Ikiru / The Looming Bureaucracy

The film Ikiru by Kurosawa Akira is undoubtedly one of the best films I have ever watched that touched upon the themes of death, meaning and the encroachment of the bureaucracy on the human condition. I strongly recommend this film to anyone even slightly interested in existentialist themes.

WARNING: SPOILERS

The Protagonist, Watanabe Kanji, is a faceless minor bureaucrat in the Public Affairs division of the local government. He has spent the past 30 years working the same job, but as the narrator puts it:

"He is just wasting his time without really living his life. In other words, he's not really alive at all."

His family consists of him, his son and his daughter-in-law. The son and his wife does not really seem to value Kanji at all. They talk about using his pension and savings to buy a house for their own enjoyment. They say that "if he refuses to give us the money we'll just move out anyway!" The absolute value of Kanji as an end-in-itself, a human worth treating equally, is eroded; what is left is a commoditized Kanji, one that only has relative value because he is valuable as a means. A means for the son to satisfy his own desires and ends. Kanji's life was spent locked in the bureaucracy; even when his son was having an operation, he couldn't be with him until the end because "he had some things to do", again showing the trappings of work and bureaucracy. This notion of utilitarian commoditization within the bureaucracy will come back later in the story as well.

Upon his realization that he was afflicted with cancer, he immediately realizes, unlike poor Ivan Ilyich in Tolstoy's novella, that death was unto him like a spectre. He withdraws 50000 yen (a substantial amount in post-war Japan, I presume) with an intent to spend it, an act of reaffirmation of his life. Yet it hits him that he has absolutely no idea how to spend it, since his whole life was spent mired in work. He meets a writer in the bar who tells him (and later shows as well) that pleasures and indulgences are the only ways to tear himself away from the suffocation of work. Here the themes of life and meaning surface again. How should we live our lives? This question was not answered by pleasures in Kanji's view.

He meets a subordinate from his department outside who was looking for him to sign her resignation letter. She struck him immediately; she represents to him everything that he is not. Happiness, fulfilment and like he says later on: "You are just so full... of life." He desires to live truly like he sees her to be doing, and he finds out she quit the bureaucracy to work at a toy factory. "Making toys makes me feel like I am playing with all the children of Japan."

He then realizes that he had been doing it wrong: it was too late to change his own life, but perhaps he could still change the lives of others. He then remembered a project that the Womens' Committee had tried to propose but was truncated in the perverse loop within the bureaucracy. Public Affairs says it is the Engineering Department's Job, who says it's the Parks department's job and so on.

He tries his best to advocate for the project, and finally the project is done: A toxic cesspit was cleared to make way for a childrens' playground. He dies contented in the playground when internal hemorrhaging kills him.

Now it seems like a happy ending now, but the last part was acted out at his funeral, and his death tale told through the mouthpieces of the various co-workers in the bureaucracy. In the face of his family and relatives, the Mayor concludes in a cynical tone that Kanji's role in the park project was minimal, that it was all due to the auspice of himself and the Park / Engineering Department. The yes-men nod in agreement. What else can they say? They begin to fight over who's to bear credit for the park, forgetting or deceiving themselves that Kanji had little to no influence in the playground even though he was the one who fought through the bureaucratic inefficiency. Indeed, one man even proclaims, proudly, that "Kanji was from the start a Public Affairs man. How DARE he try to build a park. He's ignoring the bureaucratic demarcations!"

Yet, for all their self-righteousness, they were unable to look the women in their eyes when the Womens' Committee members cried at his funeral. I felt utmost pity for this man. For everyone has misunderstood him. His aim was not to fulfill some self-pleasing goal, but rather for the good of the act itself. He found the one thing in life that was not thrown upon him by a meaningless body and instinctively sought to act it out, his curtain-closer in life.Yet his achievement was buried, overwhelmed by the bureaucracy's need for self-affirmation. To make itself feel useful. But to think along that line will be to defeat the purpose, isn't it. Regardless of its ends, his act was self-justified.

In the face of his act, such bickering seem meaningless, pointless. Indeed, in the face of death itself such acts will bear no meaning. His act will shine on its own, one that bears absolute value. Those who only see relative value in his act are misguided, fooled by the illusion that bureaucracy can direct them to any meaning at all.

They embody cowardice. They refuse to break away from the bureaucracy because that's all they have ever known. Perhaps they too need to face death to see the temporality of their lives. So that they may truly live.