[video=youtube;X-Is8hvLPHk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Is8hvLPHk[/video] Starring: Tommy Lee Jones, Matthew Fox and Kaori Momoi Directed By: Peter Webber Plot: A story of love and understanding set amidst the tensions and uncertainties of the days immediately following the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. On the staff of General Douglas MacArthur (Jones), the de facto ruler of Japan as Supreme Commander of the occupying forces, a leading Japanese expert, General Bonner Fellers (Fox) is charged with reaching a decision of historical importance: should Emperor Hirohito be tried and hanged as a war criminal? Interwoven is the story of Fellers' love affair with Aya, a Japanese exchange student he had met years previously in the U.S. Memories of Aya and his quest to find her in the ravaged post-war landscape help Fellers to discover both his wisdom and his humanity and enable him to come to the momentous decision that changed the course of history and the future of two nations. More source: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2103264/ Movie release date was not included in imdb. After doing a little research, official date is set to be release on March 8th, 2013.
The American post war occupation of Japan was one of the least explored or publicized periods of WW2, a time in which Japan's national fate hung in the balance. Given the choice of subjugating the Japanese, the US chose instead to co-opt them into the western sphere of influence, allowing for their rapid recovery and subsequent economic revivals. Of course, the US didn't do this because of altruistic reasons. It needed to pacify an entire nation that up until then, was a bitter enemy sworn to battle unto death. Also looming was the political reality of the ever widening Soviet threat on the horizon. And, much to the consternation of Stalin, the US rebuffed Soviet attempts (even though they were a winning ally), from being allowed to station troops in Japan (which they did with devastating effect in Manchuria, Korea and Eastern Europe). This decision would ultimately save half of Japan from becoming a Soviet proxy state like North Korea. In using a victor's prerogative to write the Japanese constitution, overnight, the US literally turned Japan into an Asian version of America. Japanese youth then viewed the US with envy and did everything that they could to emulate the winning Americans. But, it wasn't all easy. It took tremendous political courage that was rare, even by today's standards. I look forward to this film's exploration of that important but relatively forgotten era, but I'm unsure if the co-mingled 'love story' is at all necessary. The retelling of that history is already powerful on it's own. Disabled buses that have littered the streets of Tokyo are used to help relieve the acute housing shortage in the Japanese capital on October 2, 1946. Homeless Japanese who hauled the buses into a vacant lot are converting them into homes for their families. (AP Photo/Charles Gorry) In related stories: Beate Sirota Gordon Japanese 'Comfort' Women Used By American GI's The following are a bunch of Youtube videos on this very subject. The first is a rather dry, but extremely informative hour plus long lecture (watch all of it if you can). The next is a US government propaganda film, obviously very western leaning, but nonetheless informative about those times, and the last is likely the best; a three part History Channel take on those events, with interviews of people that actually participated in the governance and administration of US occupation Japan (significantly, including the late Beate Sirota, co-author of the Japanese post war constitution). Long informative lecture about that period and the reasons behind the social and political events: [video=youtube;XZAFftGl9Kk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZAFftGl9Kk[/video] A US government propaganda film about those times, informative but obviously very western leaning: [video=youtube;veG75yCwbHI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veG75yCwbHI[/video] Another more historically neutral take from the History Channel (starting from Pt 1 of 3): [video=youtube;AuPYzWnT1aA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuPYzWnT1aA&list=UUWXI0eXML_hY_8nP4kq6L-A&index=8[/video] And as an aside, Spoiler: A Book about the Australian experience in post war Japan Travels in Atomic Sunshine: Australia and the Occupation of Japan Troops in need of occupation therapy Light duties … the soldiers get to know the locals. Photo: from Travels In Atomic Sunshine November 8, 2008 Australian soldiers in postwar Japan often were more interested in having a good time than in helping the people. THEY arrived by ship through the legendary beauty of the Inland Sea and viewed postcard sites such as the vermillion torii gate of Miyajima, seeming to float on its waters. They also saw Japan in its worst state: the flattened ruins of Hiroshima, with the city's burnt and irradiated people, the twisted metal graveyard of the Imperial Navy at Kure, the swarms of starving orphans, the defeated men, the women reduced to prostitution. The occupation of Japan brought out the best and the worst of the Australian soldiers who took part in it - more of the latter, if you read this elegant and sardonic history of our brief (seven or so years) raj over one of Asia's most sophisticated peoples. After the Japanese surrender in August 1945, nine days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the Chifley government was keen to take part in the occupation, partly to build on Australia's wartime role in the south-west Pacific victory and partly to prevent Japan becoming a threat again. Leadership of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force was wrested from the British, who then contributed mostly Indian troops and soon pulled out of the whole exercise, and the American supreme commander, Douglas MacArthur, who was persuaded to give the force a patch around Kure and Hiroshima, far from the main game in Tokyo. Accordingly, the first of eventually 12,000 Australians at peak landed in Kure in the bleak winter of February 1946 and marched to their billets in a bombed office building. The mission was confused from the start. The Americans had set out to shift the Japanese from "feudalism" to democracy, what John Dower in his epic history of 1999, Embracing Defeat, called "the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as 'the white man's burden' " - though Gerster wonders if Iraq 2003 might be a later one. The Australians were prohibited from engaging with the Japanese. The mood in Australia, conditioned by wartime propaganda and stories of atrocities and prisoner-of-war accounts, was to punish "the Japs", not reform them. Arriving troops were given a booklet called Know Japan, which was prefaced by an instruction from their commander, John Northcott, forbidding fraternisation. "The men of BCOF, in other words, were to 'know' Japan by having nothing to do with its people," Gerster observes. The next commander, Horace Robertson, tried to avoid situations where he had to shake hands with Japanese and at the 1948 gathering for the anniversary of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima told the crowd that "you caused this disaster yourselves... The punishment given to Hiroshima was only part of the retribution of the Japanese people as a whole for pursuing the doctrine of war." The young troops soon found more of a mission in breaking the rules. Many gained their first sight of a naked woman at the mixed public baths and decided one half of the population was all right. Soon the Australians became renowned for frenetic whoring, drunken escapades, black-marketeering, racist bashings and a soaring VD rate. Clergymen were sent up to investigate and "carefully shielded from reality" by Australian Army minders. Then it was suggested that families join the married men and that more Australian women be involved in BCOF canteens and support jobs to help bring the boys to their senses. Some of the wives behaved like memsahibs, oppressing their local servants, while the husbands still kept their mistresses "up the yama", as the hills behind Kure were known. As for the single men: "Faced with a choice between a cup of tea at a whist night run by the doughty ladies of the YMCA, or a few beers and a night on the tatami with one of their local girlfriends, many servicemen, unsurprisingly, elected the latter." Robertson tried to compensate with elaborate spit and polish, getting Australians troops to mount ceremonial guard around Emperor Hirohito's palace, of all ludicrous things. It didn't dispel the lasting image of them among Americans and Japanese as a larrikin rabble. "To expect this body of mostly young men, few of them well-educated, and many of them unworldly, to perform as unofficial ambassadors, or in today's jargon, 'role models', was always a false expectation," Gerster says in their defence. But more than a few felt what Shirley Hazzard, in her 2003 novel The Great Fire, called "the unease of conquerers: the unseemliness of finding themselves a few miles from Hiroshima". Many learned from Japan and gave help that is still remembered. "Sometimes I wondered what I, the occupation soldier, was doing to Japan," recalled Tom Hungerford, who had fought as a commando in the Solomons. "Very soon I was to wonder what Japan was doing to me." A lot of soldiers formed lasting relationships with an onrii wan (a girlfriend loyal to a single patron) and no fewer than 650 Japanese women eventually came to Australia as soldiers' wives, making one of the earliest and biggest breaches in the White Australia policy. Around Tokyo in the early 1980s, when I was the Herald's correspondent, there were still a few of the old "occupationaires", as Gerster calls them, who had stayed on to run businesses or work for Japanese companies. At the Foreign Correspondents' Club there was a near punch-up when the writer Hal Porter, who had been a teacher for BCOF children in Kure, was accosted by Jimmy Beard, the former soldier he had cruelly used as model for the character Mr Butterfry. Far from being repudiated by his half-Japanese children eager to disguise their origins, as Porter had predicted, Beard had become a revered patriarch and prosperous entrepreneur, with one of his daughters marrying the grandson of a famous Japanese statesman. Gerster came at this subject from an academic background in English literature and a stint teaching Australian studies at Tokyo University. He perhaps over-emphasises the jaundiced perspective of Porter and other writers of occupation fiction and gives too much time to patently biased accounts by Japanese historians (all men, keen to claim Japanese women were victims of rape, rather than "embracing defeat"). He lost me in his last chapter when he declares Australians still unforgiving of Japan's wartime record. "No amount of contrition is ever enough," he writes. But one convincing act of contrition is all that victims such as former "comfort woman" Jan Ruff O'Herne and countless Chinese and Koreans seek. Still the Japanese keep electing leaders like the current prime minister, Taro Aso, who denies their story. The Australian occupationaires redeemed themselves militarily in the Korean War and quit Japan soon after the 1952 peace treaty, leaving behind unpaid bills and scores of unacknowledged children. Their encounter should be known as much as the now familiar prisoner-of-war one, when the boot was literally on the other foot. Source: http://www.smh.com.au/news/entertai...1225561105882.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2
