I finished watching The Grave of the Fireflies swearing that I wasn’t about to cry, and grateful that Netflix had captions. I almost ran to the reviews and was pleased to find that most people loved the movie, but I couldn’t help checking the one star reviews, quite frankly, just because I could.

There were the usuals, whining about the English dub, or the movie being too depressing. There was even someone who swore that it was Chinese-made pro-communist propaganda, yet oddly enough, the first review I saw was the one that stayed with me the most:

“This movie while well made is scary in that it portrays the Japanese people as victims.  It is a continuation of their attempt to deny their role as the perpetrators of an immoral war.  They attempted to inflict their belief that they were a master race by killing raping and Torturing millions of innocents.  In this movie the Americans, attacked unprovoked at Pearl Harbor while the Japanese foreign minister was supposedly negotiating peace in Washington DC, America is portrayed as the bad guys causing the pain distress and ultimately the death of the Japanese children in this movie.  It’s a shameful distortion of the truth.”

I will admit, as a teenager with a strong appreciation for good animation, my initial reaction was to laugh and insult whoever wrote it, but after a bit of thinking, I realized that there was a lot more to this than just the criticism of a Japanese children’s movie.

For a much needed dose of content, The Grave of the Fireflies (or 火垂るの墓) is a Japanese anime film about two children orphaned at the end of WW2. It is based on the semi-autobiographical short story by Akiyuki Nosaka which draws inspiration from his experience in the 1945 Americain firebombings in Kobe, Japan.

In WW2, the list of Japanese committed atrocities was baffling, from the Rape of Nanjing before, or the Butaan Death March in the beginning, there was truly no end to the violence. The review was not wrong about the actions of Japan, however, a very important detail was missed in their writing, and this detail is variability.

It’s safe to assume that the review was not referring to an East Asian archipelago, but all the people in it, which is already leading the writer to failure. During WW2 the Japanese population was around 72 million in a country not even 150,000 miles in size. In August of 1945, the IJA (Imperial Japanese Army)was more than six million strong. This is a huge number, but in the grand scheme of things, the army was only 8.33% of the population. In 1945 36.8% of Japanese were under fourteen, 5.1% were above 65, and 58.1% were between those ages.

Japan is a very geographically diverse country with thousands of islands stretched vertically almost as much as the east coast of the US. There are mountains and plains, snow covered landscapes, and tropical destinations, all no more than 70 miles from the sea, and never far from the earthquakes of the fault line ridden area.

So why exactly is this important? To be honest, it is because I lack the life experience to lecture anyone about most things, so I must rely on science to stake my claim.

Even if you took away the details of free will, and humanity, perhaps imagining “Japan” as several million plants, it would be insanity to think that all of them would be the same. Mature plants look different from young ones, and different soil, climate, and treatment. When you add back in the fact that we are talking about people, not cabbage, you can truly see that “Japan” was not the best word to describe those committing atrocities. 

The Grave of the Fireflies is not a propaganda film (about Communism or otherwise), but a snapshot of human perspective. It’s about a boy raised to believe that his country’s Navy is great, and who’s sick and tired of the constant Americain firebombings. 

This is not saying that we should start attacking America as a whole for war crimes, and believe that the entirety of Japan was faultless. This false dichotomy is the heart of this issue. In other words, it’s the real reason I am writing this essay.

There is no fairytale-like break between the good and bad of humanity. Real villains and saints are few, and far between. The rest of us sit in our own little shade of grey. Every person has a story with pain, and joy, and loss, and victory, so it becomes quite impossible to lump them all together.

Yet that never seems to stop people. Up until embarrassingly recently, I really didn’t like blonde girls. I thought that they were all shallow, and mean. Just thinking back to that time makes me cringe.I certainly cannot preach at you to be completely unbiased toward people, because it’s really an impossible, and hypocritical thing to ask. We people could argue for eternity trying to decide what biases are necessary, or if any are. It would be a mostly useless task to try and find a perfect list of who, and what is good, and bad, so I will instead, try to leave you with this:

At the end of the day, the world is a lot more complicated than we wish it to be. Bad and good things will always be happening, and people will always help to make things worse, or better.

There are people you will believe, or be told to believe are the enemies, but it is rarely so black and white. Not everyone must share one view, or story, or be split into “our people”, and “those people.” In the end, we are all just people. People who will do good, and bad, and that will all benefit from remembering to consider the enemy.