Movie Stirs Reflection on Life's Meaning

(May 22, 2003) - Editor's note: the following article recently appeared in the monthly newsletter of the Odawara Christian Center. Missionaries at the center take turns writing for the newsletter.

The silver chain will snap, and the golden lamp will fall and break; the rope at the well will break and the water jar will be shattered. Our bodies will return to the dust of the earth, and the breath of life will go back to God, who gave it to us. Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

God continues to speak to me through certain movies. As English students were studying the words of a wise man called "the teacher" in class this term, it was especially interesting to me that I received a magazine with information about the classic Kurosawa movie Ikiru (to live). Both Ikiru and "the teacher" talk about some of the same things I had read. I decided to see the movie for myself.

Seeing it, reading the words from "the teacher" and being where I am in my own life got me thinking. Thinking about life - my own life, the lives of people I'm growing to love . . . here in Japan and what life itself really is, or should be.

Ikiru is the story of a man, Watanabe-san, who has worked as a minor bureaucrat all his adult life. The film opens with an x-ray picture of Watanabe-san's stomach, riddled with cancer. Watanabe-san is going to die and there is absolutely nothing anybody can do about it.

But the diagnosis that he is going to die pushes Watanabe-san to really look at his life. He discovers that trying to escape from his troubles and chasing mindless pleasures only confirms his emptiness and the senselessness of the life he has lived. He realizes his life is only going to have meaning as he gives himself to something. Finally, he decides to use the power of his position to help a neighborhood group get a small park in its crowded, dirty corner of Tokyo.

The last half of the movie takes place at Watanabe-san's memorial service where his co-workers recall his strange behavior, his refusal to give up even though he was very ill, and his passion to help the neighborhood group - they come in, sobbing, to bow at Watanabe-san's altar and pay tribute to him. As we watch the rest of the movie, we see that Watanabe-san's despair had been turned into joy. He found his mission and was able to accomplish something with his life.

The movie ends at a different point than where "the teacher" leaves us in his book. Yet there are things we can learn from both, I think. You and I, like Watanabe-san, might want to ask ourselves what it is that's going to give our lives real meaning. And beyond that, to what are we going to give our lives that has eternal significance? For we all will die, just as surely as Watanabe-san did in Ikiru.

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