Forever Being Yamato: Alternate Pacific War Histories in Japanese Film and Anime

Summary

The constructed identity of the postwar Japanese is inherently unbalanced, reflecting the yet unresolved nature of their past. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the single most important problem of ‘postwar’ Japan is this inability to come to terms, once and for all, with the pre-1945 past (Shimazu 116).

Since 2000, a series of mainstream Japanese feature films have addressed the subject of the Pacific War and lavished long running times and high production values on the representation of this destructive and controversial conflict. These films can be seen within a wider international context in which the Second World War has re-emerged as a spectacular and popular cinematic preoccupation, but while these Japanese examples are comparable to and often visually resemble Hollywood precedents such as Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998) or Pearl Harbor (Michael Bay, 2001), their national context makes their specific depictions of history divisive and problematic. Films such as Men of the Yamato (Sato Junya, 2005), Sea Without Exit (Kiyoshi Sasabe, 2006), For Those We Love (Taku Shinjo, 2007), Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (Izuru Narushima, 2011) and The Eternal Zero (Takashi Yamazaki, 2013) evince an uneasy balance between lamentation for the destruction of the war, denial or evasion of Japanese responsibility for the conflict, and a celebration of self-sacrifice in the past in the creation of Japan's future peace and prosperity. The vexed status of Japan's war history, in political debate and in education, renders the recent past a contestable and re-interpretable space. The problematic and ambiguous treatment of war history in contemporary Japan (by turns pacifist and ruminative, conservative and deterministic, and inconsistent and paradoxical) which these films exhibit and exemplify is also found in films and animated series which carry their reinterpretation of the past further into active rewriting, creating divergent, alternative histories of the conflict.

Surveying these recent films foregrounds one of the most stereotypical and controversial aspects of Japan's conduct of the war in the Pacific: knowing and willing self-sacrifice by Japanese soldiers, sailors, and airmen to the imperial cause. In portraying the readiness of Japan’s young men to die for the nation, the films express and encourage admiration for their heroism and selflessness, while treating the military authorities commanding them, the nation for which they died, and the postwar Japan their deaths delivered in equivocal or outrightly ambiguous terms.