Shinto Blog

The segment of Kurosawa’s film that I chose to watch was titled “The Weeping Demon.” The setting started in a dark condemned world. The environment seemed to look cold as if people, humans did not reside there.  There were two men in the setting one was a human being and the other was a “demon”. They began to converse and the demon talked about how the world used to be. I felt as if the world that the demon lived in resembled something like hell where the condemned live. The demon spoke on how beautiful the world used to be and how it was surrounded by animals, flowers and other things of that sort. Now it appeared to be dark and deserted. Everything was mutated from the flowers to the animals. There is no food and the demons have to feed on each other to survive.  The demons were in pure torture and helpless. This immortality was there pain and suffering, they could not die. The demon also begins to discuss how things were this way because of the nuclear bombs which reminded me of the nuclear bombs that took place in Japan.

I related this to the Shinto scriptures because some of the scriptures told mythological stories about the history of Japan and its people and I felt like this film portrayed that in a sense of the events that happened in the bombing of Japan. Things used to be so beautiful at one point in time to only be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. Not only did they destroy the nature around them but they destroyed the lives of people. The aftermath of the bombing left people in distraught and they lost their since of humanity. I also think it related to the scriptures because they talked about the underworld and I felt that this film depicted the underworld in a sense where people suffer and even when you die you have this demon spirit within you that will forever suffer in the underworld. The main character, the demon committed an unethical sin that lead him to suffer in the underworld.