December 29, 2006

EASTWOOD TURNS HIS MAGNUM IN FOR A KIMONO

Dirty Harry has finally succumbed to the endemic moral pathology of Hollywood. The best evidence of this is the New York Times’ A.O. Scott’s rating of “almost perfect” for Clint Eastwood’s new film “Letters from Iwo Jima.” Following suit, most of the major media reviews acknowledged it as a masterpiece and contender for many Academy Awards.

The film is a companion piece of sorts to “Flags of our Fathers,” the story of the iconic photo of the flag raising on Mt. Suribachi on Iwo Jima in February of 1945 and the horrendous battle for the island. Despite its ideological twists and turns, “Flags” was mostly a true story. The same cannot be said of “Letters.” The new “almost perfect” movie is mostly made up out of whole cloth. But to make it seem true a “McGuffin” is used. The Mcguffin here is the two scenes that frame the movie—the discovery of a mail pouch some time after the battle with a couple of hundred letters from Japanese soldiers which never made it home to their families until after the war. Whether this is factual or not is not clear, although from the lack of detail about this matter in the promotional material that accompanies the film one suspects that not very much of the film comes from the letters of ordinary soldiers. It is known, however, that General Kuribayashi, the Japanese commander, did write many letters to his wife and family, and some of these appear in the film.

But the scenes of the discovery of the mail pouch remain a McGuffin—a trick to make the audience believe that what they will see and hear is true, and that the dramatic narrative is derived from eye witnesses. It is of course not possible that the complex thoughts, feelings, actions and ideas shown in the film could be derived from a couple of hundred brief letters and postcards, especially after they have been vetted by Japanese censors whose job it was to remove the unpatriotic thoughts and feelings that get expressed in the movie.

The main character in the movie is a young conscript named Saigo, who is fictitious or perhaps a composite of several different ordinary soldiers. He is a likable soul, a baker by trade with a pregnant young wife, a basically incompetent soldier who couldn’t hit the side of a barn with his rifle if he tried. He thus becomes the goat of his unit and target of his sadistic Bushido-oriented captain. He grumbles good-naturedly throughout the movie, and makes friends with one or two other malcontents. And although there are scenes of cruelty and sadism committed by both armies, because we see the battle through the eyes and sensibility of Saigo we cannot help but feel sympathy with and for the ordinary Japanese soldier. He reminds one of a fresh faced kid who has wandered out of an Andy Hardy movie.

This sympathy is reinforced by the commander of the Japanese forces, General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, depicted as a wise, gentle, highly respected leader who opposes the Bushido mentality of his junior officers.

On the whole, great pains are taken to show that the ordinary Japanese soldiers are not fierce fighters but just ordinary guys like Bill Mauldin’s Willie and Joe. Those familiar with the real Battle of Iwo Jima will be surprised to see the battle in the movie, which shows the Japanese as the victims of a merciless foe whom they fought with little food, water and ammunition and who, only as a last resort, chose death before surrender. You would not think, watching the movie, that this poor hapless army of twenty thousand half-starved guys could have killed 7,000 and mutilated another 14,000 Marines in six horrendous weeks of fighting. It just shows what simple, ordinary Japanese guys can do when they pull together.

Sure, all grunts are similar in that they miss their homes, their wives and sweethearts, they look at photographs of them before the battle, they tell jokes and form friendships, they are kind to little children and dogs. But their leaders are not the same. They are guided by an ideology that gives the conflict its character and may even have caused it in the first place. The Japanese were a militaristic nation bent on conquest and with a cult of death before dishonor, by seppuku (sword to the abdomen) if necessary—the way General Kuribayashi is believed to have died, not by an ivory handled U.S. Army Colt .45 as depicted in the film.

In the context of Clint Eastwood’s new movie, which seems to have a total amnesia for the history of the Japanese before February of 1945, it is important to call attention to what Eastwood and his colleagues have forgotten.

The historian Chalmers Johnson, who served as a naval officer in Japan and taught political science at the University of California, has said that:

"It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis powers, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Soviet civilians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced laborers — and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand, or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %."

Below, Clint Eastwood will find a list of more specific barbaric acts committed by those good-natured boys in the Imperial Japanese Army who loved their moms and girl friends. The details of them all are readily available on the internet.

In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.95 million civilians were killed as a direct result of the Japanese invasion. The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanking Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 260,000 civilians and prisoners of war. A scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians.

Special Japanese military units conducted experiments on civilians and POWs in China. One of the most infamous was Unit 731. Victims were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia and amputations, and were used to test biological weapons, among other experiments.

According to GlobalSecurity.org, the experiments carried out by Unit 731 alone caused 3,000 deaths. Furthermore, "tens of thousands, and perhaps as many 200,000, Chinese died of bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax and other diseases..." caused by use of biological warfare.

In 2006, the first accounts of experimentation by the imperial military outside China were published. According to the BBC and Kyodo news agency, former IJN medical officer Akira Makino stated that he was ordered — as part of his training — to carry out vivisection on about 30 civilian prisoners in The Philippines between December 1944 and February 1945. The surgery included amputations and the victims included women and children.

According to historians Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Seiya Matsuno, Emperor Hirohito authorized by specific orders the use of chemical weapons in China. During the invasion of Wuhan from August to October 1938, the Emperor authorized the use of toxic gas on 375 separate occasions, despite Article 171 of the Versailles Peace Treaty and a resolution adopted by the League of Nations condemning the use of poison gas by Japan.

Japanese imperial forces are also reported to have used torture widely on prisoners, usually in an effort to gather military intelligence quickly. Tortured prisoners were often later executed. A former Japanese Army officer who served in China, Uno Shintaro, stated:

"The major means of getting intelligence was to extract information by interrogating prisoners. Torture was an unavoidable necessity. Murdering and burying them follows naturally. You do it so you won't be found out. I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing. We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to our ancestors. On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you're winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Japanese race was superior."

The Japanese military's use of forced labor by Asian civilians and POWs also caused many deaths. According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Japanese Asia Development Board for forced labor. More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway, made famous in the film “The Bridge Over the River Kwai.”

The intent of Eastwood’s movie is to humanize the enemy; it’s in denial of the real, documented, witnessed behavior which was characteristic of the Japanese in WWII. In Hollywood’s POV we are all the same under the skin—Americans, 1945 Japanese, 1972 Palestinians, 2006 Jihadisits. And if there are no differences between us, why should we fight anyone, the Japanese then or the Moslem terrorists today?

So this is where we’ve been brought by postmodernism: there’s no such thing as truth, (every judgment is subjective), political correctness (mustn’t hurt anyone’s feelings), and multiculturalism (every culture has its own equally valid set of values—beheading, anyone?) All matters of history become relative, there is no good or evil, only different ways that cultures look at things and choose to remember them. So let’s be the first to scrap the idea that there was any point to us opposing the (fill in: Nazis, Communists, Imperial Japan, and by extension the Jihadists)—we just have to learn to understand them and accept our differences.