Know Your Enemy: Japan
Know Your Enemy: Japan is an American World War II propaganda film about the war in the Pacific directed by Frank Capra. The film, which was commissioned by the U.S. War Department, sought to educate American soldiers about Japan, its people, society and history, and its totalitarian militaristic government. However, the film never realized its full purpose because its completion was delayed by disputes between Hollywood and Washington, and the abrupt end of the Pacific War soon after the film's release in August 1945. The film's first public screening was in 1977 as part of a PBS special.
| Know Your Enemy: Japan | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Frank Capra Joris Ivens |
| Written by | Frank Capra Carl Foreman John Huston Edgar Peterson |
| Narrated by | Walter Huston Dana Andrews |
| Music by | George C. Emick Dimitri Tiomkin |
| Edited by | Major Aaxton Frank Bracht Elmo Williams Helen van Dongen |
Release date |
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Running time | 63 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Plot
The film begins with a text preamble discussing the Japanese in America who fought valiantly in the name of America who stood for values like "freedom" and "liberty," and how the following film is not talking about all Japanese, but only Japanese natives. It goes on to discuss the soldiers of the Japanese army. This section focuses mainly on the appearance and diet of the soldier, much more than tactics and strategy. The film comments on the soldiers of the Japanese army as being "as alike as photographic prints off the same negative."
The Japanese are said to be devoted to Emperor Hirohito, the narration states: "entrust to one man the powers of the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Premier of Soviet Russia; add to them the powers of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and top it all with the divine authority of our own Son of God and you will begin to understand what Hirohito means to the Japanese."
After going over Hirohito's divinity and saying that his divine origins are shared by Japanese people as a whole, the film then describes Shinto, a Japanese religion, saying that it had been a "quaint religion for a quaint people" until 1870 when a mad, fanatical, conquer-the-world doctrine, based on the commandment of Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, to "let us extend the capital and cover the eight corners of the world under one roof" was woven into it and called Hakkō Ichiu (八紘一宇, literally "eight crown cords, one roof", i.e., "all the world under one roof"). The film describes Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine where all of Japan's war dead are enshrined and where the spirits of those killed in battle shall return.
After saying repeatedly, "If you are Japanese, you believe these things," the film then shifts gears slightly with the question, "But if you're not Japanese, then what is the real Japan, the Japan of the geographer, anthropologist, and historian?" After a brief geography lesson, the idea of Japanese "pure divine blood" is countered with accusations that it is nothing more than a "plasma cocktail," and then begins the history section. Here the Emperor is portrayed as having little political power, with the real power being in the hands of daimyōs and their armies of samurai. The samurai are vilified along with their code of Bushido, with the narrator saying that it "not only sanctioned double dealing and treachery but looked at it as an art to be cultivated". The arrival of Christianity and the warlords' reaction to its teachings of peace and equality by throwing out the West and isolating Japan for 200 years is used to further vilify them.
The film then juxtaposes the Enlightenment, scientific and artistic advances that occurred in the West with Japan's stagnant isolation during the same period, broken by Commodore Perry's forced opening of Japan in 1853. The Westernization of Japan is discussed but always in the context of how the warlords were using it to further their own ambitions. The elimination of the position of Shogun and the elevation of the previously powerless Emperor as a rallying point in 1868 with the warlords "reserving for themselves and themselves alone the right to speak for him and guide his policies" give the impression of Hirohito as an effectively powerless figurehead. The film invokes the Tanaka Memorial, now generally accepted to have been a forgery, as Baron Giichi Tanaka's secret blueprint, Japan's "Mein Kampf."[1]
The power of the warlords continues to be emphasized in the rest of the film and is summarized by the statement that they never adopted the moral or ethical principles that went with the ideas they borrowed and that all information is filtered down to the Japanese people, having been first approved and altered to suit the purposes of the warlords. This is emphasized by showing how, despite Japan's modernization, most of the Japanese people still lived and worked in ways effectively unchanged since the 17th century, and that even the white-collar Japanese man, once he arrived home, lived like his ancestors did in the Middle Ages.
The warlords' control over the Japanese people is used to explain the current expansionist and warlike actions of the Japanese, and the film ends with the wartime circumstances of 1945 Japan.
Production
Development
When the U.S. entered World War II, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall made an official request to director Frank Capra for the production of a series of documentary films to be released to the general public and used for the orientation of American soldiers before and during deployment. Commissioned as a major and placed in charge of the 834th Photo Signal Detachment, Capra produced the film series Why We Fight, as well as other films, including Two Down and One to Go and Know Your Enemy: Japan.[2]
Although production on Know Your Enemy: Japan began in 1942, it was troubled from the very beginning by the inability of the U.S. government to determine what exactly the foreign policy towards Japan should be.
Writing
Frank Capra hired Joris Ivens to supervise the documentary in early 1943, but after Ivens submitted a 20-minute preview which treated the Japanese as an open-minded people being led by a vilified Emperor Hirohito, Capra told Ivens to leave the project because the U.S. Army had disapproved so much of the approach he had taken towards his portrayal of the Japanese that they had requested he be removed from the production. Allen Rivkin, one of the writers working on the script, commented that a large setback for the film's production was the realization that "we couldn't call Hirohito a war criminal because we knew we had to deal with him later and it threw us into a tailspin. That's why it took so long."
Eventually the scriptwriters felt Capra had lost direction in the film, apart from his desire to give the film racist overtones. The writers did not know that Capra's racist depictions were at the request of the U.S. military. In January 1945, the film underwent a series of final revisions because The Pentagon thought it still had "too much sympathy for the Jap people."
Editing
The film is compiled from footage obtained from newsreels, the UN, enemy film, fictional Japanese movies for historical background, and re-enactments supervised by the war department. The footage is narrated by Walter Huston and Dana Andrews.
Release
The film's main purpose was to maintain the fighting spirit of United States military forces for the final push against the Japanese Home Islands (where resistance was expected to fiercest). Historian John W. Dower said the film:
was a potpourri of most of the English speaking world's dominant clichés about the Japanese enemy, excluding the crudest, most vulgar, and most blatantly racist [which] captured the passions and presumptions that underlay not only the ferocity of clash in Asia and the Pacific, but also the sweeping agenda of reformist policies that the Allied powers subsequently attempted to impose upon defeated and occupied Japan.[3]
The release date of Know Your Enemy: Japan turned out to utterly destroy its propaganda value because it was done on August 9, 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and on the same day that Nagasaki was hit. When it became clear a Japanese surrender was becoming a reality, American foreign policy in the Pacific rapidly switched from war to negotiation. In response, General Douglas MacArthur decided the film should not be shown - as previously planned - to all military personnel in the Pacific theatre (he also recommended that it should be withheld from public release).
Notes
- John Stephan, "The Tanaka Memorial (1927): Real or Spurious?" Modern Asian Studies 7.4 (1973): 733–45.
- Dower, John W. (1986). War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon. pp. 18–19.
- Dower, War Without Mercy pp. 20,23.
References
- Carney, Ray. American Vision: The Films of Frank Capra. Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1986. Print.
- Know Your Enemy: Japan. Dir. Frank Capra. Prod. U.S. War Department. 1945.
- Know Your Enemy—Japan (WWII) (VHS). Military-World War II-Nazi-Soviet-Propaganda Videos-International Historic Films. Web. October 27, 2009. <http://www.ihffilm.com/56.html>.
- McBride, Joseph. Frank Capra the catastrophe of success. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992. Print.
- Schatz, Thomas. Boom and bust the American cinema in the 1940s. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.
- Springer, Claudia. "Military Propaganda: Defense Department Films from WWII and Vietnam." Cultural Critique 3 (1986): 151–67. JSTOR. Web. October 21, 2009.