Huynh Death: A Part of Life

In American society, death is something of a taboo. It's just something you don't openly talk about ion public and is never a good topic to bring up in a conversation. Death is avoided, and life is expected; once life is threatened, everything gets really serious. The Japanese openly embrace death and see it as just reality. They don't dance around the subject because it's just a part of life, something that is inevitable. Why avoid something that is inevitable? Life is celebrated in Japan, and life is lived to the fullest, and hopefully with honor. They have many different ways to die. Natural death is there, and is expected, so nothing too big there, except for maybe the close family and friends. Death via suicide is another story. Suicide is a common thing in Japan and it happens after dishonor or a great failure of some sort. It's kind of the easy way out, but it's something along the lines of removing their useless self from existence to get out of the way for other people. In America, death is a big thing, but suicide is like really bad. It's seen as the coward's way out, and is looked upon really badly. There's also death in war, which in the Japanese sense is one of the greatest ways to go, because you have so much honor dying for your country. The American sense is the same, but the main difference is seppuku, which is stomach-cutting. One will preserve one's honor by committing seppuku to not be captured and become a POW and being tortured to spill secrets of the army, and also in some cases to not hinder the unit's mission success.

In Harp of Burma death surrounds the group of soldiers as they try and complete their mission during WWII. It's not realized until the end, where you find out why one of the soldiers stays back instead of returning home with his comrades. He stays back as a traveling monk to give all of the fallen soldiers a proper burial, and he says that it may take him his entire lifetime to complete, but he believes that was the reason he was sent to Burma. The amount of bodies shown were endless, and they were all rotting out in the open with nobody to care for them. The Japanese soldiers that died at the American hospital were all buried together with no names on the tombstone, and a quick prayer service was given to them. During war, death is to be expected, but one cannot understand how bad unless one was there to experience it in war itself.

Taken from houseofanime.org

The movie Letters From Iwo Jima covered death as well, but in an entirely different view. They had a scene where a soldier was blinded by a grenade, and instead of trying to survive with all his might, he committed suicide. It may seem like a coward's way out, but his actions were for his comrades and Japan. He didn't want to hinder the unit's mobility which would be a great disadvantage for them, and he didn't want to be captured as a POW by the Americans and be forced to give information about the unit's missions and tactical strategies. Another scene was where the captain who was wounded and trying to escape called it quits and asked his assistant to behead him. This plan failed when an American killed the assistant as he was about to give the death blow, but then a soldier who owed his life to the captain 3 times over came along and helped him commit suicide with his own Colt .45. This aspect was a way of dying with honor on his homeland of Japan. These are all aspects of death that are carried out in different ways, and eventually we will see these aspects of death during our lifetime, that's because death is just a part of life.