Is Jolie’s Movie “Unbroken” Unfair to the Japanese?

Hollywood celebrity Angelina Jolie’s movie Unbroken is debuting in Japan this week, more than a year after it opened in the US.  Both then and now, many in Japan are resentful of the one-sided portrayal of their country’s military during World War II.  AP reports that “some have called for a boycott of the movie whose main character endures harsh treatment as a prisoner of war.”

     The movie is consistent with the anti-war, anti-military ethos of the 1960s, but is it wise to stir up resentment against the Japanese so long after the war, especially now that they are America’s most steadfast allies?  Hatred is hatred, isn’t it?

     To characterize war as a conflict between good and evil is certainly expedient to mobilize public sympathy and support, but both sides can do the same.  After a war, however, the victors almost always unfairly characterize the vanquished.  Fairness does count, doesn’t it?

      Thomas Goodrich’s book Hellstorm: The Death of Nazi Germany, 1944-1947, for example, seems to put the shoe on the other foot, as if the Allies had perpetrated a Holocaust against all German civilians, including old people, women, and children.  Perhaps the film documentary (also free) of Hellstorm should be matched with the Jolie movie rather than the book.

      Americans may prefer to see actor James Stewart (and WWII bomber pilot) as the wholesome face of Allied warriors, but realism and truth are as necessary as propaganda to win a war.  It’s difficult to fight a straw man. Our strategy for defeating ISIS must also take into account who the enemy really is.

       The Japanese during WWII were steeped in martial values that would help explain their apparent evil and brutality in the Jolie movie.  In Kamikaze, A Japanese Pilot’s Own Story of the Suicide Squadrons (1957 with Gordon T. Allred), Yasuo Kuwahara explains how brutality was an essential part of military training, part of the toughening-up process.  The same with not being taken captive, a staple of the strongest military machines, including the European Spartans.

       The tendency in movie-making so long after a war is to treat both sides with sympathy and understanding, as if principled patriotism characterizes combatants equally.  It seems disingenuous for us to hate the Japanese in Unbroken, then drive home in our Honda or Toyota.