ONLINE EVENT - The Japan Society Film Club: Fires on the Plain directed by Shinya Tsukamoto
Date
Wednesday 5 August 2026
Time
6.30pm (BST)
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Booking Details
Online meeting on Zoom
Please register for the meeting in advance from the link below. After registering, you will receive an automated confirmation email with meeting access details (please check your spam folder if you don't receive any emails).
Free for members of The Japan Society
Please remember to watch the film in advance. Fires on the Plain is available to rent on Third Window Films and to rent or buy on Amazon prime and Arrow video.
Please help us to keep this event free and open to all!The Japan Society is a charity and its activities are made possible thanks to the support of its members. If you are planning to attend this event and are not a member (as an individual or through your employer), please consider becoming a member or making a donation if you can - the recommended donation is £5. Thank you!   |
For our Film Club in August, we invite you to explore Shinya Tsukamoto’s brutal and devastating war film, Fires on the Plain (2015), a hunting portrayal of Japanese soldiers wandering through the Philippines during the final days of WW2.
Based on the homonyms novel by Shohei Ooka, Fires on the Plain follows Private Tamura, a Japanese soldier suffering from tuberculosis as Japan’s defeat in WW2 becomes inevitable. Cast out by his unit and rejected by an overwhelmed field hospital facing severe shortages, he is left to wander the devastated Philippine wilderness alone. Battling starvation, isolation, and the relentless tropical heat, Tamura witnesses the horrifying collapse of human morality around him. Shinya Tsukamoto transforms Tamura’s journey into a stark, harrowing vision of war, stripped of heroism and filled with haunting, often surreal imagery. The result is a devastating meditation on survival and the fragility of the human being.
Shinya Tsukamoto (1960-) is a Japanese filmmaker celebrated for his visceral, uncompromising approach to cinema. Emerging from the independent underground scene in the late 1980s, he gained international attention with Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989), a ferocious fusion of body horror, cyberpunk energy, and experimental filmmaking. Tsukamoto’s work is defined by raw physicality, handheld intensity, and themes of identity, violence, and urban alienation. Across films such as Tetsuo II: Body Hammer (1992), A Snake of June (2002), and Fires on the Plain (2015), he has continually reinvented his style while maintaining a fiercely independent spirit.