Posted on 12/09/2006 9:31:30 AM PST by Zakeet
TOKYO - Hiromasa Murakami went to see Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" to find out if an American could tell the Japanese side of a battle that became a symbol of U.S. patriotism, but for Japan was a bitter memory of defeat.
After viewing the film on Saturday when it opened it Tokyo, Murakami thinks Eastwood got it right.
"It was marvelous," the 50-year-old carpenter said as he emerged from the theater. "How should I express it? It was the same for both sides, for them and us. Everyone was a victim."
[Snip]
For many Japanese, the battle that killed 6,800 U.S. Marines and 21,000 Japanese has long been a tragedy best forgotten.
"Iwo Jima was a defeat. It was miserable and no Japanese movie company wanted to try to show it," said Eichi Tsukada, a 71-year-old retiree whose father died in World War Two.
Six decades after its defeat, Japan is still trying to come to grips with the Pacific War and who was to blame.
[Snip]
Few young Japanese these days know much about the battle for the tiny, tear-shaped island 700 miles south of Tokyo.
But after watching the film on Saturday, 17-year-old high school student Satoshi Koyama said he had learned something.
"American and Japanese soldiers were fighting with the same emotion. Both wanted to return to their homelands," he said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Good grief! You think you can summarize Japan's motivations for their attack on the US and their subsequent defeat at the hands of the US forces in a single sentence?
I summarized the emotions of my father who fought in Europe and was badly injured. He had hoped to move on to fight the Japs in the Pacific, but he couldn't.
His emotions were more than wanting to just return home.
This phrase described that:
Take your non-sequitur, rude response and blow in out your a*s.
Oh, I have the book. Will keep reading it in spite of its speed bumps.
Thanks to both.
i couldn't put it down...later, reluctantly gave it up to that old german soldier...
from what his children say, he is another haunted old soldier, albeit from the
enemy side. check abebooks.com; search by putting in title and in keywords, english. (there are thousands of title if you don't narrow the search down)
good luck, good reading. (why shadow dancer? forgive me for asking)
No special reason. My screen name used to be riley1992 (my dog's name and year he was born) and when I left here for a while I didn't think I could use my old screen name still so I changed it. Turns out I could have.
I don't have my copy anymore either but you're right, it was a great read.
If this review is even remotely accurate, it's just one more reason NOT to see Eastwood's films about Iwo Jima. I'll save my money and use it to buy a real history of that battle. I'm not interested in sentimental journeys that attempt to rationalize the evil of the Japanese Empire.
Have you ever seen modern Japanese and German pornography? The girls aren't smiling. The pornography isn't as disturbing as is the national interest. It is a window into their national psyche. A nation's character can partially be read by what they fantasize about doing to other people.
Japan and Germany should not be allowed nuclear weapons. Can you imagine what the world would look like today if they had them 60 years ago?
Do a title search on Amazon? I think I just saw it there also. "soldat"....
I would never own a Japanese car"
I have an uncle who feels exactly like you do and whose plane was shot down in the Pacific.
Yet he has owned several Mercedes during his life which astounded me since the Germans matched the Japanese for brutality and mercilessness during the war.
Its OK to make a statement but he should have been consistent.
Geez, #66 was meant for you, not me.
Yep, the person who has it now told me the name. My memory is shot to hell.
I think relevant Germans were tried for war crimes and those getting away have been hunted down. Also, I have not seen the denial or revisionist history coming from Germans that I have seen from Japanese.
Correct. Our mindset was worlds apart. We were fighting for freedom, they were fighting for their emperor.
We are grateful for your father's service. We are always better than our enemies. I fear though that today we are being too 'nice'.
The Japanese wanted to return to their homelands - sure "after" they conquered all of Asia.
As for the Japanese themselves, they can be anal, frustrating, conformist and still make great allies. Maybe it's a generational thing but I can't hate today's Japanese for what their grandparents did.
I agree with that saying "War is Hell." Some of that Hell is the expectations WE place on our warriors who are not treated equally.
Panties on head vs burning and dragging through the streets, hanging on bridges, and beheadings, etc? But in the end--this opposition will thank us (as those before them did) for our decency. Right. /sarcasm on.
I hadn't either until I went to the Hiroshima museum.
As far as karma goes, I think the target list was based more on putting the bomb on a city with military/industrial capacity that hadn't already been bombed a lot. Tokyo was out because the U.S. thought they might need the Emperor after the war and it had already been bombed quite a bit.
One of my japanese friends has a live in mother-in-law which is quite common there. My wife and I were invited over for New Years and she proceeded to tell me how she remembered the Doolittle raid and then a couple years later when the B-29s started coming over every day. It was an interesting conversation with her granddaughter acting as translator.
"What happened to Ira Hayes is probably the most pathetic story of a human to come along. He was thrown into a limelight he felt that he did not deserver to be in, only to be found dead in a ditch."
"So far Clint Eastwood's "Flags of Our Fathers" has escaped that kind of criticism, protected by the passage of time and its air of realism. But even its people are problematic. The character of Bud Gerber -- the political sharpie who puts the heroes on the bond tour -- is fictional (and veers perilously close to the old cliche of the wily, cigar-chomping, show-business Jew). And although the film suggests that Ira Hayes' alcoholism stems solely from his war service, he had a history of drunk-and-disorderly arrests before he ever put on a uniform."
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