A person who is usually good suddenly becomes paranoid and excited, and there is no distinction between good and evil......
Just because the accent is different, ordinary people can become butchers who kill without blinking......
Even today, 100 years later, such absurd tragedies continue to be staged -
《Fukuda Village Incident》
It happened five days after the outbreak of the Great Kanto Earthquake, and before that, the villagers of Fukuda in Chiba Prefecture were still living a life of melon sheds and bean racks.
The film begins on a train, with a woman returning to her hometown with her husband's ashes. The village chief and several veterans of the village waited at the station early to welcome the martyrs home.
In this small village, the military man has supremacy.
The people in the village who participated in the war and served as soldiers are proud of their past. Even if he has retired from the army and is at home, he will always wear a military uniform and show off his heroic deeds.
Among them was a retired veteran who was proud to have killed many people in the war. Whenever the retired servicemen get together, everyone will coax him to tell the deeds of the year again.
But in fact, this veteran is not what he boasts, he is just a man who feeds horses.
On the battlefield, he saw with his own eyes that the slaughter never stopped, day or night. Both strong men and women and children will be killed indiscriminately.
Although he felt cruel at the time of the incident, in order to be looked down upon after returning to his hometown, he could only make up what he heard and saw on the battlefield into his own story in exchange for face and respect.
In a militaristic state, the military represents honor and authority.
Once war is dressed up in patriotism, it is just. Any hesitation and timidity will be seen as disloyalty to the country and will be despised and ridiculed.
The first time a topic related to North Korea appeared in the film was on a ferry boat.
The boatman looked at Mrs. Shizuko, who was dressed in a foreign style and returned from abroad, and asked, are you a North Korean?
At that time, rumors about the North Koreans had spread to this isolated village. Some say that the North Koreans poisoned the well, and some say that the North Koreans took the lead in making trouble......
And Shizuko's father, a member of Toyo Takushoku Co., Ltd., knows that things are not as they are rumored.
Japan has formulated a policy of exploitation on the grounds that it is good for other countries. Under such oppression, the North Koreans went on strike. But the Japanese civil administration thinks that you are so poor that you should be grateful to Dade for being able to eat now.
People who have been deceived by official rhetoric have gradually developed discrimination and prejudice against North Koreans.
It wasn't until the outbreak of the Great Kanto Earthquake that the conflict was completely intensified.
On September 1, 1923, a strong earthquake of magnitude 7.9 struck the Kanto region of Japan. The earthquake-stricken areas included Tokyo, Kanagawa, Chiba, Shizuoka, Yamanashi, and other places, and the earthquake caused a huge disaster, with about 100,000 casualties.
At this moment of panic, Japanese police officials spread irresponsible remarks. North Koreans took the opportunity to burn, loot, and rape women and children......
As a result, local Japanese villagers began to form self-defense forces, check and post posts, and raise bamboo spears against Koreans in the name of protecting their wives and children.
It was also at this time that a caravan of 15 people peddling medicines traveled from Kagawa Prefecture to Chiba Prefecture. They sat at the shrine in the village and rested and waited for the ferry.
It so happened that a member of the Fukuda Village Self-Defense Group spotted them, so they quickly called the security team and carried out a unilateral attack on them on the grounds that they were suspected of being North Koreans, killing nine people, including children and women.
During the confrontation between the two sides, the Self-Defense Group demanded that the drug company prove that he was Japanese.
How to prove it?
Forcing them to speak Japanese words, forcing them to name the emperors of the past dynasties......
These actions, which now seem incredible, became the basis for their exclusion of dissent. If you don't say it well, your voice is too small, it's all unpatriotic and not the basis for the Japanese.
Fear-fueled anxiety, the villagers of the Self-Defense Corps gathered and exercised so-called "justice" with a sense of frenzy to protect their wives and children, even when numbers prevailed.
When the leader of the medicine merchant uttered the phrase, "Should you kill a North Korean?", a woman in the crowd with a child on her back plunged a sickle into his head.
Like dominoes, the slaughter began......
They besieged the unarmed youth, drove the women with their children under the water, and ignored the cries and pleas for help, and the emotions of the red-eyed self-defense groups had overwhelmed reason.
This is a real event in Japanese history, and it is rarely mentioned by survivors of the year after the incident.
This tragedy is unfortunate for either side.
But silence does not hide history, nor can it change misfortune, but allows such tragedies to be repeated again and again.
The accumulation of anxiety and the spread of rumors always lead to attacks on vulnerable individuals and groups.
For example, during the coronavirus outbreak, there were cases of attacks on Asians in Europe and the United States, and innocent car owners were injured in the boycott of Japanese goods.
Suppressing fear and excluding dissent can be language, skin color, place of origin and even living habits, which is the most common occurrence when a group gathers.
In addition to the Futian villagers and the medicine merchant in the movie, there is also a newspaper reporter who tries to appear as a communicator.
The reporter witnessed the murder of the North Korean sugar seller, but when she wanted to publish the truth, she was repeatedly stopped by the editor-in-chief.
"Newspapers should light the dark path at people's feet," was what the editor-in-chief told her when she first joined the company.
But now, in the official propaganda of the choice of survival with other races, individual forces are still unable to fight against the organization, and can only be buried in the end.
Although this history took place 100 years ago, it is not an ancient story. Because to this day, such stories are still unfolding.
Rumors spread on the Internet with ill intentions, attracting spectators who do not know the truth to add fuel to the fire, and their keyboards are like bamboo spears in the hands of ignorant villagers, stabbing at innocent people.
There are also those school bullies that are repeatedly banned, and they always bully a few or one person with the majority.
Groups increase cohesion, but they also have great destructive power, and in groups that erase the will of individuals, what is superimposed is not wisdom but stupidity.
Today, 100 years later, when we look at this matter, we can only sigh at the deep speculation of human nature.
We can't look directly at people's hearts, we can only lead by example, figure out the reasons before acting, think twice before acting, and use our own meager strength to avoid such a tragedy.