As far as the battle of Iwo Jima goes, art has an intriguing way of imitating
life. One minute, the excitable Yanks are flapping the Stars and Stripes,
boasting of a swift victory; two months on, the Japs are still dug in,
stolidly defending their island to the bloody death. Such is the effect of
Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood’s brace of
films depicting the brutal engagement from both the American and the
Japanese perspective.
After Flags came out in December, the director probably thought it impossible
to improve on, so praised was his tale of the “heroes” of Joe Rosenthal’s
iconic flag-raising photograph. But what do you know? Along comes Letters —
his modest rejoinder to the main attraction — and it’s the one scooping the
glory. Letters from Iwo Jima has garnered four Oscar nominations, including
best picture — an unlikely outcome for a film shot entirely in Japanese. His
Iwo Jima suite (surely the two films will be released together on DVD) may
well amount to his masterpiece. From Dirty Harry to Hara-Kiri. Frankly,
who’d have thought it?
As the story goes, so immersed was Eastwood in his subject that a
touchy-feeliness compelled him to offset Flags with something about the
“enemy” (initially entitled Red Sun, Black Sand). It’s some counterpoint. In
Letters, those marines hoisting Old Glory atop Mount Suribachi are an
inconsequential background speck.
For Ken Watanabe, the star of Letters from Iwo Jima, the film is much more
than a simple reverse angle on proceedings. “Someone said the two movies are
like the front and back of a coin, but I don’t think so,” he says. “It seems
objective and many-sided. If we look at the same thing from many
perspectives, then maybe we can see better.” In Japan, where the second
world war is still something of a taboo subject, it is striking that both
films are already huge hits. There, Letters has taken 10 times what it did
at the US box office, with the films often viewed in reverse order.
The facts of the battle bear restating. In February and March 1945, nearly
30,000 men died while fighting over a lump of volcanic rock 650 nautical
miles from Tokyo. Far from providing the stepping stone for an invasion of
mainland Japan, the assault met with a dogged 36-day resistance that, though
overcome, helped to convince the American brass that a couple of nukes might
be a more economical way of winding up the war. Watanabe plays Lieutenant
General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who led the rear-guardfrom a 16-mile
honeycomb of tunnels dug beneath the lunar-like surface. In these
furnace-hot catacombs, 22,000 imperial troops met their death — from wounds,
starvation, dysentery ... or self-immolation in preference to surrender.
Watanabe is recognisable to western audiences. He first won raves (and an
Oscar nod) as the brooding warrior opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai
(2003). After two decades as a star of stage and screen in his homeland —
and an exhausting brush with leukaemia — he was in no need of a Hollywood
career. At 47, he seems to have landed himself one anyway. On his arrival in
Tinseltown, he knew little English (“I could order room service,” he jokes),
but he has gone on to appear in Batman Begins and Memoirs of a Geisha, with
further projects in the works.
An imposing physical presence on screen, Watanabe is, in the flesh, tall but
slight, exceptionally polite and bowing in that quintessential Japanese way
(and with only occasional and courteous recourse to his interpreter). His
name, Ken, he points out, means “modest” and describes how, away from
showbiz, his daily life is devoted to the simple samurai way
of doing things — “Keep the promise; admire the old man; care about the
child”. Not qualities in abundance in Los Angeles, where he now spends half
his time.
Two years ago, Watanabe was mooching around his Santa Monica home, feeling a
little, he says, like the opposite of Bill Murray’s character in Lost in
Translation, when he got wind that Eastwood was making Flags. “I thought,
‘I’ll have to ring my agent to get a role as a Japanese officer or
something,’” he says. Neither man knew that there was to be a companion
piece to which he would be far better suited.
Watanabe is the perfect choice to play Kuribayashi, an English-speaking
Yankophile with one foot on each side of the Pacific, yet traditionally
Japanese to his core. “I could somewhat relate to his feelings,” Watanabe
says. In one of those many strange coincidences thrown up by war, the
general had been a special envoy to the USA in the 1920s, and had dined at
American society’s top tables. Kuribayashi was opposed to Pearl Harbor and
war with the USA generally, having witnessed, at first hand, American
industrial muscle. He was an elegant writer and illustrator, and it was his
published missives home during his American sojourn, Picture Letters from
Commander in Chief, that informed
Paul Haggis’s screenplay, subsequently reshaped by the Japanese-American Iris
Yamashita.
But Kuribayashi was a patriot and a soldier, and, when dispatched to defend
Iwo Jima, did not shirk from telling his men (average age 19) that they
would never return home, defying his superiors with an ingenious,
back-breaking tunnel construction to ensure the battle would be as
protracted as possible. He was “a real family man”, Watanabe says, and his
letters to his wife read “almost like a will”. Ruthless, then? No, Watanabe
says. “He was a rational person. He thought if he gave a big blow to the
United States, American general opinion would be changed to stop the war.”
Given Kuribayashi’s acceptance of inevitable defeat, the deliberate sacrifice
of so many young lives is hard to comprehend today, but for Japan the war is
a complex issue, still seeming to engender an elective national amnesia. In
terms of Iwo Jima specifically, that is understandable, for few survivors
were left to give an accurate account — though the reaction of one elderly
survivor Watanabe interviewed speaks volumes about the psychology of the
imperial veteran. “It was a really sad story he had,” Watanabe says. “He
started apologising.” To him? “To the other soldiers,” he continues. “He was
really sorry he survived, that he lived.”
The war is clearly discomfiting even for Watanabe. His parents must have
lived through it, I venture. Nasty though it was, did they never say
anything at all? His father was too young to fight, he explains: “Same age
as Clint”. Beyond that, there was just a sort of silence. “Before the movie,
I did not know about Iwo Jima,” he admits. “I’m 47. No knowledge. It’s bad
or wrong information ... We normally talk as victims, you know — atomic
bombs or the bombing of Tokyo or something.” The young Japanese actors on
the film knew even less. “This movie is a good opportunity for a rethink
about the second world war,” he says, “or true Japanese history.”
There is certainly no lack of thirst for discovery. Though Watanabe hated the
film Pearl Harbor, it did a roaring trade in Japan, a seemingly cynical
exploitation of something Hollywood was only then waking up to — that the
Land of the Rising Sun accounts for nearly 50% of a typical studio’s
overseas box-office, and at least a quarter of the total. Could Eastwood’s
films, too, be American cash-ins? No, Watanabe asserts. “This is a completely
Japanese film.” (Indeed, it has won several American awards as best
foreign film.)
Was it strange, Eastwood directing in a language he didn’t understand?
“Making the moment is the same thing,” Watanabe says. “Language is just a
tool of the art.” The script had an English master version, and the director
trusted his actors. And Eastwood may be more of a kindred spirit than you
think — something to do with that link between the cowboy and the samurai.
“He completely understood about the traditional Japanese feeling.”
Letters from Iwo Jima is not the first film to take an evenhanded view of the
war. Both The Longest Day (D-Day) and Tora! Tora! Tora! (Pearl Harbor) were
detailed us-and-them accounts of their respective conflicts. Nonetheless,
for all the rehabilitation of Germany, the Pacific war remains a largely
black-and-white affair, viewed through the prism of the film-maker’s
national experience: the Americans with their John Wayne-led island-hopping;
the British with our POW-tinged view of proceedings.
But cinema and war should never be confused, for how can a film truly convey
such suffering? In Letters from Iwo Jima, the cramped, noxious ratholes and
the emaciation of the Japanese soldiers are impossible to replicate. On the
island, 1,200 sets of remains are still entombed beneath the black rock.
Little surprise, then, that this small island, only eight square miles, has
remained a deserted, eerie and sacred place, with Eastwood granted rare
privilege to shoot a few low-key scenes there.
Watanabe was glad that principal photography had been completed in LA before
he visited Iwo Jima. When he arrived, he completed the traditional rite of
sprinkling pure water brought from Kuribayashi’s home town at his resting
place, somewhere in the caves. Watanabe says he experienced “a volcano of
feeling. It was a really sad moment”.
But, he says, he retains “a really good memory of Iwo Jima”. After the shoot,
he and a group of American and Japanese crew climbed Mount Suribachi to
visit the shrine there and share contemplative silence. That done, the prop
master whipped out both American and Japanese flags, and they all posed for
a photo. “It was an amazing moment,” Watanabe says, in a sincere and
heartfelt sentiment. “I realised the whole meaning. Sixty-one years ago we
were enemies, but now we could make this movie and, in doing so, help
understand each other.”
Flags of Our Fathers is in cinemas now; Letters from Iwo Jima is released
on February 23
