Review of Black Rain

BLACK RAIN's 2nd assistant director Takeshi Miike was still alive to help explain to American audiences how this seeming black & white retro piece of imperial propaganda filmed from a 1930s mindset actually was met to come full circle with a WIZARD-OF-OZ style transformation to color for a 19-minute closing segment in which actress Yoshiko Tanaka (who in BLACK RAIN represents the entire civilian population of Japan) was literally tortured till her feet bled by writer\director Shohei Imamura as her guilty conscience compels her to trudge through every imaginable weather and geographical extreme (while those of the "innocent" generation born after WWII pelt her with objects from buses and trains) in a quest to ask for absolution at each of Japan's 88 Shinto\Buddhist temples (ending with her turning into a stone among the rest of her late family members at the foot of temple #88). While most Americans (and many Japanese people themselves, such as Miike, Tanaka, and Imamura) would regard this original color closing as the bare minimum of penance required from a country which aggressed to conquer the rest of its continent, sneak-attacked Pearl Harbor, raped and\or killed millions--all under the well-publicized government-sanctioned banner at the time of "total warfare" (defined by the Japanese as meaning EVERY man, woman, and child was equally active and responsible for the war crimes they knowingly committed), the Japanese censors of 1989 still were powerful enough to get this ending cut (though fortunately hidden away till now by Miike), with the pathetic black & white NO EXIT-style close substituted in its place. What a shame (though not as much of a shame as WWII).