Digital Script ArchivesDetail
Watashi wa Kai ni Naritai
- No.
- ST-00013
- Year
- 1958
- Broadcated
/Created by - ＫＲＴ
- Scriptwriter
- Hashimoto Shinobu
- Original author
- 題名・遺書 加藤哲太郎
- Format
- one-off drama
- Awards
- ACA National Arts Festival Award
- Overview
- This anti-war drama conveys the tragedy of war through the heartrending cries of an ordinary man and garnered widespread attention. It won the 13th ACA National Arts Festival Grand Prize. When it was first broadcast, the first half of the show played content recorded on a video tape, while the second half—war trial and after—was broadcast live. The story is set in 1944, in the late stages of the World War II. Toyomatsu Shimizu, a man in his early 30s who runs a barber shop in Kochi, receives a draft notice. One day during his hard life in the army, Toyomatsu receives orders from a superior officer to stab a prisoner, a former B-29 bomber crew member, to death. However, being a timid man, he only manages to injure the prisoner. After being discharged from military duty, he is suddenly arrested as a class-C war criminal on the charge of murdering a prisoner. In the war trial, he defends himself in the following words: “In the Japanese army, superior officers’ orders are absolute. I would have been shot to death if I had disobeyed orders.” However, a trial by the victor is an unfair one, and Toyomatsu is sentenced to death by hanging. Awaiting his day of execution, Toyomatsu writes the following message in a will addressed to his wife: “I never want to be reborn as a human being again. If I have to be reborn, I want to become a shellfish in the depths of the sea where no one can see me.”
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