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Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima film resonates in Japan
2006-12-10
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." Named best film of 2006 by the National Board of Review last Wednesday, "Letters from Iwo Jima" is the second of two Eastwood films about the 1945 battle, engraved in U.S. memory by a photo of six servicemen raising the flag on the island's Mount Suribachi. The first, "Flags of Our Fathers," is the tale of three of the Americans who raised the flag and later became propaganda tools in a campaign to sell U.S. war bonds. Starring Ken Watanabe as Lieutenant-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the Japanese forces in the epic World War Two battle, "Letters" focuses on the Japanese defenders. Central to the film are Kuribayashi, who had served as a military attache in the United States and himself had little hope of victory, and Saigo, a young baker who is drafted and forced to leave his pregnant wife but vows to return home alive. The title refers to letters the two men, both loving husbands and fathers, write to their families as they prepare for battle. The shared humanity of those who fought on both sides was one message Eastwood wanted to convey. "I think it's important that everybody remember that people gave their lives to protect their country," he told a news conference in Tokyo last month. 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. "As a person in the Japanese movie industry, I have the slightly embarrassing sensation that we should have turned our attention to the Battle of Iwo Jima and filmed something on the theme earlier," Watanabe said in an interview published in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper on Saturday. The first scrap of Japan's native soil invaded in the war, Iwo Jima -- "Sulphur Island" -- was coveted by the Americans as a base for fighters escorting B-29 bombers headed for the mainland. Kuribayashi honeycombed the island with tunnels from which defenders had to be dislodged by demolition charges, grenades and flamethrowers to try to delay an invasion of the mainland. 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.
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