.
From what I heard later,
it took nearly two months to scout locations.
Near the end of that trip, as Kobayashi was getting into a bath...
an open-air hot-springs bath...
the moon was plainly visible.
At that time, Kobayashi -
Keep in mind that this is a massive work.
No doubt he wanted to see the characters from various angles.
So he was staring up at the moon.
At the end of the film, Kaji is wandering around.
He's gone a little mad.
He's chasing the memory of his wife, calling out her name, "Michiko."
"That look in his eyes -" Kobayashi thought,
"it has to be Nakadai."
It seems that's when he made up his mind.
The Human Condition was my first leading role,
and it was also - how shall I put it? -
a pure-hearted, extremely heroic character.
Up to then I'd mainly played characters who looked askance at humanity.
But someone like this, pure of heart,
who stands up alone against the horrors of war - that was a first.
So...
in the beginning I was at a bit of a loss.
I think I caused the director and crew a great deal of trouble.
Kobayashi was -
Well, he wasn't a very talkative man.
But as I observed him during the shoot,
I thought to myself, "This is Kaji."
I played the role with him in mind.
Afterward...
what I heard from other people
was that he'd harbored antiwar feelings even while in basic training.
And apparently he was one of the best marksmen in the army.
So during the filming,
Kobayashi and Kaji
were basically one and the same in my eyes.
I think the same could be said of the author, Gomikawa.
In that sense...
an actor keeps an image in mind as he's creating a role
and expresses that through his own body.
Watching Kobayashi's facial expressions
provided me with a lot of inspiration, you might say.
And this is somewhat related:
When I was chosen to play Kaji,
all the actors who had been cast
went to Shochiku's Ofuna studio...
and received a month of military training.
You see the results of that in the film.
For example, in the barracks
the soldiers are sleeping in bunk beds.
Assistant directors would sound a tone
and time us with a stopwatch. They were called "first sergeants."
The point was to see
whether we were ready to rush out to battle.
We'd be sleeping, then change into our uniforms,
grab our rifles, strap our swords on,
and put on our backpacks.
So we practiced that process over and over
until we had it down pat.
And of course we got faster at it every day.
We also did bayonet drills,
and practiced marching in step.
They emphasized that the most. We practiced for over a month.
As an actor who was to play a soldier,
the amount of training I received
did, I think, give me some sense of what war was like.
Almost everyone in the worlds of Japanese film and theater
appeared in this film,
and they were all more experienced than me.
They were all older than me at the time.
So when I look back on it now,
among such a stellar group of my elders from the worlds of film and theater,
I'm proud that I was able to do my job,
and I'm grateful for all they did to help me.
In particular...
So Yamamura appeared throughout the film.
He gave me a lot of advice.
On one occasion, Yamamura and I
were rehearsing in front of Kobayashi,
what you call a "read-through."
I unthinkingly changed the wording of a line.
"Yeah, right," became "Yes, that's right,"
or something like that.
So Yamamura called me over.
He said, "Screenwriters...
go to great efforts to choose the right wording.
It isn't acceptable for actors
to change that wording as they please."
I was grateful that he told me that.
In my life as an actor after that,
when it came to lines in a screenplay or stage play -
Of course sometimes you consult with the director and change things,
but otherwise, changing lines unthinkingly
is something I never did after that day.
That was something I was taught in my early 20s.
I also watched the older actors' performances
and realized that there were so many different styles of acting.
I may have had the lead role, but I learned so much from them.
Including preproduction, it took four years.
I think actual filming
took three years.
So we more or less finished
Parts 1 and 2 and took half a year off.
Then we started Parts 3 and 4
and then took another six months off.
Then finally Parts 5 and 6.
So it was three shoots spanning three years.
We shot most of it in chronological order.
If you watch it
from beginning to end, you see how my face changes over three years.
It's amazing that a person's face can change that much in their 20s.
During that process -
and of course it happened over three years -
it became as if my body were acting instinctively, by itself.
The process of interpreting the role in my head
slowly came to a halt.
As I mentioned before, in the early stages
I was worried about a lot of things, but those worries ended.
I just let my body do what it wanted.
So for those three years,
the shoot was extremely tough.
The conditions were severe.
But those three years were, for me,
extremely rich and full.
The only people who didn't get sick over those three years
were me and the director, Kobayashi.
I must have had quite a constitution.
I had to jump into freezing rivers
and crawl under a tank that was coming at me.
The fact I could do such things
strikes me as rather terrifying today.
But I did them with such absolute focus
that they didn't seem so grueling then.
The cameraman had dug a hole below me.
Just the lens was sticking out,
protected by a solidly-built wooden frame,
whereas my only protection was dirt.
The whole day before that I had no appetite.
And in the scenes inside the barracks -
Back in those days, they were run with an iron fist.
If you made a mistake, you'd be beaten savagely.
During the worst instance in the film,
I had about 20 soldiers...
actually punching me with their fists.
I collapsed,
and my face began to swell as the camera closed in.
It was an amazingly realistic scene.
But the role called for it, so I felt I had no choice.
But I still remember the person who hit me the hardest.
Nobody would do that on a film set these days.
And then there was the way they filmed my swollen face.
I remember when we shot the final scene.
Kaji has finally collapsed
in the middle of a wide plain,
and the snow falls on him,
building up in a mound.
That's where the novel ends.
At that time, Kobayashi
and Miyajima, the cinematographer, both strove for extreme realism.
In fact...
we shot that scene in Hokkaido, on the Sarobetsu Plain,
and the camera rolled as snow was actually falling.
I lay on the ground,
and we filmed until the snow became a mound.
So there I was -
I think there were two or three cameras rolling...
and there I was, hidden under that mound of snow.
I slowly began to feel faint.
I really began to think I might die from hypothermia.
That's how long they kept shooting.
Kobayashi finally called cut, and I -
The assistant director said that if they warmed me up too quickly,
I'd get frostbite,
so first they undressed me and pounded on my muscles.
Then they took me inside an enclosure with a fire,
and at last I was able to feel my body again.
Kobayashi and Miyajima
had already left.
I thought, "They left me behind?"
There was a car waiting,
so we went to the car,
where the two of them were waiting.
He didn't say, "How did it go?" Or "That must have been tough."
Not a word.
Kobayashi...
was very faithful to the book in making this film.
When adapting a book for the screen,
the film often takes on
a very different quality from the book.
But with The Human Condition,
I never once heard Gomikawa, the author, say...
that the film differed
from the story as he imagined it.
Kobayashi shot the film with the book in one hand
and the script in the other.
If something in the book wasn't in the script,
he would add that part in.
He'd tell us the day before,
and we'd do our best to memorize the lines.
I recall things like that,
so I believe the film is extremely faithful to the novel.
There was a party after the premiere,
and I was also invited to Gomikawa's home,
where I was treated very hospitably.
As far as the film goes,
I don't know if he and Kobayashi
talked about it,
or what he might have said to Kobayashi about the film,
but I remember him telling me, "Great job."
They showed all three films in one sitting once a year in Japan.
I've watched it from beginning to end once or twice, all nine hours.
There were all-night screenings,
big events that lots of people would attend.
I believe these marathon screenings were held once every year.
The ones I happened to attend were always sold out.
I'd have to say that among Japanese antiwar films,
I think this is the best.
I'm just as moved by it now.
Right after The Human Condition was completed,
I watched it in a theater
with a regular everyday audience.
As an actor you can't really see the whole thing right away.
You're too focused on your own performance.
But with the passage of time,
I began to see it in its fullness, objectively,
and when I watch The Human Condition now...
I think I understand it better than when I was younger.