Eastwood does Iwo Jima with Japan perspective

Independent:

Earlier this year as Japan was gearing up for a summer of painful Second World War anniversaries Yoshitaka Shindo received a phone call. Clint Eastwood was planning to visit Tokyo and would very much like to meet the Japanese Diet member to discuss a project he was working on. Was he available? "Of course I said yes," says Councillor Shindo.

The project was a movie about Iwo Jima, a speck of volcanic rock in the Pacific Ocean about 700 miles south of Tokyo and the site of one of the war's most brutal battles. Shaped like a teardrop, the eight-square-mile island was blasted almost flat, becoming what one veteran called a "sulphurous, crater-filled hellhole" in six weeks of intense fighting in February and March 1945.

When the fighting stopped, 7,000 Allied soldiers were dead and just 200 of the 21,800 Japanese troops defending the island had been taken alive. The black sands of Iwo Jima passed into military legend, immortalised in a famous photograph by Joe Rosenthal showing a group of battered, exhausted Marines raising the Stars and Stripes on Mount Suribachi on 23 February 1945. The battle remains, even after 60 years of blood-soaked history in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, the US marines' deadliest: nearly one-third of all marines killed in the Second World War died on the island.

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"The reason they fought to the last man was to delay the air raids on their families and the Japanese people. It doesn't matter if the soldiers were from America or Japan, they fought to protect their families."

Eastwood is clearly aiming for authenticity. He has hired Japanese-American writer Iris Yamashita to write the script and reportedly intends to hire some of the cream of Japanese acting. Like all American filmmakers today, he has a monetary interest in getting Japan right: the country is the world's second-biggest market for Hollywood movies, one reason why the barbaric, buck-toothed stereotype of yore has disappeared from movies like Pearl Harbor, which showed clean-cut Japanese pilots warning American children to flee the bombing.

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I think Eastwood is being too nice to the Japanese military which had decided that the soldiers it left on Iwo were expendable. All to buy just a few more days before the US assault on the main island with air strikes would begin. While those guys may have been thinking about their families, the Japanese who participated in the rape of Nanking and other atrocities commited by that army, like the death march in the Philippines were hardly thinking about their families.