Gary J. Bass’s magnificent new study of Japan’s wartime legacy raises moral questions about the international hit film.
Gary J. Bass’s magnificent new study of Japan’s wartime legacy raises moral questions about the international hit film.
M any intelligent critics have hailed the Japanese film Godzilla Minus One for offering more than the campy fun you would expect from a movie featuring the giant lizard. They have found in it a humanity and depth of characterization lacking in earlier outings of the long-running franchise.
I do not entirely agree with writers, including some for this publication, who have praised the film as one of the best of the year. In the end, I found it to be competent but largely forgettable. The climax of the movie, during which a fishing fleet goes out to trap the giant creature so that a bold kamikaze pilot can fly straight into its mouth, plays like a remake of Jaws that fulfills one of the most famous lines in movie history — “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” — and the good guys finally get that bigger vessel, a plethora of them, in fact, and put them to deadly use.
My concern is more with the identity of the good guys in this action-adventure. Godzilla Minus One is set in 1946, and the heroes are Japanese soldiers and sailors who vocally resent their defeat in the war and its lasting consequences for Japan’s empire.
What is their general mind-set? As that song by the Police goes, “I can’t stand losing!” Defeat is humiliation, and these beaten are, or were, as proud people as you could ever hope to find. These are characters whose noble suffering and desire to redeem themselves, in explicitly martial terms, are meant to endear them to us and to put this film several cuts above all those earlier Godzilla outings with disposable characters, dialogue, and plots.
From the opening, when the kamikaze pilot who could not bring himself to do his duty to the empire in the past watches the tragic deaths of his fellow soldiers at the hands of the monster, through the scenes in which Godzilla ravages the mainland, and defeat has deprived the nation of the means to fight back, to the later scenes when an officer who acts as if the war is still going on gives a rousing speech to members of the demobilized fleet, Godzilla Minus One is in the Japanese military’s corner. You might view the monster as the specter of Japan’s wartime enemies, haunting the psyche of a people, crying out for them to summon their heroic virtues and fight.
The film’s hero is a kamikaze pilot denied the glory of dying in combat. He never got a chance to fly his Zero into a warship deployed by one of the powers that dared oppose Japan’s subjugation of other nations. Now, he just may get a chance to fulfill his martial, racial, and spiritual destiny.
By a strange quirk of fate, Godzilla Minus One came to U.S. theaters just as Gary J. Bass’s stunning new book, Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia, appeared in bookstores, at the end of October. Nearly 900 pages long, this may be the most comprehensive account of the Japanese military’s atrocities throughout the Pacific theater of the war and of the tendency of Japanese officers to not only overlook but encourage such crimes through their orders and the general culture they fostered. Appropriately, Bass’s framing device is the Tokyo war-crimes trial that ran from May 1946 to November 1948. The book features a large cast of lawyers, diplomats, heads of state, journalists, and historians, along with all the officers and soldiers of China, the Soviet Union, Korea, Malaya, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, Japan, and the United States.
Of course, Bass — a journalist, Princeton professor, and scholar of genocide and war crimes — is not the first to call out the peculiar inhumanity with which Japan conducted the war. But he goes much further than other writers and enhances the reader’s understanding of this awful subject.
When people use phrases such as “Pearl Harbor,” “Bataan death march,” or “Palawan massacre,” they evoke some of the most horrific episodes of modern history. Yet in an odd way, those terms have a comfortably discrete character, as if they each represent a single event with a clearly demarcated beginning and end for historians to study. One of Bass’s achievements in Judgment at Tokyo is to expose the arbitrariness and falsity of any such boundaries. Certain events in the war may have caused more casualties than others, but they were indistinguishable in their horror and in the contempt for generally accepted rules of war that some of their participants exhibited.
The Japanese officers and soldiers we meet in Judgment at Tokyo do not conceive of the human body as something sacred. If there is any way to shoot, stab, beat, pummel, burn, freeze, starve, stretch, compress, suffocate, overwork, expose to disease, or otherwise violate, maul, mutilate, and destroy the human form not presented in these pages, envisioning it would require a considerable effort of imagination.
Part of the reason for the Japanese military’s treatment of the hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners of war who came under its purview, Bass explains, was logistical. Handling such staggering numbers of captives is no mean task in the best of conditions, with all the needed space and resources, let alone in the bitter and bloody circumstances of a conflict playing out in a hemispheric theater. But a more important reason, Bass writes, is simply the alienness of the concept of a POW to the Bushido- and Shinto-influenced military mind. To lose, and become a prisoner, was to incur dishonor. How do you respect the rights of someone who for all intents and purposes has ceased to exist as a human being?
Even so, many of the accounts here beg belief. Bass recapitulates the trial testimony of Fleming Brien, who, as a 19-year-old Anzac private from Sydney, sustained a shrapnel wound while fighting in the wilderness outside Singapore. After he had briefly rested in a Catholic convent, the occupiers marched him back into the woods, calmly told him that he was going to die, tied his hands behind his back, and made him kneel before a shallow grave. Somehow, the sword blow meant to remove his head gave him a large gash across the back of his neck instead, and he rolled into the ditch and played dead. Brien somehow managed to crawl his way out of the filled-in grave and turn himself in at a Singapore police station. Not realizing that he was supposed to be dead, the Japanese kept him in a prison camp until the end of the war. If that sounds like a relatively happy outcome, it is well to remember the endemic cholera, dysentery, malaria, diphtheria, and diarrhea in the severely overcrowded POW camps that Japanese officers oversaw; the beatings, tortures, and executions without trial; the occupiers’ tendency to put even deathly sick men to work on grueling construction projects; and the treatment that Japan’s surgeons meted out to Allied POWs and Asian draftees alike.
Bass writes: “The Asian conscripts were the first to perish from cholera, leaving the camps fouled with vomit and watery diarrhea and choked with flies. Even men with malaria were not excused from labor. Hundreds came down with tropical ulcers, reeking of putrefaction; in one camp, seventy Allied soldiers had their legs amputated, the surgeries performed in the open air under mosquito nets to keep flies out.”
Those flies would have pestered surgeons already chafing under a heavy workload. Bass’s figures are chilling. The Tokyo tribunal, “using distinctly conservative estimates,” found that 35,756 Allied POWs, or about 27 percent of the total, died in captivity. This figure is not quite evenly distributed among all the British, Dutch, Australian, and American captives. If you were an Australian or American, Bass continues, you had a one in three chance of dying.
Bass also details Japanese officers’ cannibalism of downed U.S. flyers, and their ferocity toward even Allied nurses who fell into their clutches. He recounts the testimony of an Australian, Vivian Bullwinkel, who underwent evacuation from a Singapore hospital in February 1942. Japanese planes bombed the ship transporting her and strafed the lifeboats. Bullwinkel and others miraculously made it to Bangka Island, off the coast of Sumatra. When Japanese forces arrived, they marched off the surviving men and machine-gunned them before ordering the 22 nurses to walk into the sea. The nurses did not get far before the guns opened fire again. Bullwinkel, like Brien, played dead and later became a captive of the Japanese.
“She spent the rest of the war in a series of reeking, overcrowded camps, where as many as three-quarters of her fellow captives were sick from malaria and tropical fevers,” Bass writes. “She tended to them as best she could or dug their graves.”
If a movie came out presenting recently demobilized Wehrmacht soldiers as heroes — and conveying the message that these Nazis may have taken a licking but still had some fight in them — audiences and critics around the world would rightly revile the film as the morally repulsive garbage it would be. Yet, in the face of all that Bass documents in painstaking detail, Godzilla Minus One has grown into one of the most popular, lucrative, and, one might even say, beloved movies of the decade.
Something’s wrong here.