Movie Response Prompts

 
These prompts are meant to help focus your thoughts for your responses and get you thinking about what you are watching. You can respond to any of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Note that I suggest you examine the prompts before watching the film.

Letters from Iwo Jima, directed by Clint Eastwood; screenplay by Iris Yamashita, based on Gyokusai Soshireikan' no Etegami (in English, Picture Letters from the Commander in Chief by Tadamichi Kuribayashi); starring Ken Watanabe, Kazunari Ninomiya, and Tsuyoshi Ihara

Iwo Jima (literally Sulphur Island) is an eight square mile volcanic island about 650 miles south of Tokyo. The battle there was among the most violent ever fought. It holds special importance in U.S. history, and especially for the U.S. Marine Corps, which did most of the fighting on the U.S. side, though Army and Navy land units also participated. Some of you may have seen Flags of our Fathers, the companion film to Letters from Iwo Jima, or visited the Marine Corps War Memorial near Arlington National Cemetery, which is a statue duplicating Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of the raising of the flag on Mt. Suribachi — an event that happened only five days into a five-week battle, and which in fact was the second raising of a flag (here is a photo of the first). The second flag-raising stemmed from a dispute between Marine Corps and Navy commanders over who deserved the flag as a souvenir more. One-third of the U.S. Marines who died during the entire war died at Iwo Jima during the five weeks after the invasion. It was the only major battle of the war in which American forces took more casualties (though fewer killed in action) than the Japanese. Of the eighty-two Medals of Honor, the highest recognition of military valor the United States bestows, presented for actions during World War II, 27 derived from what happened at Iwo Jima. However, Letters from Iwo Jima presents the battle from the Japanese perspective. The protagonists are Japanese, and though this is not the same as saying the Japanese are the heroes, it does mean that as an audience we are expected to be emotionally invested in them. How does seeing a film depicting the war from the perspective of the enemy affect your experience of it?

On the other hand, from The Iliad onward, we are used to seeing war from the victor’s perspective.We know when we watch a typical World War II film, for example, that whatever happens to the individual characters in whom we are invested, on a larger scale the good guys win.That is also true with a novel like The Naked and the Dead. Yet a victor requires a vanquished.The Japanese fought brilliantly and couragerously at Iwo Jima against a much larger and better equipped force — only 1,083 Japanese survived out of a force of about 22,000, and the last two hold-outs did not surrender until 1951 — but they did lose. How does knowing you are watching the side that will be defeated affect your experience?

The film portrays both Tadamichi Kuribayashi and Baron Takeichi Nishi quite accurately except for the relationship between them, which was not as friendly in real life as the film shows. Kuribayashi had lived in the United States for three years, had briefly attended Harvard, and had many friends in the United States. Like Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto (the supreme commander of the Imperial Japanese Navy who, despite his opposition to the policy, planned the Pearl Harbor attack), he strongly opposed war with the United States. Unlike most Japanese commanders he refused virtually all privileges of rank including better food, he forbade suicide attacks (banzai! charges), and contrary to Japanese custom he apparently died in combat with his men (though his body was never found) rather than commit seppuko behind the lines. Nishi won an equestrian gold medal at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles and was indeed friendly with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the big Hollywood couple of the day — think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie when they were still a couple, or Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz. Every day the U.S. forces broadcast personal messages to him to surrender because the world would regret his death. Consider why Clint Eastwood decided to focus on these two characters, plus Saigo the baker, and Shimizu, the former member of the kempetei.

 
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