With Japan once again about to embark on a militarist power trip, it must be comforting for them to know that Clint Eastwood is on their side.
That, I’m afraid, is the only conclusion to be drawn from Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood’s Japanese-language companion piece to his structurally unsound epic Flags of Our Fathers.
I commend him for the idea. There were two sides to the battle, and after 60 years of Marine hero worship we’re more than ready to hear what the Japanese have to say. After all, they lost 20 000 men in what could quite reasonably be called a desperate struggle to defend their homeland.
Eastwood has said he wanted audiences on both sides of the Pacific to know “what kind of people” these guys were. It is indeed a question worth asking, but it is also a tough one to answer, because General Tadamichi Kuribayashi and his doomed troops were not only good men, devoted and brave, but also very bad men, who worshipped violent death and were as capable of murder as they were of sending cute postcards to their kids.
That they were just men, sons and husbands and fathers, is in itself worth telling, and Eastwood does it with verve and eloquence. But there is more to their story than that. They weren’t just defending their families, they were also defending a fascist dictatorship that had indoctrinated them to accept an extraordinarily nasty military code. This doctrine not only gave them permission to rape and mutilate but encouraged it as part of the subjugation of those deemed less human. They were ordinary men, but so were the SS, and, moralistic as it may sound, to focus on that is to belittle the destruction they wreaked.
Eastwood tells us that they were noble men, pushed to desperate acts by a quirk of history. If it weren’t for the megalomania of their rulers, so the reasoning goes, they would’ve lived their lives happily without bothering anyone, baking bread and making babies in their beloved Nagano or Yokohama. But they happened to be on Iwo, and Iwo happened to be in the middle of the American attack route to Japan, so they had to fight, and they fought valiantly just as others would have. This is the case Letters from Iwo Jima so movingly pleads: judge not decent men forced to kill each other.
Fair enough.
But just so we don’t forget what kind of decent men they were, let’s talk a little bit about Iggy Ignatowski.
Remember him? He was Doc Bradley’s foxhole buddy in Flags of Our Fathers, and ultimately the cause of his nightmares. The Japanese pulled him into a spiderhole and tortured him for three days. According to various eyewitness accounts, some of which I’m sure were exaggerated, his arms were broken and his skull bashed in, and he was bayoneted repeatedly. But before any of this happened, his nails were pulled out, his eyes punctured, his ears cut and his testicles shoved into his mouth. Quite a three days, even by Iwo’s standards.
One might argue that ordinary men don’t commit such atrocities. But Eastwood thinks otherwise. In a brief and chaotic scene, we’re shown a group of Japanese attacking a captured American. This is an obvious allusion to the previous movie, but instead of trying to provide another perspective on Iggy’s murder, Eastwood proceeds to explain it away. The soldiers were just angry, the movie says; it was a heat-of-the-moment thing, a momentary lapse of reason, and we shouldn’t read too much into it.
If so, where does it end? If everyone is a victim of his circumstances, who is responsible for the circumstances? Who is responsible for Iggy Ignatowski’s agony, of the rape of Nanking, of Treblinka and Katyn, if not those wielding the weapons? If we’re just adrift in a sea of blood, how are we to manage our own destiny?
These questions may sound big in the context of a Hollywood war movie, but they’re not. You only have to look at recent developments in Japan, where teaching patriotism to schoolkids is once again mandatory and the army is no longer coyly called defense forces, and you begin to realise that the monster that spawned the rampaging hordes may be in heat again. No wonder, then, that Letters from Iwo Jima has been a hit in Japan. For those worshipping the memory of war criminals at Yasukuni, this movie is a vindication beyond all dreams.
