I am an American PhD student based in both Japan and Micronesia doing extensive fieldwork with the survivors of the Pacific War in the Pacific Islands and Japan--as well as the families of war dead. Since I have been really involved most recently with the families of soldiers and sailors who died in the Pacific, I naturally wanted to see this movie.
I found myself with tears in my eyes from the very beginning, because it was as if all the black and white photographs I have been generously shown by these families were coming to life--the young faces of these sailors, frightened, proud, and eager to live up to their responsibilities, were very true to what I sense was really happening in the 1940s.
I have to say, unlike the very propagandist flavor of many American films about the Pacific War, including most recently 'Pearl Harbor,' this film really delves into the traumatic aspects of masculinity in general and having to live up to "being a man" in Japan just as much as it celebrates the humanity of the people involved. Many American films, with the exception of 'Saving Private Ryan' and several films about Vietnam, tend to stick to very comic-like stark depictions of heroes and villains and an overall sense of being "victimized" by the enemy. Here, the enemy is not the United States but rather masculinity and male pride itself, as well as the whole tragic story they create.
As such, it is a welcome remedy to way too much American-biased victory narratives that obscure the face of the Japanese military, and to films that portray menacing, dehumanized battalions of Japanese soldiers advancing forth without any legitimate context of their own. We see in this film the faces of these young men and understand what situation they were coming from.
That said, clearly the film was trying to be sensitive to war bereaved and to the official narratives of Japanese pretexts for war, and in that sense I feel they overdid it a little. We don't get a sense, for instance, about Japan's colonial presence throughout Asia and the Pacific--only the vague notion that Japan somehow got involved in war. Still, this isn't really a film about why the war happened, but rather about how it was to live and fight in the immediate time preceding Japanese surrender. In that sense, I do want to make the critique that this film really could have done with even MORE contextualization and solid research of popular Japanese culture at the time, because this would have added even more to its convincing sense of reality. For instance, the soundtrack would have been greatly enhanced with some of the evocative marching music and the ballads on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s that encouraged young men to join the navy and go south to the South Seas.
These songs are still sung even by the bereaved families who go back to visit the places where their loved ones died, so it would have been quite powerful if we got to hear them throughout the film. The absence of small details like this, some rather poorly-imitated Japanese regional dialects, and some of the melodramatic overacting by a few members of the cast, detracted somewhat from the overall production. But in general, this is a very fine film, extremely well acted (and compassionately so) by its cast.
I have been reading a book about the film in Japanese and it's fascinating to learn how so many of the cast worked directly with Japanese veterans and the bereaved families in order to develop their characters and their behavior. So in many respects this film is not only based on the realities of battle (which are really just the backdrop) but on the real life realities of war and on being a young man in the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1944-1945.
In all, it's an extremely meaningful film that needs to be distributed widely through the world. I know there is a lot of resistance to its release in China and Korea, understandably, but I think this is a portrait of what was going on for Japanese at the time and as such could even work as a tool to facilitate better understanding in these countries. It is essential that more compassionate films like this are made that go on to address the complexity and horror of what happened in Asia and the Pacific-- to the people whose lives were colonized and ruined by Japanese aggression, but at least it's a start. It appears to me that Japanese popular culture is finally ready to address the war in all of its ugliness and begin to heal some of these old wounds.
I found myself with tears in my eyes from the very beginning, because it was as if all the black and white photographs I have been generously shown by these families were coming to life--the young faces of these sailors, frightened, proud, and eager to live up to their responsibilities, were very true to what I sense was really happening in the 1940s.
I have to say, unlike the very propagandist flavor of many American films about the Pacific War, including most recently 'Pearl Harbor,' this film really delves into the traumatic aspects of masculinity in general and having to live up to "being a man" in Japan just as much as it celebrates the humanity of the people involved. Many American films, with the exception of 'Saving Private Ryan' and several films about Vietnam, tend to stick to very comic-like stark depictions of heroes and villains and an overall sense of being "victimized" by the enemy. Here, the enemy is not the United States but rather masculinity and male pride itself, as well as the whole tragic story they create.
As such, it is a welcome remedy to way too much American-biased victory narratives that obscure the face of the Japanese military, and to films that portray menacing, dehumanized battalions of Japanese soldiers advancing forth without any legitimate context of their own. We see in this film the faces of these young men and understand what situation they were coming from.
That said, clearly the film was trying to be sensitive to war bereaved and to the official narratives of Japanese pretexts for war, and in that sense I feel they overdid it a little. We don't get a sense, for instance, about Japan's colonial presence throughout Asia and the Pacific--only the vague notion that Japan somehow got involved in war. Still, this isn't really a film about why the war happened, but rather about how it was to live and fight in the immediate time preceding Japanese surrender. In that sense, I do want to make the critique that this film really could have done with even MORE contextualization and solid research of popular Japanese culture at the time, because this would have added even more to its convincing sense of reality. For instance, the soundtrack would have been greatly enhanced with some of the evocative marching music and the ballads on the radio in the 1930s and 1940s that encouraged young men to join the navy and go south to the South Seas.
These songs are still sung even by the bereaved families who go back to visit the places where their loved ones died, so it would have been quite powerful if we got to hear them throughout the film. The absence of small details like this, some rather poorly-imitated Japanese regional dialects, and some of the melodramatic overacting by a few members of the cast, detracted somewhat from the overall production. But in general, this is a very fine film, extremely well acted (and compassionately so) by its cast.
I have been reading a book about the film in Japanese and it's fascinating to learn how so many of the cast worked directly with Japanese veterans and the bereaved families in order to develop their characters and their behavior. So in many respects this film is not only based on the realities of battle (which are really just the backdrop) but on the real life realities of war and on being a young man in the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1944-1945.
In all, it's an extremely meaningful film that needs to be distributed widely through the world. I know there is a lot of resistance to its release in China and Korea, understandably, but I think this is a portrait of what was going on for Japanese at the time and as such could even work as a tool to facilitate better understanding in these countries. It is essential that more compassionate films like this are made that go on to address the complexity and horror of what happened in Asia and the Pacific-- to the people whose lives were colonized and ruined by Japanese aggression, but at least it's a start. It appears to me that Japanese popular culture is finally ready to address the war in all of its ugliness and begin to heal some of these old wounds.