During the last 45 years, I thought I had seen every TV show, documentary, or whatever about World War II. Then, quite by accident, I found this YouTube video - YouTube which is about Pearl Harbor (and beyond) from the Japanese point of view. It has film and photos (of the Pearl Harbor attack and the Japanese super battleships, etc) that I don’t ever remember seeing on US or British television programs. It’s really very intriguing.
[It’s interesting that when they refer to the “enemy” they mean the USA.]
Has anyone seen any other programs done from the Japanese perspective?
Moderator - This is my first thread, so if it’s in the wrong place please correct. Plus, I haven’t figured out the way to link the video. Thanks in advance.
The events shown are the Battle of Midway and afterwards, but the anime series Zipang shows the war from a 21st century perspective.
It starts in the 21st century, with a Japanese warship (Mirai) sailing to Pearl Harbor to take part in joint exercises with the US Navy, but the Mirai is sent back about 60 years, where it nearly collides with the Imperial Japanese Navy battleship Yamato. The crew of the Mirai spend the rest of the series trying to avoid contact with both the IJN and the USN, because they don’t want to change the course of history, but of course they do have contact, especially with an IJN officer that they rescue from drowning. Part of the interest in the story is that officer learning what will happen in the next 60 years, with the defeat of Japan, but its postwar economic recovery.
Of course the best line of the movie is “I fear we have only woken a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve”… Screenwriter embellishment, not fact.
I second Zipang. It’s one of the few Japanimations I’ve ever seen that is trying seriously to handle a serious subject matter. It’s also the only Japanese media product I’ve ever seen that explicitly comes out and is like, ‘whoa, we were bastards back then.’ But, in fairness, I haven’t seen a lot of Japanese media.
I lived in Japan for almost 25 years, so I watched a fair amount of TV. They did some documentaries on the war. Not as many as there are in the States, but that’s what happens when you lose, I suppose.
There was a lot of focus on the atomic bombing. They really skip over the war in high school history, so many people think that WWII was mostly about the end.
I did see a few documentaries and it was interesting to watch interviews with Japanese participants. I don’t know if any of them made their way over to youtube, though.
The Final Countdown? I haven’t seen that movie, but the premise is very similar. One difference is that the crew if the USS Nimitz now that their side wins the war, while the crew of the Mirai know that their side loses. So only the captain of the Mirai faces the moral dilemma of whether to change history so that his country might win. He makes the choice to stand on one side and let his country lose the war.
Not Japanese, but I found the movie Kampf um Norwegen – Feldzug 1940 to be a very interesting German take on the Invasion of Norway.
Intended as propaganda, it nevertheless paints a very interesting picture of the invasion as seen from the German side of things, and it is one of the more concise and factually correct films I’ve seen about the invasion. I can’t remember seeing another documentary that so clearly outlines just how tense an operation and desperate a struggle this was for the Germans, in terms of almost failing altogether.
I’ll head to the library for “Samurai” and search YouTube for the anime. Final Countdown is a great movie, by the way!