The Movie "Death by Hanging"

People tend to stereotype history and reality through memory, which is one-sided. Because history is an objective existence of what has happened, and mind is a judgment made with people's subjective emotions. The same thing, in different people's memory, is often due to their subjective factors. Therefore, the same thing is often seen differently by different people. What's more, what we remember is usually some critical event, and each individual has separate focus and details of the event, so it is easy for just one game to be characterized differently by people.

Human beings often live in the arms of fantasy, for some history can only be described by memory. Some of the memories are well described by the director in the film to warn and hint at current human cognition.

Just like in the movie 'Death by Hanging', director Nagisa Oshima describes a Korean R who is sentenced to Death for the rape and murder of two women in Japan.

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After he was sentenced to death, he was tortured in prison. The murderer who is hanged is not hanged and wakes up bereaved. In the film 'House', director Nobuhiko Obayashi describes the story of seven girls who ride happily on a train to their aunt’s house in the countryside but later encounter misfortune. What these two films have in common is that the main characters live in the cognition of their memories and have illusions about the ignorance of historical reality. The directors all want to imply through the film that this is very dangerous; memory is not necessarily the historical restoration, sometimes memory is not necessarily wholly correct; memory has limitations and malpractice of plasticity.

Memory is malleable. Sometimes people claim to be able to recall things that didn’t happen in the first place, given specific guidance and hints. In 'Death by Hanging', for example, there is a scene in which the prisoner's memory has to be recalled to be hanged again. In R’s mind, he did not kill people. He was only disturbed by people around him; that is, his cognition of reality and fantasy world was vague. Also, because R's identity as a 'Korean in Japan' is undoubtedly on the fuzzy and sensitive border, these executors are judging these fragments of 'memory' and distorting the reality of what happened.

In the film, the director tries to depict the fear experienced by the criminals in the form of a documentary and uses the film to express what seems to be the motivation of analyzing the killing of Koreans in Japan, which is the criticism that Koreans are subjected to various kinds of discrimination and mental torture under the life in Japan. In the article Ukai Satoshi, Why is the Hinomaru Flag, it points out: 'Yanaihara Tadao pointed out that there were many commonalities between Japanese and French colonialism.' (Ukai Satoshi 269) of postwar Japan genuinely liked the British colonization of the culture and the influence of materialism, discriminated against non-native lose reason and judgment. Japan's policy of expansion, modeled on the British system in memory, was a criticism of the post-war Japanese leftist ideology of foreign imperialist aggression and oppression and absolute obedience to the national will at home.

Memory is subjective. A person's mind is not the whole process of things happening, nor is history. At the beginning of the movie, seven girls happily went to their aunt's house in the countryside by train. 'Village' was the symbol of the destination. The beautiful mountain scenery outside the window made the movie create a happy impression. Among them, the heroine recalls the time when her mother and aunt lived. She thought that the heroine's memory was a romantic trip, but the reality is not like this. It turned out that her mind was the beginning of terror. When my aunt was young, she fell in love with a young man, but because the Pacific war had taken the life of her lover, she hated him. She has been looking forward to the return of this lover, by a romantic waiting for the performance of love infatuated woman slowly into a murder seven girls ghost.

In the article Consuming Rural Japan, Millie Creighton explains: 'To Japanese, furusato evokes affective images of an area where one's childhood memories or that memories are most active. No matter where one lived as a child, the Prevailing models of Fortunato are nearly always of a rural landscape.' (Millie Creighton 242) a lot of people to their emotional sustenance in the countryside, rustic is that they think good romantic memory. Whether it is Nobuhiko Obayashi or Millie Creighton, they want to tell people about the significant trauma that post-war Japan caused to many people. They want more people to know about the life of rural Japanese after the war. The countryside behind the battle is not what people think it is.

When Japan recruited soldiers, many of them came from the country and died in the war, and many rural families experienced the grief of losing their spouses and children. Like the seven girls, they were like most people, and their memories of life were beautiful, romantic, and simple. But the reality is different. At the same time, the director wants us to understand the history and go deep into the countryside in the real world, and recognize the significant damage caused by the war.

In conclusion, people's memory is not always a reflection of history and reality. The subjectivity and plasticity of the mind can bring many disadvantages. People often judge the right and wrong of things based on memory, which may bring misunderstanding or even danger. Postwar Japan had a lot of problems and a lot of invisible terror. If you blindly follow your mind and live without objective evidence and reason, then history and facts will be changed by ignorance.

Work Cited:

'Ukai Satoshi, Why is the Hinomaru Flag', Richard F. Calichman, Ukai Satoshi, Columbia University Press. (2005), 'Consuming Rural Japan', Millie Creighton, Ethnology, Vol. 36, No. 3 (Summer, 1997), pp. 239-254