left to his own devices when the guns stop blazing. He poses the question, 'When stranded on the bombed-out landscape after the fighting has calmed, what will those left behind do to survive?' It's bleak and it's chilling, and yet Fires on the Plain is also completely engrossing. It's the post-action picture as morality play, the journey of the individual recast with Dante-esque overtones. Ichikawa doesn't have to hit you over the head with a message because the story is so truthfully crafted, to state the message outright would be redundant. Once you've seen Fires on the Plain, the movie will get under your skin, and you'll find it impossible to forget." Awards In 1960, the film won the Blue Ribbon Awards for Best Director and Best Cinematography, the Kinema Junpo Awards for Best Screenplay and Best Actor (Eiji Funakoshi) and the Mainichi Film Concours for Best Actor (Eiji Funakoshi), all three in Tokyo. In 1961 it also won the Golden Sail at the Locarno International Film Festival. The film was also selected as the Japanese entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 32nd Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. Themes Symbolism Donald Richie has written that Fires on the Plain is in contrast to Ichikawa's earlier The Burmese Harp as it "could be considered conciliatory" whereas Fires on the Plain is "deliberately confrontational". Alexander Jacoby has written: "The Burmese Harp and Fires on the Plain differ in approach – the one sentimental, the other visceral, rather in the manner of the American Vietnam movie of later years. The comparison is telling: just as Hollywood has largely failed to deal with the politics of US involvement in Vietnam, preferring to focus on the individual sufferings on American soldiers, so Ichikawa's war films make only a token acknowledgement of wartime atrocities committed by the Japanese, and largely buy into assumptions of Japanese victimhood in World War II – assumptions which to this day remain too widespread in the country." He has further written that, like Tamura, many of Ichikawa's characters are loners. Max Tessier has called Ichikawa a cinematic entomologist because he "studies, dissects and manipulates" his human characters. Tessier calls Fires on the Plain the summit of this tendency in Ichikawa's work, and "one of the blackest films ever made." Tessier continues that by criticizing the loss of humanity which war causes, the film remains