Hiroshima Again.
At Tokyo, the peculiar bow by POTUS to the diminutive Japanese Emperor Akhito elicited predictable media chit-chat on the Monday following the event, including this anchor inquiry from MSNBC, "Why was this considered by some a gaffe?" The answer is less significant to me than the speculation that the POTUS conduct may be connected to an apology or an expression of remorse with regard the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
No Doubts.
Spoke Saturday 14 with Dennis Giangreco, author, "Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan 1945-1947." The documented facts re the decision to use the first available atomic weapons on strategic targets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki," supports a general statement that Harry Truman and his military and civilian advisers, including Marshall, Leahy, Turner, King, Arnold, Hull, Grew and more, examined very closely the realtime estimates of what casualties the US would suffer in the event of an amphibious invasion of the home islands. They also looked at estimated Japanese casualties, military and civilian. The planning for DOWNFALL started in the summer 1944 and was continually updated into the Spring 1945. The Japanese suicidal resistance on Okinawa kept readjusting the ratios. The first two weeks of April 1945, US casualties were 7 thousand per week, and then continued at 35oo per week through April, May and into June. The actual number of US casualties was not the 35 thousand by June 1 but actually double that, in the 65-70 thousand range, including battle fatigue and exhaustion. All this changed the estimates on DOWNFALL. I was shocked, and you will be, too. Herbert Hoover, the ageless and timeless public servant, who was assisting the FDR and now the Truman administrations (Truman assumed POTUS mid April at FRD's death), got involved in numbers crunching in late May. Truman personally invited Hoover to the White House, and Hoover traveled from the New York Waldorf (where he lived in the penthouse) to the White House on May 28. When Hoover returned to New York, he drafted a memo that went to POTUS and presented the bald fact that a minimum casualty number was 500 thousand and that 1 million casualties was possible. Did Truman believe it? Yes. It was based upon Hoover's good, sound, field tested information from Iwo Jima and Okinawa battlefields. The draft had already started looking for 600 thousand new soldiers as replacements for the estimated casualties. The Truman administration was in preparation for a living nightmare, hence "Hell to Pay." They gave orders to prepare 500 thousand Purple Hearts. They gave orders to prepare 700 thousand hospital beds stateside to receive the wounded. The estimates of casualties kept climbing. By June 1947 the official estimate was still based upon the low number of one US combat casualty for every seven Japanese combat casualties. Using the baseline of 3.5 million combat personnel available for the defense of the homeland, that meant the half million. However by Summer 1945, the DoD believed that the Japanese were capable of fielding 5 million or more men with weapons in defense of the homeland, which would raise the estimates to three quarters of a million at best. And climbing.
What Didn't Truman Know?
Truman and his generals and admirals, chiefly General George Marshall and Admiral King, did not know that the Japanese had fully anticipated exactly how and where the US would invade and had prepared the killing fields with divisions ordered to die in place. The Japanese battle plane, Ketsu-Go, assigned 13 Divisions to southern most in the homeland chain Kyushu Island, which they anticipated would be the first target. They were correct. Operation DOWNFALL was to go in two phases, and the first was Operation OLYMPIC, with X-Day on November 1, 1945. The Japanese divisions dug in well back from the landing zones which they anticipated, and they were exactly correct in their choices. Also, Kyushu had a civilian population of ten million people, who remained in place. The US was going to launch 14 divisions against 13 Japanese divisions, a formula for disaster. The second phase of DOWNFALL was Operation Coronet, and it was to launch on Y-Day, March 1, 1946, when 40 Allied divisions were to assault the main island of Honshu. Again, Ketsu-Go anticipated correctly, and the Japanese planned to have a comparable force that was well dug in, again to fight to the death. Add to this misery that fact that the Japanese Air Force was much larger than the US figured because it had been reconfigured with wooden built Kamikzaes. The Kamikaze was the single most effective weapon the Japanese ever employed, and the US suppressed the facts of how devastating the attacks had been at Okinawa. Adding all this preparation, most of it unknown to the US command, the Japanese warlords were prepared to lose 20 million people of all types in order to drain and neutralize the Allied invasions. The Japanese warlord aim, supported by the Emperor Hirohito, was to make the invasion so costly that the US would offer a ceasefire, thereby preserving the Japanese empire for a negotiated withdrawal of all forces from the homeland.
The Decision.
The strategic bombing plan was to use four atomic weapons against four lesser cities to cow the warlords into surrender. Truman's choice was stark. Destroy several hundred thousand Japanese or commit to the credible possibility of one million or more US casualties over the next two years. The situation would likely have been much worse. After the first atomic strike on Hiroshima, August 6, the warlords sent out what was interpreted as surender messages; but after the second strike on Nagasaki, August 9, the warlords fell silent. Marshall accepted the fact that the warlords would not surrender, and he argued that the next two bombs be kept back for use later in the invasion. Marshall wanted the first seven to nine bombs dropped on Kyushu Island just before November 1. Then Marshall wanted the invasion troops to wait forty-eight hours and attack through the debris. Marshall knew what the bombs would do; he had gone to New Mexico. But no one knew what radiation would do over time. Ten million Japanese civilians on Kyushu, plus 13 Japanese divisions and 14 Allied divisions, plus the American fleet of battleships, carriers, destroyers, troop transports, all of it, under a rain of fallout. This was the eve of the horror. It didn't come, because on August 14 the warlords surrendered, to the great surprise and prayerful relief of Truman, Marshall and the admirals.
James Michener, October 20, 1945.
The novelist and chronicler James Michener wrote a letter to a comrade after the surrender to explain what he, Michener, had thought when he heard of the bombs. Aware that the progressives were already campaigning against Truman for his decision to use the bombs, Michener asked that the letter not be made public until after his death: "How did we react? With a gigantic sigh of relief, not exultation because of our victory, but a deep gut-wrenching sigh of deliverance. We had stared into the mouth of Armageddon and suddenly the confrontation was no longer necessary. We had escaped those deadly beaches of Kyushu."
Sixty-four Years Later.
The Japanese people of 1945 were obedient to an emperor and a cabinet of warlords who fully aimed to kill and wound as many Americans as possible while ordering the self-destruction of millions of Japanese civilians, especially including women and children. Does America now indulge in revisionism and fault Truman and Marshall and their cadre for choosing between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and one hundred times those losses? The whole of the Pacific and Asia was losing 400 thousand casualties a month as long as the Japanese continued to resist. Europe was starving and in ruins. Southeast Asia, Korea, the Philippines, all the islands, were desperate and in need. Wait for blockade? Wait for negotiation? Wait for what? The decision was made to bomb. And when that didn't work as of August 9, the decision was made to invade. Truman crossed the line. He accepted both scenarios, August 9, 10, 11, 12, 13. Hiroshima and Nagsaki were not enough. Suddenly Truman had to live with his decision to launch fifty-four divisions into Hell. Apologize? Remorse? Bows? I await more information, but for now I am puzzled. Does the Obama administration have the facts of why Truman gave the order to use the bombs?
Thanks, JB for that gripping summary. The book is on my amazon truck already.
Utopians are seldom burdened by such things as history, human nature, resource limitations and such. Theirs is to imagine and move toward the pot of gold--with our money and lives.
BO does have a bowing problem in my opinion. what the hell, why obsess about it and him. It is clear to me he is a goofy, marxist, anti-American lightweight. He must daily thank his lucky stars for the miserable performance of GW Bush.
Having gone to a very liberal school with very liberal professors, I can say they choose to ignore history and re-write in their own minds. Call it revisionism to suit their own narrative as America the oppressor and progenitor of victims world-wide of their imperialism and hubris. In other other words, they have their own template or narrative with which they judge America and the world, and the facts do not matter. Obama is part of that Fabian crew. I can recall their refusal to believe we would have lost anyone invading, and that the Japanese were ready to surrender, in their minds. To them, the dropping of the bomb was made like a decision to take out the garbage, with little thought, and with only the intent of showing our might. This is the academia we have in America. Nice post JB.
Obama has the facts alright - the facts he wants (us) to believe. In order for ideologies to survive, they need to be supported - if not with facts, then with lies. To our president, the only evil that has ever existed in this world is us. It is we who rape and pillage the planet; it is we who drop bombs and make war; it is we who live off the exploitation of the world's poor.
And we ourselves have gone along with it, happily spitting on the success and prosperity our forefathers have wrought, glibly casting their effort and sacrifice in the same light as our own sloth; ennui; nausea and nihilism. Therefore, it becomes possible for us to say that the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took little thought – like deciding to have an abortion or taking the garbage out.
Above all, it highlights the utter and profound disdain these people have for the nation that’s given them all she had to give – even the platform from which to ridicule her. I am not surprised that with new display of our leaders soiling themselves publicly on the global stage, our people’s outrage grows. It will reach a point where not even the state-sponsored media will be able to air-brush it away.
By the way, I think it is wrong to attempt to justify any war action in terms of soldiers lost as opposed to the soldiers that might have been lost. It’s the same algebra that Obama uses to justify copious spending in order to justify jobs ’saved’. What matters in war is WINNING, and only that.
There are always those who will contrive a rhetoric to blame America first for anything and everything. They represent the squeaky wheel that should at worst be no more than tiresome. The point is, WE WON/they lost. We have nothing to be ashamed of. When winning becomes the source of one’s shame, a civilization lapses into irrelevance.
http://peterkoelliker.blogspot.com/
Based on his performance on both domestic and foreign policy, does anyone still seriously think that Community Organizer Barack Hussein Obama is actually qualified to be POTUS?
A colleague passes along this research on the surrender delay:
"After the Hiroshima atomic bombing, the Japanese Army and Navy had sent separate teams of scientists to determine what type of bomb had destroyed the city. By August 11th, both teams had reported to Tokyo that the bomb was, indeed, atomic (Sigal, pg. 236).
No Surrender
Japan had received what would seem to have been overwhelming shocks. Yet, after two atomic bombings, massive conventional bombings, and the Soviet invasion, the Japanese government still refused to surrender.
The Potsdam Proclamation had called for "Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers" (U.S. Dept. of State, Potsdam 2, pg. 1475). On the 13th, the Supreme Council For the Direction of the War (known as the "Big 6") met to address the Potsdam Proclamation's call for surrender. Three members of the Big 6 favored immediate surrender; but the other three - (War Minister Anami, Army Chief of Staff Umezu, and Navy Chief of Staff Toyoda - adamantly refused. The meeting adjourned in a deadlock, with no decision to surrender (Butow, pg. 200-202).
Later that day the Japanese Cabinet met. It was only this body - not the Big 6, not even the Emperor - that could rule as to whether Japan would surrender. And a unanimous decision was required (Butow, pg. 176-177, 208(43n)). But again War Minister Anami led the opponents of surrender, resulting in a vote of 12 in favor of surrender, 3 against, and 1 undecided. The key concern for the Japanese military was loss of honor, not Japan's destruction. Having failed to reach a decision to surrender, the Cabinet adjourned (Sigal, pg. 265-267).
The Emperor's Desire
On the following day, August 14, Anami, Umezu, and Toyoda were still arguing that there was a chance for victory (John Toland, The Rising Sun, pg. 936). But then that same day, the Cabinet unanimously agreed to surrender (Toland, pg. 939). Where none of the previous events had succeeded in bringing the Japanese military leaders to surrender, surrender came at Emperor Hirohito's request: "It is my desire that you, my Ministers of State, accede to my wishes and forthwith accept the Allied reply" (Butow, pg. 207-208).
What made the Emperor's "desire" more powerful than the revulsion the military leaders felt toward surrender? The Emperor was believed to be a god by the Japanese. The dean of historians on Japan's surrender, Robert Butow, notes in regard to the military leaders in Japan's government, "To have acted against the express wishes of an Emperor whom they had unceasingly extolled as sacred and inviolable and around whom they had woven a fabric of individual loyalty and national unity would have been to destroy the very polity in perpetuation of which they had persistently declared they were fighting" (Butow, pg. 224). Or as War Minister Anami said after he agreed to surrender, "As a Japanese soldier, I must obey my Emperor" (Pacific War Research Society, JLD, pg. 87-88). "
"...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."
William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
It was not the Japanese that we wanted to cow with our use of nuclear weapons, but rather the Russians.
I find I can not comment on the President's need to go to Hiroshima as I am prejudiced. My father was part of the occupying force of Japan after the war. He would have been part of the invasion force. Survival odds were not good; he would have been just 17 years old at the time and had already tried to fraudulently enlisted twice. It's hard in this day and age to think of someone having so strong a desire to go to war but my father then stole a car with the express idea that the judge would send him to the Army (he had read that somewhere and the judge did indeed send him to the Army). Since I was not born until 1951 I can only think what my father thought and told me when I got older--he thanked President Truman and God for the surrender of Japan and the use of the atomic bomb. Hard to say it but I and many more like me are here now because of that choice. Also the 20 million estimated Japanese and their descendants must feel similar angst.
Obviously, the opinions of the giants MacArthur and Eisenhower on the proposed atomic bombing of Japan must be given due weight in any historical discussion. That said, we must also note that their opinions were, and remain, precisely that -- opinion. While it might well have helped to communicate to the Japanese by some reliable back channel that the Emperor would not be removed -- assuming, of course, that no such communication ever did take place -- the historical fact, as opposed to anyone's personal opinion, remains that even after two actual atomic annihilations of Japanese cities there was still sufficient, although minority, opinion in the Imperial Cabinet to block a surrender. In addition, no one has mentioned in this discussion so far, not even in JB's masterful summary of events, that certain hot-headed junior Japanese officers were quite prepared to replicate the successful actions of their Thirties forebears and resort even to assassination in the Emperor's name, if necessary, to force senior leaders to adopt policies of their choosing, in this case continued fanatical resistance to the USA and its allies. Only the active and specific intervention of the Emperor forestalled such antics, but there was at the time no certain information -- only opinion -- whether or not conditional surrender, atomic bombing, or the DOWNFALL invasion of the Japanese homeland would prove the most effective way to finally end the long and brutal Pacific/Far East war. Which is an admittedly long-winded way of saying that no US President, not even our self-proclaimed "first Pacific President" (can you believe this man Obama's narcissism and arrogance?) has any need to apologize, or even bow, for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Yes, Ike's and Mac's opinions were just that, opinions. But rather better informed ones than most, given their considerable knowledge of the big picture, no? Certainly their thoughts on the matter should not be passed over in any discussion of whether we were right, both strategically and morally, to employ nuclear weapons against Japanese cities.
We should also note that MacArthur was far from alone in being troubled by our insistence on total surrender, which would in effect have meant the abdication and hanging of their Living God, Hirohito, a condition that made it impossible for the Japanese to choose any course but death. After the bombs were detonated over civilian areas, and the Russians suitably impressed by our demonstration of both firepower and willpower, we conveniently saw fit to soften our stance.
And since Mr. Batchelor mentions the doings of (an also well-informed) Herbert Hoover during the latter part of May 1945, it might perhaps be worth bringing up this passage from Richard Norton Smith's "An Uncommon Man: The Triumph of Herbert Hoover" (p. 347):
"On May 28, 1945, Hoover visited President Truman and suggested a way to end the Pacific war quickly: 'I am convinced that if you, as President, will make a shortwave broadcast to the people of Japan - tell them they can have their Emperor if they surrender, that it will not mean unconditional surrender except for the militarists - you'll get a peace in Japan - you'll have both wars over.'"
Hoover also criticized in the starkest terms the use of Fat Man and Little Boy after the war as well.
That said, I agree that no President should apologize for what we did in those grim days. Apologize to one hand and p*ss in the other, and see which one fills up first.
Somebody PLEASE HELP ME! I just realized I'm addicted to political blogs. I can't even run down the hall for fear I'll miss something important (notwithstanding the fact that nothing really important's happened for the last month or so.) But PLEASE HELP ME! I need to have my internet service taken away for at least a couple of weeks to give me a chance to recover.
We've never apologized for fire bombing Dresden, and bombing the Germans into submission, so why do so here? What about the 100,000 Japanese killed on the bombing of Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945? The Atom Bomb just made it much more efficient and it was used as a tool to defeat an enemy. What I find ironic in all this is that the Japanese seem to have forgotten how they got into the mess in the first place. Ask a young Japanese person (I suppose the same could say the same about Americans) about Pearl Harbor. I recall when the movie Pearl Harbor came out, some native Japanese that saw it were in horror because they had no idea that had happened.
While we can argue in retrospect about whether or not it had to be done, it was done, we won, and hopefully we'll never have to use one again. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that the next use of an atomic weapon will be by a country whose leaders don't use the same due diligence we did, and it'll be a lot uglier.
You seem quite sure that we used due diligence before dropping those atomic bombs. As I pointed out, Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Hoover thought otherwise.
In addition to those knowledgeable gentlemen I could mention Admiral William Leahy ("It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons"), as well as the military intelligence officer in charge of preparing intercepted Japanese cable--the MAGIC summaries--for Truman, Brigadier General Carter Clarke ("....We didn't need to do it, and we knew we didn't need to do it, and they knew that we knew we didn't need to do it, we used them as an experiment for two atomic bombs").
A little less certainty with regard to our actions in August 1945 seems in order, as well as a little more reflection.
As for who next uses nuclear weapons, my money is on either us or the Israelis. Afterward (assuming that there is an afterward), those who question this decision will be labeled as either unpatriotic or anti-Semitic.
Re-reading your post, it occurs to me that in fact you might not be entirely sure that we used due diligence. If I misunderstood you, my apologies. The hour is late.
IF OBAMA BOWED TO AKHITIO TO APOLOGIZE FOR HIROSHIMA/
NAGASAKI, WHY DID HE BOW TO ABDULLAH?
I don't think anyone can doubt that Truman made an executive decision that is the definition of leadership. History is being rewritten by political correctness. Political correctness will be the death of the West.
NYT:
By MANOHLA DARGIS
Published: November 18, 2009
At one point in the Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s beautiful and eccentric movie “The Sun,” the emperor Hirohito begins enthusing about a preserved hermit crab, the sounds of war planes having subsided. “What a miracle!” Hirohito (Issey Ogata) marvels, staring at the pale, pickled, seemingly unremarkable crustacean as an assistant transcribes the emperor’s comments. “What heavenly beauty!” As Hirohito gazes at the crab, you sense that he is acknowledging a fellow specimen, a communion accentuated by the smudged visuals and murky palette that suggest that all this is taking place inside a dirty aquarium.
Related
Film: Taking a Man, Then Removing His Myth (November 15, 2009)
Fiilmography: Alexander Sokurov
Much of “The Sun” in fact unfolds inside the contaminated confines of Hirohito’s palace in the period leading up to and following Japan’s surrender to the United States in 1945. An act of historical imagination, the film is the third in Mr. Sokurov’s trilogy about dictators, which began with “Moloch” (1999), featuring Hitler and Eva Braun at home in the Bavarian Alps, and continued with “Taurus” (2001), about the dying Lenin. Although “The Sun” borrows from history in sweep and detail — down to the statuettes of Darwin, Lincoln and Napoleon that Hirohito kept — the movie is best understood not in banal docudrama terms but as an impressionistic portrait of a man who, stripped of power, is revealed as grotesquely human. (First shown at the Berlin Film Festival four years ago, “The Sun” is finally receiving its welcome American theatrical release, which means that one of the best movies of 2005 is now also one of the best of 2009.)
The humanization begins with scenes of everyday life in the palace and Hirohito being fed, fussed over and dressed by his bowing, ubiquitous aides. One (Shiro Sano), a chamberlain whose watchful gaze seems closer to that of a prison guard (or nanny), rattles off the royal schedule, which includes “time for private thought.” And what happens to the schedule, Hirohito asks, if the Americans show up. The chamberlain forcefully dismisses the idea, invoking the “humiliation” of 1924, a reference to the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded Asian immigrants from entering the United States. “Ah, so” (“I see”), Hirohito responds opaquely (but what does he see?), his mouth fluttering open and closed, open and closed, as if he were a fish breathing underwater.
The Americans do show up, as they must, and hustle Hirohito off to meet General MacArthur (Robert Dawson), who, over the course of two sustained meetings, amicably entertains and gently intimidates the emperor amid oblique references to his plans for the American occupation. Working from Yury Arabov’s brilliantly distilled and elliptical screenplay, Mr. Sokurov moves in and around the two men, his camera shuttling between the twinned foreign landscapes of MacArthur’s gently amused face and Hirohito’s implacable mask. After their first meeting ends, Hirohito walks away from the general, only to pause awkwardly in front of the shut door: the god, you realize, has never had to open a door himself, a moment of pathetic comedy that forecasts a far more profound threshold-crossing: his renunciation of his divinity.
Godhood rests uneasily on Hirohito, who asserts — almost defensively — to his disapproving aides that he has a body like any other Japanese. Yet even as he insists on his own humanity, his words and deeds remain alien to real, lived existence, as evident when he meets with his military advisers. Faced with the news that the army is losing a war already lost by the navy, he blinks and, with his gulping mouth, invokes a poem by his grandfather, the Meiji ruler under whom emperors were deified. “Capitulation contradicts the tradition of the empire and of the Japanese people,” Hirohito concludes. “We must continue fighting for our survival. The peace that is on favorable terms for my people is the only peace. Let the sea continue to rage.”
This image of Hirohito as an advocate for war contradicts the usual take on him as a pawn or a peace seeker, and corresponds with some of the revisionist portraits that have emerged since his death in 1989. In “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” (2000), Herbert P. Bix writes: “From the very outset Hirohito was a dynamic emperor, but paradoxically also one who projected the defensive image of a passive monarch. While the rest of the world disassociated him from any meaningful personal role in the decision-making process and insisted on seeing him as an impotent figurehead lacking notable intellectual endowments, he was actually smarter and shrewder than most people gave him credit for, and more energetic too.”
Even so, Mr. Sokurov seems to me far less interested in Japanese history than in creating a world that in its perverted and closed logic conveys the psychology of power, a reasonable endeavor for a filmmaker born under Soviet totalitarianism. The sense of imperial decay is exquisitely conveyed by the eerie and sui generis beauty of Mr. Sokurov’s images — here he serves as his own cinematographer — which at times suggest the soft-focus style of some 19th-century photography. At other times, however, you might as well be staring at a neglected exhibition in a natural history museum, a vision of life shrouded in dust and cobwebs. What strange world is this, you might wonder, even as the all-too-human figures, the horrible facts and catastrophic battles gradually come into focus.
THE SUN
Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan.
Directed by Alexander Sokurov; written by Yury Arabov; director of photography, Mr. Sokurov; edited by Sergey Ivanov; music by Andrey Sigle; art director, Elena Zhukova; produced by Igor Kalenov, Mr. Sigle and Marco Muller; released by Lorber Films. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenue of the Americas, South Village. In English and Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Issey Ogata (Emperor), Robert Dawson (General MacArthur), Kaori Momoi (Empress), Shiri Sano (Chamberlain), Shinmei Tsuji (Old Servant) and Taijiro Tamura (Director of Institute).
I just finished reading "The Temple of the Golden Pavilion", a novel by Yukio Mishima, a major Japanese literary figure. The story takes place roughly within the time frame of the war and its immediate aftermath and never manages to mention Hiroshima and Nagasaki even once. There is a brief and unflattering reference to the American occupation troops, but otherwise no allusion to Japan's defeat and surrender. The story revolves around the deliberate torching of a beloved Zen temple in Kyoto by a deranged Zen acolyte. Admittedly, this in itself may have served as an oblique metaphor to the cataclysm that has come to define the end of the conflict in the Pacific. Nevertheless, I found it a strange omission; almost a conscious rewriting of history in an effort to show Japan in a better light.
If there is a photogenic bow on the one side, and One Million body bags on the other side, this hero will choose.... the photogenic bow.
Lee Iacocca photo-op on one side, survival of the Auto Industry on the other, this hero chooses....
Applause from ACORN and SEIU on one side, the economy of the entire world on the other, this hero chooses........