THIS year’s Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme includes Conflagration (no certification) from 1958. The remastered print and themes remain as fresh as ever.
It was inspired by true events and fictionalised in Yukio Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. This building appeared invincible, having survived whatever adversities came along for well over half a millennium. In 1950, the pavilion was destroyed when set on fire by a novice monk. Imagine the shock if an arsonist successfully demolished the religious and cultural equivalent of, say, Canterbury Cathedral. What kind of mind could do such a thing?
Exemplifying Oscar Wilde’s notion that “each man kills the thing he loves,” this was the work of a troubled apprentice monk. In the film, Mizoguchi Goichi (Ichikawa Raizo VIII) arrives there, craving spiritual comfort. His father taught him to regard the Golden Pavilion as somewhere of unsurpassable beauty, eternally divine. Raised in a Buddhist temple himself, he is tortured by memories both of the father’s death and his mother Aki (Tanie Kitabayashi), who continues to oppress him with constant nagging. Goichi yearns for sanctuary amid the sacred atmosphere of this holy shrine.
A new friend, Tokari (Tatsuya Nakadai), is outraged when Goichi asserts that the temple’s constant immutability through all the changing scenes of life makes it an object of reverence. “You fool!” he cries. “People, history, and even morality change.” The crippled Tokari may be cynical, equating Zen with nihilism, but not without just cause. The very goal of Goichi’s pilgrimage is besmirched with hypocrisy and avarice. A greedy head priest Tayama Dosen (Nakamura Ganjiro II) acknowledges as much. Having greatly profited from turning the temple into a tourist trap, he spends much time entertaining geishas and dining sumptuously. It is enough to disgust Goichi at how corrupted the temple has become, and for him to see no alternative to destroying what he and the nation had long treasured.
Conflagration is really a parable about post-war Japan’s values and beliefs. It is emblematic that Goichi himself is a stutterer, hardly able to articulate the discomfort he feels in the face of moral decay. When he is citing scripture, however, the stammer disappears. It is his bedrock. Tsurukawa (Yôichi Funaki), another friend he makes, is alone in not mocking his speech impediment. “You have a beautiful mind,” he tells him. It is one that cannot comprehend the opposing viewpoints within a country inexorably being Westernised after a military defeat like no other. In the aftermath of nuclear annihilation, traditional outlooks have lost any sense of permanence. There are parallels to be drawn with our own situation. Where once the sea of faith was at the full, we all too often hear its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar. This is all too much for Goichi.
Kon Ichikawa, the director, takes a philosophical look at how the human race can now proceed. Conflagration is filmed in starkly contrasting black and white tones. The issues that it raises, however, about beliefs and humanity dramatically counterpoint this in a far more fragile, nuanced, and subtle manner.
The Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026 takes place in cinemas around the UK from 6 February to 31 March. Details at: jpf-film.org.uk
