Kon Ichikawa was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His work displays a vast range in genre and style, from the anti-war films The Burmese Harp (1956) and Fires on the Plain (1959), to the documentary Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which won two BAFTA Film Awards, and the 19th-century revenge drama An Actor's Revenge (1963). His film Odd Obsession (1959) won the Jury Prize at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival.

The Burmese Harp is a 1956 Japanese drama film directed by Kon Ichikawa. Based on a children's novel of the same name written by Michio Takeyama, it tells the story of Japanese soldiers who fought in the Burma Campaign during World War II. A member of the group goes missing after the war, and the soldiers hope to uncover whether their friend survived, and if he is the same person as a Buddhist monk they see playing a harp. The film was among the first to show the losses of the war from a Japanese soldier's perspective.