alexsuen

I've been thinking about war a lot, lately. And writing this in August 2025, it feels as if history has finally returned: India and Pakistan were on the brink of war just a few months ago, leading the world closer than ever before to all-out nuclear war. Take your pick of 'interesting' conflicts: Israel's continued obliteration of Gaza and its slower-moving conquest of the West Bank, Russia entering the fourth year of its “3-Day Special Operation” in Ukraine, various middle powers moving their pieces on the chessboard as they seek to position themselves in a post-American world order. Build nukes, build aircraft carriers, invent new kinds of drones, buy and sell small arms and make sure you have huge stockpiles of artillery shells (you can never have enough of those). Perhaps it's time to invade Taiwan. Perhaps it's time to invade Iran. Perhaps it's time to invade Canada! A serious suggestion, in this day and age. Who knows what will happen tomorrow? It makes one want to buy some dehydrated food and solar panels.

And yet, a certain amnesia has begun to set in. The 2003 USA-Iraq War, and the ensuing Arab Spring and the rise and fall of ISIS? Never heard of her. I haven't heard of the African Great War either, the genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Armenia-Azerbaijan War that was the result of Russia's newly revealed weakness, and the complete irrelevancy of the CSTO. Memories are short these days. Wars are now “conflicts,” like one might have at the dinner table with some contentious family members. The meat has been cooked to the perfect temperature, so it's time to dig in.

When I was a child, the History Channel used to play history documentaries, mostly about World War II from the perspective of the Allies on the Western Front. There was a lot of pessimism as a result of the invasion of Iraq, but the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union gave our societies a long hangover from a decade-long party in which everyone got totally smashed. One of these drunken dreams was the end not just of wars, but of all genocides committed by states against helpless peoples. Responsibility to Protect was a concept serious people were talking about, some years ago, a rapid intervention force that could violate a country's sovereignty if they were committing genocide. The failure in Rwanda stained our souls, and the success in the collapsing Yugoslavia was too chaotic. Some kind of process was needed.

Why? Someone might ask, why bother preventing genocides and stopping ones in progress? Am I my brother's keeper?

Most people think they are good people, and most people (I hope) do not laugh at crimes against humanity the way some do on 4chan and its successor kingdoms on the internet (notably X, formerly Twitter, which has achieved great strides in making right-wing extremism mainstream). For an average person who does not laugh at the death and suffering of innocent people, I'm fairly certain that they learned in grade school that the Holocaust was a horror beyond comprehension and that We All Must Stop It From Happening Again. A lesson I think many people have forgotten, or have been silenced by a sense of their own real or perceived powerlessness.

Perhaps the lesson was learned too well.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988) is Studio Ghibli's darkest, most brutal film, unflinchingly depicting the horrors of war, in this case, with a story of two children as they experience the Tokyo firebombing (1945) and its aftermath. Directed by Isao Takahata, the film is based on a semi-autobiographical short story of the same name (1967) written by Akiyuki Nosaka. In a very strange move, it was marketed towards children and families, and debuted as a double feature with My Neighbour Totoro directed by Hayao Miyazaki.

It's been said in English-language discussions online that this is the saddest film ever created, a film that universally moved people to tears. So it was sometime in my late 20s where I finally watched the film with my Korean friend, just to see what the fuss was about.

This next part is gonna sound insane to most white people. Also, there are spoilers.

My friend and I didn't find the film sad at all. Not one bit.

The typical summary of this film in English-language reviews and social media discussions is focused on the raw evil of the American firebombing, the helplessness of children in the face of 20th century technological horrors unleashed on innocent Japanese people. People tend to focus on the heart-wrenching personal tragedy experienced by the 14-year-old Yokokawa Seita (voiced by Tsutomu Tatsumi) and his 2-year-old sister, Setsuko (voiced by Shiraishi Ayano).

However, my friend and I found ourselves furious with Seita. To us, it doesn't matter that Seita is still a child, fourteen is old enough to know that you aren't supposed to run out of your family's house with your toddler-aged sister, in the middle of a goddamn war!

Maybe this is overly harsh, and the vast majority of white people would certainly believe that to be the case. But why does Seita run away? Because his aunt said a few snide comments towards it? Suck it up! Your parents are both dead, your aunt isn't even being that harsh, and you are lucky as hell that you and your sister have an undamaged roof over your head. No corporal punishment even, a very gentle Asian parent indeed, especially in 1945. Why run away? Why not come back at the earliest opportunity, when your toddler-aged sister is obviously suffering from malnutrition?

For the two of us, a Chinese person and a Korean person, we see something different than most western audiences, seeing Seita beat the drum in his fond memory of the launch of some battleship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and he joyously recounts this memory to Setsuko while literally starving to death next to him. At the time the film takes place, near the very end of the Second World War, 150,000 Chinese people are dying every day from direct and indirect violence of Japanese occupation forces: a Hiroshima and a Nagasaki happening daily. No technological wizardry is involved, nothing but merciful rifle rounds penetrating human skulls, cruel swords and bayonet blades slashing through infants and children, and the groaning agony and subsequent silence of ten million starving people. For every Setsuko that died, there were around 7 nameless Chinese whose lives were crushed into dust. Few movies are made about them, and the ones that are tend to be critically panned box office failures.

Returning to the film: Now, Seita is only 14, and he cannot possibly be culpable for any foolish or reckless actions he takes out of pure immaturity. That is fair. But the author of the original short story calls the actions of Seita a “double suicide.” In other words, there is a level of intention in the actions that led to Setsuko's death by malnutrition, and a level of intention to his own death. Once Setsuko dies, he allows himself to starve to death. At any point, before Setsuko's death, before Seita's death, he could return to his aunt's house. At any point until the very end, he could choose to survive, and save his sister who is only placed in danger in the first place because of his foolish actions.

Don't get me wrong. I am not saying that Seita 'had it coming,' or any such nonsense. Nor do I think that the US was right to employ strategic bombing against civilian targets with no strategic value (I refer you to Philip O'Brien's book, How the War Was Won: Air-Sea Power and Allied Victory in World War II, for anyone who wants to look at it from a military historian's perspective.) War crimes are war crimes, and collective punishment is never morally justifiable. The closest you can come is declaring that defeating Imperial Japan and overthrowing its military dictatorship requires sacrifices to be made, but it's not clear to me that such motivations are untainted by American racism towards the Japanese or a general callousness towards the lives of innocent people.

But at 14, Seita himself is essentially equivalent to a Hitler youth. He wears the cap of a military uniform at all times; he is proud of his late father's role as an officer of the Imperial Japanese Navy. At what point does he become responsible for his own actions? Is 14 too young? How about 15, or 16? Beyond that, you start entering the realm of what we now consider just-about-still-a child soldier today, but plenty of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers lied about their ages to be assigned to combat roles. Once in these roles, many of them go on to shoot and kill human beings. Not all of them were in a position to shoot back.

Or does their context absolve them, children and adults alike, of all responsibility? Suppose all these people, innocent civilians, believe their views of Chinese and Koreans and Filipinos and everyone else in the Asia-Pacific region as subhuman scum, worthy of torture and extermination and tyranny over the survivors, are simply not responsible. Many of these people, tens of millions in fact, believed that if any infants were stuck on the ends of IJA soldiers' bayonets, it was funny, or it never happened, or it if it happened those babies had it coming, or all three simultaneously. They lived under a military dictatorship that in many respects resembles the Nazi dictatorship. Under the umbrella of fascism, who can truly be said to act freely? What are the consequences for disobedience? (Not that much, as it turned out. On the German side, I refer to Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men.)

None of this is really addressed in the film, except in the subtext. Seita the child beats the war drums of imperialism as his sister slowly dies from starvation. The victims of imperialism are not mentioned; some Chinese and Korean viewers of the film find the ubiquitous Japanese films and novels and anime displaying the plight of Japanese civilian victims of firebombing and the two nuclear bombings to be rather tiresome (perhaps a European equivalent to this is The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008), a notably disastrous film).

Ultimately, those raised in East Asian households have come to an understanding that the protagonist, and by extension the author of the original memoir, finds himself chiefly and perhaps solely responsible for his sister's death. It's a deeply personal story. It's a story of anger, guilt, and the impossibility of self-forgiveness. In both Japanese and Chinese culture, suicide has historically been considered the socially responsible choice for a crime as horrific as killing one's own sister, or allowing one's sister to die out of negligence and foolishness. Seita 'courageously' commits suicide by starvation; his real world-counterpart Nosaka doesn't make the same decision. He was burdened by the weight of responsibility, and carried that weight upon his back until he died of natural causes in 2015.

I'll paraphrase a quote attributed to French director François Truffaut: there is no such thing as an anti-war movie, because there is no such thing as a movie that can show you what war really is. At the end of the day, a movie, even an excellent one with an anti-war message, is a spectacle. It is meant to be entertainment. It aims to tell a story, one that appeals to its audience in some way.

And in doing so, there is a double-bind that occurs with any anti-war filmmaker: two other interpretations are always possible with ostensibly anti-war films. One is that you may loathe the victims being portrayed, and cheer at their torture and destruction. It is sadly more common than you think. And the second possibility, is that Grave of the Fireflies could teach, say, a Japanese nationalist: “look at what the Americans have done to us! We should eliminate the pacifist parts of our Constitution, so that we can rebuild our great army and navy, and never let anyone do something like that to us again.”

Thus, the world trembles in terror at the return of the Fourth Horseman, known to us moderns as “great power competition.”

I have never experienced war up close, always mediated as it is by social media, by Hollywood films, by novels and memoirs and anime. I have been entertained by it. I have never smelled it, never tasted, never known that kind of hunger, never felt the traumatic injuries that war inflicts upon bodies and minds, never known what it means to become a human experimentation subject of Unit 731, never known what it means to be liquidated in a Nazi death camp. To myself, to any of you reading this, and to all our families and everyone we care about: I ardently hope that we all live long lives without ever knowing a tiny fraction of what it means to suffer and die like these people.

But many unfortunate souls do have that knowledge. They suffered yesterday, are suffering today, and will suffer tomorrow. Their lives shall be extinguished. It is not sufficient to shed tears for Grave of the Fireflies. For them, we owe them more than sadness. We owe them rage. For, like Seita, we should ask ourselves: how did we let it get to this point? How do we go on like this?