Many films have been made in Japan about the tokkotai or “kamikaze” pilots who flew one-way missions against the ships of the US Navy in the closing days of World War II.
The heroes are usually pure-spirited young men whose deaths are portrayed as sad but noble sacrifices for the future of Japan. That is, instead of merely wasting their lives in the defense of a dying empire, they are setting examples of selfless dedication that will inspire their survivors and descendants to rebuild Japan into a flourishing and peaceful country. The “peaceful” part is important since these films position themselves as “anti-war,” even when they are full of soft nationalism. That is, not the “Banzai, die for the Emperor” nationalism but rather the “We Japanese are wonderful, exceptional people” variety.
Based on Hyakuta Naoki’s 2006 novel, Yamazaki Takashi’s The Eternal Zero focuses on not the young sacrificial lambs of the usual tokkotai film, but rather the pilots who made the Zero fighter plane a feared byword among their American opponents. Also, the hero, Miyabe Kyuzo (Okada Junichi), is not a naive kid, but a veteran pilot determined to survive to the end of the war, though his colleagues label him a coward.
While bombing their targets and downing American planes, Zero pilots were supposed to scorn death much as their samurai forebears had. The Japanese military in general indoctrinated soldiers to welcome a heroic end and feel shame at returning home alive.
Miyabe’s outspoken opposition to this attitude – he believes that living survivors will be of more benefit to a postwar Japan than dead heroes, make him not just an exception, but in the eyes of certain colleagues and superiors, a danger to morale.
Like many recent Japanese films that look back to a war now nearly seven decades in the past, The Eternal Zero is framed in the present. Two of the pilot’s now adult grandchildren – a freelance writer (Fukiishi Kazue) and a struggling law student (Miura Haruma), begin investigating his past. What, they wonder, led him to die as a tokkotai pilot, rather than try to survive a war he knew would soon end with Japan’s defeat?
They interview elderly former comrades who still seethe at the mention of his name. Then they find one, the seriously ill Isaki (Hashizume Isao), who remembers him fondly as a mentor and inspiration. His story is the window into their grandfather’s past that they have been searching for.
That story is told with CGI bombing runs and dogfights. Given that only a tiny number of Zero planes survive today in flyable condition, such a digital air war may be inevitable, but the CGI wizardry of Yamazaki and his staff make it far closer to the real thing than would have been possible when he directed Always, an ensemble drama set in a digitally recreated 1950s Tokyo that was a hit with the Udine audience in 2006.
Also, the film’s portrayal of its pilots, as both young and old men, is more shades-of-gray than goldenly glowing.
Trained in the harsh school of the wartime military and tested in life-or-death air battles, they are a varied lot, but the shining youths of the typical tokkotai movie they are not. Even Miyabe, for all his idealistic, nice guy qualities, is a thorough professional at his deadly work.
So why does he volunteer for a suicide mission?
The film reveals the answer to that mystery, as well as much else, but it also refrains from over-explaining, leaving the interpretation of Miyabe’s last flight up to the audience.
A mega-hit in Japan, with a total box office of nearly $70 million, The Eternal Zero has inspired controversy both at home and abroad. Prime Minister Abe Shinzo, an outspoken nationalist, said he was deeply moved by the film after seeing it on New Year’s Eve, but he was promptly blasted by Chinese bloggers and message board commenters, with one labeling the film “propaganda for terrorism.” Abe wife’s Akie, who was with him at the screening, responded on Facebook that she couldn’t stop crying. “[The film] made me really think how we should never wage war again and how we should never ever waste the precious lives that were lost for the sake of their country.”
Does that sound like terrorist propaganda? What do you think?
Mark Schilling