Movie 'may help Japanese face past'
Wednesday May 10, 10:37 AM
Japanese actor Ken Watanabe said he hopes a new Clint Eastwood film can help young Japanese face their country's wartime history.
The movie is about the bloody World War II battle for Iwo Jima, in which Watanabe plays a main role.
"As we went through this film we realised that, until now, we haven't really looked at Japan's past. We kind of looked away from it," Watanabe said. "But we have to look at it and accept the fact that this is what our fathers and grandfathers have actually done."
"Accepting the reality is the first step," he said at a news conference at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan.
In the film Red Sun, Black Sand to be released in the US in December, Watanabe plays the general who loses the battle, causing the deaths of many young Japanese soldiers who followed his orders.
It will be the fourth Hollywood film for Watanabe, who earned fame at home after appearing in Batman Begins, The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha. To prepare for the Iwo Jima film he read many books - but said he found it impossible to understand why the disaster could not be stopped.
"The time simply seemed to have passed before anyone was able to come to a conclusion what was happening," he said. "I'm afraid that a lack of complete understanding of a situation is a tendency many Japanese people today still carry, and I felt depressed at the thought."
However, he said he wanted to take part in the film to "think through the struggle of Lt Gen Chudo Kuribayashi, who adored the US and most wanted to avoid waging a war against that country, and ended up fighting against Americans through to the end."
Iwo Jima, 1,200km (700 miles) south of Tokyo, has come to symbolise the Pacific war to many Americans, largely because of a famous photograph of US troops raising the American flag atop the island's Mt Suribachi.
Sixty years after Japan's World War II surrender, Iwo Jima remains uninhabited except for a few military bases. Any activity on the island is potentially controversial, because many consider it hallowed ground. Nearly 7,000 American troops and more than 20,000 Japanese died in the battle between February and March 1945, and the bodies of thousands remain unaccounted for.