Yet Another Outstanding Eastwood Movie, This One in Japanese
Directed by Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima (2006) was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. It is one of a pair of films Eastwood directed that center around the World War II Battle of Iwo Jima, the other being Flags of Our Fathers. On the Letters From Iwo Jima DVD, the two movies are sometimes characterized as comprising a diptych.
Letters is almost entirely a Japanese-language film, but it was made by an American production company that shot nearly all the footage in southern California. The important roles are played by Japanese actors unfamiliar to English-speaking audiences, with the notable exception of Ken Watanabe (The Last Samurai, Memoirs of a Geisha). However, the key characters are portrayed by people who are well-known in Japan, especially Kazunari Ninomiya, a member of the boy band Arashi.
In the real-life Battle of Iwo Jima, the Japanese faced inevitable defeat by the attacking American forces. History tells us that of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers in the battle, about 95 percent died and the rest were taken prisoner. Letters From Iwo Jima gives some idea of what it might have been like for the doomed defenders on that tiny island in the Pacific back in February and March of 1945.
Why They Fight to the Death
The film puts us in the mindset of the Japanese soldiers on Iwo Jima. The Americans have taken back all the Pacific islands seized earlier by Japan. Now only Okinawa and Iwo Jima stand in the way of a Normandy-style invasion of mainland Japan.
But the Japanese high command makes the decision that the best allocation of limited resources will be to defend Iwo Jima with just the soldiers already on the island: there will be no air support, no naval support, no additional troops. The size and strength of the attacking U.S. forces will be overwhelming, and the Japanese defenders are ordered to fight to the death, causing as many American casualties as possible.
The movie leaves it up to us to figure out why the Japanese soldiers mostly obeyed those orders. One reason was that they were trapped and surrender was iffy — it could get you shot as a deserter, and in one scene the Americans are shown killing prisoners. Also, there was the Japanese tradition of death with honor, and the film shows soldiers committing suicide with grenades or guns rather than face the possibility of dishonor. But in the final analysis, it seems likely that most felt they were sacrificing themselves to protect their families back on the mainland. As the commanding general puts it to the men, "We will defend this island until we are dead. Until the very last soldier is dead! If our children can live safely for one more day, it would be worth the one more day that we defend this island."
The Baker and the General
Letters From Iwo Jima recounts episodes in the lives of a handful of disparate Japanese soldiers. The closest thing to a central character is a fictional Everyman, the young conscript infantryman Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya). A baker in civilian life, he wants nothing more than to be back home with his wife and baby daughter. As a military man, his service is undistinguished, but adequate. In battle, he participates in the unsuccessful defense of Mount Suribachi, then under fire from U.S. Marines he makes his way to the north caves, and finally he is present for the last-ditch futile efforts to slow the American onslaught.
The film's most memorable character is loosely based on the real-life Lt. Gen. Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who is impressively portrayed by Ken Watanabe. The commander of all Japanese personnel on the island, Gen. Kuribayashi is patrician, but he has compassion for enlisted men. (The story contrives to have him rescue Saigo from bad situations on three separate occasions.) Kuribayashi lived for a few years in the United States and likes Americans. One of his prize possessions is a 1911 Colt 45 given him as a farewell gift when he left the U.S., and this gun plays an important part in the movie. However, Kuribayashi is a professional soldier to the core, and his goal on Iwo Jima is for his men to kill as many Americans as possible.
The Patriotism Police and an Aristocratic Olympic Champion
A noteworthy supporting character in Letters From Iwo Jima is the fictional Shimizu (Ryo Kase), an enlisted man who joins Saigo's unit. His background gives us a glimpse of a repressive aspect of Japanese society at the time. Shimizu was in a cruel law enforcement organization known as the Kempeitai, which Japan's totalitarian government used to make sure everyone exhibited sufficient commitment to the war, turning the country into a police state. In one of the film's most compelling scenes, Shimizu and his Kempeitai superior reproach a woman for failing to display the flag at her home, and the superior orders the family dog shot as punishment for the offense.
The most colorful character in the movie is the fictionalized version of the real-life Baron Nishi, played by the handsome Tsuyoshi Ihara. A lieutenant colonel, Nishi won a gold medal in an equestrian event at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics, and he claims to have had Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks as his houseguests in Tokyo. Nishi brings a favorite horse with him to Iwo Jima and looks simply marvelous riding around on it, but this seems a form of animal cruelty since he knows the American attack is impending. Also, in one of the film's several saccharine scenes, Nishi translates for his troops a letter a captured U.S. Marine had received from his mother.
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