Letters from Iwo Jima: Japanese Perspectives

Extract

Clint Eastwood's Iwo Jima films, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, have enjoyed considerable success in Japan and the United States. Letters from Iwo Jima, which told the story of the battle from the Japanese perspective, made nearly 5 billion yen at the box office in Japan, and won an Academy Award and a number of other major awards in the United States. Critics in America praised a film that, in the era of the war on terrorism and the Iraq conflict, attempted to understand the humanity of the enemy, while those in Japan celebrated the film's anti-war message and its largely unbiased portrait of Japanese. Few, however, have tried to analyze the reasons behind this success and how audiences were approaching these films. One of these rare cases was a short piece in the Asahi Shinbun (13 December 2006) by Ikui Eikoh, which suggested conceptualizing the film against the background of the Iraq War and the fact that to America, having lost many of its staunch allies except Japan, “Japan is the sole country in the whole world that it feels it can understand, that it wants to understand.” Japan Focus, in extending a series of articles we have featured on the two films, asked Professor Ikui to expand on his thoughts. This article appears for the first time in Japan Focus and was translated and introduced by Aaron Gerow.