Ken Watanabe hopes Japan doesn't shy away from it's war history

Interesting subject, one which I'm sure could lead to much heated debate. The Yasukuni Shrine, dedicated to 2.5 million Japanese war dead, memorializes nurses, students and WWII suicides -- as well as 14 war criminals. As war dead are considered dieties by Shinto, the national religion, one doesn't make a pilgrimage simply to pay one's respects, but to worship the fallen in battle. Each year, 100s of thousands of people visit the shrine. The month of August is a particularly sensitive time, as it marks the surrender of the Japanese to the Allied forces, ending WWII. Japanese prime minister Koizumi's regular visits to the shrine have inflamed tensions in Korea and China, both victims of Japan's aggression early in the 20th century.As Japan takes on a more assertive role in military matters, the issue is only bound to become more heated.

how this does in japanese market (or watanabe's career for that matter) will be interesting. there have been a string recently of nationalistic/"patriotic" blockbusters: LORELEI (sp), AEGIS.

there used to be SOME japanese war movies with confrontational angles about japan's role (fukasaku, oshima) going beyond the lament of hiroshima/nagasaki (even kurosawa...), but hardly register any effect in today's disposable pop market.

I recently caught [b]Barefoot Gen[/b] on UK DVD, with its horrifying images of devestation wrought by the Bomb. The anime was unbelievably even-handed in its treatment. The film does not hesitate to criticize Imperial Japan for its refusal to surrender, effectively saying that a war that costs so many lives can not be a just war.

Interesting, informative post, Mack, thank you!

Ther were loads of great directors from the post-war generation taking very critical swipes at the various groups, inidivuals and idealogies responsible for the war round about the 60s, like Tomu Uchida with the STRAITS OF HUNGER and Seijun Suzuki with STORY OF A PROSTITUTE, and especially Shohei Imamura- you can see it in films like BLACK RAIN, obviously, but he made some really interesting but little seen TV docs in the 70s about comfort women (KARAYUKI-SAN) and also the soldiers who refused to return to Japan after the defeat (IN SEARCH OF UNRETURNED SOLDIERS). And even recently, there was the documentary JAPANESE DEVILS and the indie movie PEEP TV SHOW.
But these directors were all cantankerous, left-leaning figures eager to attack the establishment, and it is, as usual, the establishment, companies like Shochiku, and TV stations like NHK, who have recently presented watered down and distant image of events and kept the details to a minimum. So lots of films out there which are more critical, but not seen widely by the general public. There were plenty of commerical films set around the war released in Japan for the 60th anniversary, just as there were a fair few, like DOWNFALL, made in Germany. But still, most kids today dont know anything about events 60s years ago other than the real basics (like the dropping of the A bomb), and so its easy to make silly fantasies like LORELEI about the events which use the basic facts to say something rather sinister for this day and age - or for rightwing manga artists like Yoshinori Kobayashi to write very nationalistic revisionist comic-book acounts like SENSO-RON.

Jasper- do you know of any documentaries about the 'comfort women' (in any language) available to the public?

best would be Byun Young-Joo's series of documentaries, but sadly they're not out on DVD (yet). AsianDb.com might have the subtitle-less VHS, though.

Readers with a smattering of French and interested in learning more about the war in the Pacific could do worse than to check out "L'Asie en flammes: de la Chine a la guerre du Pacifique," [Asia in flames: from China to the war in the Pacific]five documentaries by Serge Viallet and published by Mk2 Editions. The superb 2-DVD set gathers together archival footage, much of it previously unreleased, as well as eyewitness testimony by those who until quite recently dared not talk about Japan's sordid past(many feared for their lives or the end of their careers). Events recalled include the construction of the bridge over the river Kwai by slave laborers, the suicide of Japanes civilians on the arrival of the Americans, the 2nd atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the secret experiments performed by the Japanese army in order to develop chemical and biological arms ("Les fantomes de l'unite 731"). The first DVD lasts 160', the 2nd, 102', and the set is accompanied by an elegant 100-page illustrated booklet.

John, Imamura's doc Karayuki-san played at a festival in italy about 5-10 years ago, so not readily available.Imamura also made the films ZEGEN around the same subject, but again, it is not easily available.

There was a women's video activist group in Japan called Video Juku who made a couple of films on wartime sex slaves. You can find details of their work here:
http://www.jca.apc.org/video-juku/index-eng.html
I've not seen any of this.

The most interesting and enlightening film of this type is Sandokan 8, which was avaible on VHS in the States years ago, so you might be able to find a copy. It was a 1971 film directed by Kumai Kei, a fictionalised bigography of the subject of the book of the same name - the book has been translated, so you should give it a read.
Find it on Amazon at:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0765603543/sr=8-1/qid=1147682022/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-3116484-7985747?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Finally, there was a category III HK woman in prison exploitation film from a few years back entitled COMFORT WOMEN. Not much historical background really - more an Asian version of the Italian Nazi films like SS EXPERIMENT CAMP.

Hope this helps.

Jasper

Thanks, Jasper. It really would seem like there's a conspiracy of silence on these issues, particularly concerning the comfort women, but in other areas as well. Some of the best doc's on the Vietnam war are French, BUT THEY USE MATERIAL FROM ARCHIVES IN THE USA. Same goes for doc's on the CIA and on Saudi Arabia. Some good Korean documentaries are trickling out on DVD, but unfortunately, documentaries are among the least profitable markets. Even in my collection of 350+ films, I'd guess that fewer than 20 are documentaries. Good TV dramas like "Sandglass," war films like "Come and See," and family sagas like "Heimat" (with exceptional period detail) are great too, but well-done historical films are the exception rather than the rule...