Original subtitles

(narrator) May 8 1945.

V-E Day.

Victory in Europe.

After years of struggle, an explosion of joy and of relief.

(♪ "Knees Up Mother Brown" by Harris Weston and Bert Lee)

(crowd) ♪ Send him victorious

♪ Happy and glorious

♪ Long to reign over us...

(Churchill) We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing.

But let us not forget for a moment the toils and eftorts that lie ahead.

(narrator) There was still Japan.

(narrator) Tokyo, just before midday on 7 December 1942.

(♪ Japanese national anthem)

The Japanese people obserVed the first anniversary

of their imperial navy's destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour.

lt was one year since they learned that their nation of 80 million

had engaged the combined might

of over 200 million Americans and British.

Many had heard the news of the Pearl Harbour attack soberly,

even apprehensively.

But then came victory after victory - Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore.

Earlier fears were lost in exultation.

(shouts in Japanese)

(crowd cheers)

(speaks Japanese)

(narrator) Prime Minister General Hideki Tojo,

representative of the militarists

who had made Japan into an aggressive totalitarian state,

had led his countrymen into the war.

Now he promised them final victory.

(translator) The nation will complete the final round of this conflict.

To overthrow America and Britain we will fight until the last day.

Then in the Greater Asian area

we shall accomplish the destruction of our enemies.

Now, at the start of the second year,

both myself and the nation think about the men in the front line,

and once again l express determination for final victory.

War work must be pushed on and the struggle carried forward.

(narrator) At this time, Japan was not an industrial giant.

But in this first year of war,

they had seen the Japanese soldiers' spiritual strength and discipline

prevail over the materially stronger

but morally inferior Americans and British.

The same dedication on the home front

would make Japan's newly won empire unassailable.

(♪ fanfare)

For some well-informed Japanese,

the Pearl Harbour attack had been an astonishing gamble.

l came to work as usual about nine o'clock

and everybody was there.

There was martial music playing

and l almost fell over when l saw the newspaper extra

saying that the emperor had declared war on United States and Great Britain.

l think the man on the street had the same feeling

of being taken by complete surprise.

(narrator) But now, propaganda film could portray jubilant Japanese aviators

smashing the American fleet at Pearl Harbour.

(shouts in Japanese)

(narrator) Doubters were persuaded.

Newsreels emphasised the humbling of the arrogant whites.

The Japanese believed that their own soldiers always fought to the death.

The sight of white prisoners dwarfing the Japanese

who herded them into dishonourable captivity

helped convince them of their own invincibility.

(woman) Japan was winning

and every day we heard over the radio all the victories.

And the whole nation was very excited.

And the thought l had at the time

when l heard the news about the war was, "What's going to happen?"

But immediately all the victories and big war songs

and marches over the radio all day long...

So we are... quite excited

and it was almost like a festival.

(band plays march)

(narrator) War had been with the Japanese people for ten years.

Since 1931 , their armies had been fighting

an endless, frustrating war in China.

Victory in the Pacific had been quick and complete.

Here at last was something to celebrate.

(air-raid siren)

For years before Pearl Harbour,

there had been mock air-raid drills in every Japanese city.

Not a precaution against China's almost nonexistent air force,

but part of the process of keeping war-like emotion at a high pitch.

(shouting in Japanese)

(narrator) All took part.

Neighbourhood Associations - the Tonarigumi -

ensured that every one of the emperor's subjects at home

was involved in the distant war.

The Neighbourhood Associations controlled all our life at that time.

All the instructions from the government were through the Tonarigumi,

so we had to obey it.

And we relied upon the Tonarigumi.

(narrator) ln every neighbourhood,

in schools, in playing fields and on the streets,

ordinary citizens patriotically submitted themselves

to regimentation of thought and act.

(man shouts instructions in Japanese)

(narrator) The inculcation of patriotic virtues began in infancy.

(piano plays)

(children sing in Japanese)

(narrator) From their earliest days, children prepared mind and body

to serVe a cause greater than themselves -

the family, the nation,

the emperor.

And if the nation was at war, children had to be ready for that, too.

(children continue singing in Japanese)

(narrator) When school was over,

it would be their duty and their privilege to serVe their country

in the imperial forces on land, on sea,

in the air.

High-school pupils joined the air force for a day.

lf they were lucky,

they would have the chance to join as adults before too long.

(man) Of course, the Japanese were brought up

in three or four cardinal truths from cradle to grave -

that the emperor was divine, the country was invincible,

and it consisted of... a chosen race.

Things like these,

which were drummed into the Japanese mind from kindergarten up.

(narrator) Japanese boys were taught

to imitate the martial code of the samurai -

archaic and ferocious, devoid of pity for enemy or for self.

For the samurai, to die in battle was to fall at the moment of perfection,

as the cherry blossom does.

The worship of Buddha had coexisted in Japan for centuries

with the ancient Shinto worship of spirits, of ancestors,

of the sun goddess, Amaterasu.

But in the 1920s and '30s, the nationalists and militarists

had insisted that Shinto be made the state religion.

Shinto was pure. lt was strictly Japanese.

And it was from the Shinto sun goddess, the Japanese devoutly believed,

that the nation's high priest was directly descended -

the emperor.

The emperor was a god and a warrior chief.

The mystic belief that, through him, the Japanese race

was destined for conquest was systematically propagated.

The military acted in the emperor's name,

but they contrived that, in spite of appearances,

he retained little real power on Earth.

The emperor was deeply solicitous of peace,

which means that he was opposed

to starting hostilities with America.

But his position was such

that if the cabinet recommended, unanimously,

a certain line of policy,

he could not disapprove of it, although he might dislike it at heart.

(narrator) ln a government headed by a general,

this meant doing what the army wanted.

The ashes of Japan's war dead were carried home, packed in boxes.

Relatives of the fallen, widows and mothers,

had no more occasion for pride,

no more right to tears than the day they had said goodbye.

To send sons or husband to die for the emperor was the highest duty.

"We'll meet at the Yasukuni Shrine,"

where the ashes of the war dead were consecrated,

was the traditional farewell of the soldiers leaving,

wrapped in haramaki - the protective belly band of a thousand stitches.

(man) A girl stands on the corners of the streets,

say if in Tokyo, along the Ginza,

and asks each passer-by woman to make a stitch.

She must collect a thousand stitches.

This is given to a soldier. l got one. You wrapped this round your belly.

lt's supposed to keep your stomach warm

so that you don't catch cold or this or that,

but also to ward oft bullets.

Now, we all know this cannot be done, but this is like a charm, also.

And l used to think, now l don't know whether l should say this,

but l felt this is very unfair,

especially when l got the order to go overseas.

The Japanese girls are giving me this thousand stitches.

l am going to die. l have not experienced a woman.

Why cannot they give me their body to enjoy, and let me live,

however short my life is, to enjoy the fullness of it?

Because sleeping with me is not going to kill the girl, you know?

Maybe she likes it, l don't know.

But here l am about to die, and all l get is a thousand stitches.

(narrator) Wartime farewells were supposed to be a spiritual experience -

ceremonial, unsentimental.

(all sing in Japanese)

(narrator) Men recovered from wounds

left hospital to the singing of the Umi Yukaba.

"l go to a lonely grave far across the sea," they sang,

and went oft to the war again.

But suddenly, less than five months after Pearl Harbour...

..the war was not so far away.

18 April 1942.

16 Mitchell medium bombers, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle,

set out from the US aircraft carrier, Hornet,

for the first-ever air raid on Japan.

The American aim was to make a token, but early, demonstration

of Japan's vulnerability to air attack.

ln this, they entirely succeeded.

When Doolittle's raid was conducted

over the sky of Tokyo,

that produced a... produced a sort of consternation

because the military

repeatedly assured the public

that the Japanese sky was impenetrable.

(narrator) Doolittle's bombers did penetrate Japan's skies

to drop a mere 16 tons of bombs on her cities.

The actual damage was not great.

The shock was.

(man) The Japanese press were told how to display the news.

The complexion was put on as a cruel act -

indiscriminate bombing of civilians and women and children.

(narrator) Eight Doolittle flyers were captured.

For the Japanese, bombing was something that happened to other people.

They were angry that this barbarity had happened to them.

The prisoners were tried by a military court.

Three were executed.

The main function of Japanese women was to bear sons.

Skilled only in such feminine arts as the tea ceremony,

they stayed in the background.

Now with the battle fronts taking the men away,

they were directed to sterner things.

(man sings in Japanese)

Country women were used to taking their place in the fields

alongside their men.

But for the women from the cities, the war meant a complete change.

To stock the nation's depleted larder,

they too were conscripted to labour long hours.

They mined coal to make the utmost use of Japan's scanty resources

and keep the war machine moving.

City girls were brought up to be wives and mothers,

to be known as the "honourable hidden one".

Now they came out of their seclusion and learned new skills.

The women of Japan must take over men's work, they were told,

as their enemies had done, to ensure victory.

(man sings in Japanese)

(woman) When we worked at the factory,

every other week we had to work

from three o'clock in the afternoon until 1 1 o'clock.

And at 1 1 o'clock when we finish our work,

they would take us to a dining room and they would give us one bowl of soup.

Actually, it was hot salt water with maybe two or three soy beans.

And we are very hungry.

Or maybe just one noodle at the bottom.

Everything we got through rations.

Unless we have a card for rations, we couldn't get anything.

We have to do some self-supply, and we grew potatoes in our gardens.

We worked very hard to grow our own vegetables.

Our everyday life,

that life was very, very hard.

(narrator) The empress herself took on a new role,

urging the nation to more eftort, more sacrifice.

Sacrifice was necessary for victory,

and in final victory their belief was still unshaken.

None knew that by June 1942,

the battle had already become one simply for surVival.

June 1942.

United States war planes take oft to intercept a Japanese armada

attacking the island of Midway.

To this battle, Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander-in-chief,

had committed the four largest aircraft carriers in the Japanese fleet.

When the battle ended on 5 June 1942,

Yamamoto's four carriers were blazing wrecks or sunk.

Midway was a defeat from which Japan's navy never recovered.

But the Japanese people were told that Midway was a victory.

The truth was concealed even from members of the government.

(speaks Japanese)

(translator) We were told that one aircraft carrier was sunk

and one was severely damaged.

Since there were four carriers involved in the battle,

the way we heard it, three had come back,

although one was severely damaged.

But the Anglo-American side was saying that all four had been sunk.

This left some doubts in our minds.

We pressed the navy to give us more details,

but they stuck to their original announcement.

(speaks Japanese)

(translator) l was a news cameraman in the Midway battle.

When we got back to our base in the Japan Sea,

we were not even allowed to write any letters.

The wounded were kept in the isolation wards.

A top-secret order said that nothing could be talked of the Midway battle,

not even within the navy itself.

l was virtually kept prisoner

for about a month and a half after returning to Japan.

As a journalist, l was kept under particularly strict surVeillance

because we were reputedly great talkers and loose with our tongues.

And l was kept from going back to Tokyo while the rest of the war lasted.

The true situation was never broadcast from the NHK, of course.

Every news... broadcast

was strictly censored in those days.

The general public only knew that the Japanese army and navy

kept winning every battle they fought.

(narrator) No news, just propaganda.

Only one outcome was imaginable

in the conflict ceaselessly portrayed in the propaganda films.

The white oppressors of Oriental people overcome by the brave Japanese soldier.

(shouts in Japanese)

(shouting in Japanese)

(narrator) The spartan Japanese soldier, in turn,

overcome by contempt and rage at his white enemy's soft living.

(shouts in Japanese)

(band plays dirge)

(narrator) Tokyo, 5 June 1943.

The state funeral for Admiral lsoroku Yamamoto,

the great commander

who had masterminded the victory at Pearl Harbour.

Yamamoto died a hero, the Japanese people were told,

in the front line, meeting death gallantly in a war plane.

His loss was greater than many battleships.

But this first public admission of a defeat,

although represented as only symbolic of heroism,

hid grimmer truths of which Yamamoto himself had been well aware.

He knew that the enemy's material superiority, once fully mobilised,

would be overwhelming.

At Pearl Harbour, he had gambled that the war would be a short one.

At Midway, the gamble was lost.

Yamamoto had been shot down in skies now swarming with enemy planes,

over seas now dominated by the enemy's navy.

By 1944, the scales had tipped fully against Japan.

Metal had become a precious war commodity

too valuable for ornament or ceremony.

The war had been fought to secure raw materials

for a land where they were scarce - above all, for oil.

But now the resources General Tojo had boasted would flow from their conquests

were getting no nearer to Japan than the bottom of the ocean.

Not enough got through to keep the war machine going.

And food was scarce.

The ofticial daily ration of 1500 calories, subsistence level,

was often not met.

The rice harVest was the worst for 50 years.

StarVation hovered close.

The victories of 1941 had placed Japan behind a vast protective ring,

defended in death.

By the middle of 1944,

General MacArthur's amphibious armies had reduced this to an inner ring

hinging on the island of Saipan.

Saipan, within flying distance of Japan,

was claimed by the Japanese military to be a shield and an impregnable one.

lt was vital that it should be.

(speaks Japanese)

(translator) lt was realised that if Saipan was lost,

we would be in a very difticult position.

The importance of Saipan was that once it fell,

the war would be right in front of Japan's eyes.

Japan would come within bombing range of US planes.

lt was an absolutely vital defence area for Japan.

(narrator) On 15 June 1944,

after five days of saturation bombardment by sea and air,

American assault troops stormed ashore.

As always, the Japanese garrison fought to the last.

Here, for the first time, Japanese civilians -

women and children - were caught up in the battle.

Some, dazed and docile, submitted.

Saipan had deep-water harbours, it had two airfields.

Every rock was defended.

ln three weeks, to take an island only 85 square miles in area,

the Americans lost 15,000 dead and wounded.

25,000 Japanese defenders died to a man.

And some civilians, like many soldiers, chose suicide rather than surrender.

They died in vain. Saipan was taken.

Even before the last Japanese had died,

American bombers were ready to take oft for the mainland.

The truth was now too close even for the Japanese high command to conceal it.

(speaks Japanese)

(narrator) The situation, they told the people, was grave but not hopeless.

But the sacred homeland itself was now directly threatened.

The enemy, schoolchildren learned, was within striking distance by air.

The time had come for all, young and old,

to meet the threat with the same defiance as their fighting men.

Only a handful of trained pilots remained of Japan's once proud air army,

built for attack not defence.

When war began, their Zero fighters had ruled the skies.

Now they were outdated and outgunned.

These men pitted their machines against giant American Superfortresses

which now attacked the homeland.

They were young and brave, but they were very few.

(shouting in Japanese)

(man speaks Japanese)

(translator) l felt that a Zero fighter

was to me what a sword was to the samurai,

and l felt that l must manipulate the plane

just as if it were my own body.

And l also believed that the cockpit was a secret place

which would be my death place.

When we went on an attack, we never took parachutes.

This was because we believed

we should never become prisoners when shot down over enemy positions.

From ancient days, it was the belief of the Japanese warrior

that to be taken prisoner alive is sinful.

We, too, were always taught that the modern Japanese soldier

should never become prisoner because it is the greatest disgrace.

(narrator) With the imperial navy shattered,

the Saipan shield pierced, the Philippines conquered,

only the islands of lwo Jima and, finally, Okinawa,

were left to bar the Allied advance on Japan proper.

By April 1945, lwo Jima had been taken.

Now an American army, protected by massed warships, threatened Okinawa,

the last island before Japan.

ln a desperate throw to stave oft the ultimate assault,

Japan once more summoned its young men

to fight and die as their ancestors had done.

Special squadrons were formed.

The kamikaze - men of the divine wind -

named for the typhoon

which had destroyed the invasion force of Kublai Khan centuries before.

They drank a last cup of rice wine and set oft to die.

Their aircraft had been converted into flying bombs.

Their mission was to crash them

onto the decks of enemy warships round Okinawa.

(speaks Japanese)

(translator) As a commander, l'm often asked

whether l went through hell in sending out these pilots.

But, actually, the opposite is the case.

We had a lot of pilots who volunteered,

but it was only a very few who could leave on one attack.

And so it was more difticult to choose a selected few.

All the other volunteers said, "Send me! Send me!"

So it's difticult to ask these people not selected

if they'll wait until another day.

On the other hand, those taking part in the day's attack

were in very high spirits,

and so there's no difticulty in sending these men out.

But unlike an ordinary attack,

these kamikaze pilots, once they took oft, they never come back.

And so there was this sadness in knowing

that the people you were sending out you'd never see again.

(narrator) The kamikaze were shot out of the air.

They did severe damage, but failed.

The Americans invaded Okinawa.

Okinawa was only 350 miles from metropolitan Japan.

The nearer to the mainland, the more fanatical the fighting.

On Okinawa, only 7,000 Japanese soldiers surVived.

Over 100,000 died, many by their own hand,

and 75,000 civilians.

Mrs Yonaha, a student,

was ready to die, too.

(speaks Japanese)

(translator) All around us, the soldiers and the inhabitants

were running helter-skelter, obviously confused.

For some reason, l followed the soldiers and we got into a small shelter.

lt was more to get out of the rain than anything.

We found several other soldiers already in the hideout.

We could hear the US army calling us through loudspeakers to come out.

Whoever it was spoke a very beautiful Japanese,

but we had been taught from a long time

that we should never surrender and become prisoners of war.

So we let these broadcasts continue all day long without any let-up.

The shouts came from the sea - "Come out. Come out."

They were saying, "We will not inflict any harm

on women and children and old people,

so please come out."

l had already decided to die and felt that l should commit suicide.

One of the soldiers had a hand grenade and said, "Let's all commit suicide."

And we agreed.

Once we had made that decision,

l felt a great relief and a calmness come over me.

At first, of course, l did not want to kill myself.

l wanted to escape somehow and keep on living.

But the loudspeakers began to increase in intensity and in volume.

We felt that the Americans were coming in closer and closer,

so l asked the soldier to kill me, together with himself.

Just when l was waiting for the soldier to pull the pin,

one of the other soldiers took out a sword

and started waving it around saying,

"You women and children get out. You shouldn't die here."

We were quite startled by the sudden shouting,

and so we stood up and took a step backwards.

The place in which we were hiding was very small,

so one step back and we were outside the shelter.

We looked up and saw two American soldiers pointing pistols at us.

They didn't say anything, but kept gesturing with their pistols.

"Come out. Come out."

The soldiers we had left inside

asked us not to tell the US soldiers they were hiding

because all of them were going to commit suicide.

(narrator) On 2 July 1945, Okinawa fell.

ln the home islands, the Japanese people braced themselves for the storm to come.

The first Superfortresses over Tokyo a few months earlier

were only the harbingers of hundreds of others.

These were now to spew out fire and high explosive

in a sustained aerial assault,

systematically razing the cities of Japan one after the other.

There it is, the end of the line.

(narrator) ln formations of up to 2,000 at a time,

round the clock, virtually unopposed, they laid Japan's cities waste.

Beneath them, the rush to air-raid shelters as the sirens blew

became a dreaded daily routine.

(woman) l first ran into the shelter,

but l didn't rely upon it because it was very small and weak.

All people in the shelter were so tired

and always pale and silent and...

What l say?

The children... not so crying

because they were too tired and too terrible to cry, l think.

So they were all silent.

(narrator) Japan's wooden cities burned easily,

and their citizens in them.

This man-made inferno in Tokyo

was worse even than that following the great earthquake of 1923,

the capital's worst natural disaster.

(woman) Some distance from my house,

there was a lot of men died.

And my best friend lost her father

and brother and sister at that night.

And her mother, suicide after that.

The next morning,

l thought l want to see my house.

So l crossed the bridge and went to my house.

And whole houses were destroyed.

l was so tired...

..to think anything bad, but l hated the war.

And l hated the war.

l was standing in pain

and in silence, too.

(narrator) Tokyo was a charred wasteland.

Only steel and concrete surVived.

16 square miles of the capital were flattened.

The stench of death hung heavy over the ruins.

ln one raid, in one night,

over 70,000 perished.

ln air raids on Japan, nearly a quarter of a million civilians died.

Eight million were made homeless.

Man and woman, boy and girl,

the surVivors prepared to defend their homeland,

to drive the invaders back into the sea with wooden rifles,

bows and arrows, bamboo spears.

But the end, when it came, was to be from the sky -

irresistible,

unimaginable,

mushroom-shaped.