Original subtitles

我哥在邦克山号航母上 My brother was on the Bunker Hill.

邦克山号被两架神风自杀飞机击中,死了500人 Ship got hit by two kamikazes, 500 guys died.

他们不要命了？ How can they do that?

开着飞机直接往船上撞？ Fly themselves into a ship?

天皇是神 向天皇尽忠 The emperor is God-- duty to God.

I think America had never before

faced this kind of fanatical enemy.

Young American boys who went to the Pacific

were dumbfounded and shocked

at the tenacity, the ferocity of the Japanese enemy they faced.

The Japanese had a very strong belief

in Bushido-- death before dishonor.

And they didn't respect a soldier that surrendered.

Dr. Akira Iriye: This is what made Japan unique:

that it would bring dishonor to yourself,

to your family to surrender.

Rather than being taken prisoner, you're supposed to commit suicide.

The emperor is a god.

And you're taught and trained from the time you're eight years old

that that's what you do as a young man.

You fight to the death.

They were dedicated totally

to their cause.

And that's because they followed the code of Bushido.

Richard Frank: What Japan was seeking in going to war

was to secure an empire throughout all of East Asia,

an empire that would be self-sufficient,

an empire that would permit Japan

to defend itself against all comers now and forever.

We know that Japan is willing to risk war

to have the economic empire it desires.

Roosevelt, however, wanted to avoid a war in the Pacific.

He told his secretary of state Hull one war at a time.

The Japanese looking at America at the time of Pearl Harbor

said America is really fractured and fragmented.

We can strike a decisive blow that will crack their morale.

Miller: Pearl Harbor gets us into a war.

An attack on American territory,

it turns a European conflict

into a true World War.

Japan would be facing enemies who would have far more population

and far more industrial power than they would.

How could they win under such circumstances?

Well, Japanese leaders believed that the one trump card they had

was what they called Japanese spirit.

Why was there any hope that a country as small as Japan

could take on the big countries such as the United States?

Well, they said there's one thing that Japan does have

which the US does not have.

The emperor would worship social cohesiveness and order,

a sense of unity.

The Japanese were socialized

to think of themselves as a single unit.

So this is the propaganda.

It basically says 100 million hearts beating as one.

I can remember a Japanese soldier running at us full tilt.

And we fired into him so many shells.

We must have hit him 60 times.

But he kept coming. He didn't stop.

Then he got to about 40 or 50 feet from us and collapsed.

It was amazing that this man was actually dead on his feet

but something just kept him going.

Spielberg: The Japanese had a different tactic in fighting.

With overwhelming strength they would attack our lines.

And it was very hard to fight that kind of a battle.

But that incurred great losses on the side of the Japanese.

When the Japanese fight

they say "Tenno heika banzai."

You know, "Long live the emperor.”

But they're always thinking about family.

I'm dying for my native place.

I must die to defend my family.

100 against 1200.

They're either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid.

Tom Hanks: The concept of the Japanese soldier,

it was as though war was being taken on

against this race of other beings.

The Japanese were seen as grossly inferior,

caricatured as having Coke bottle eyeglasses

and being incapable of inventing

or developing anything themselves. Those copycats.

There's a portrayal of them as monkeys, rats,

pillagers, rapists and barbarians.

Ambrose: The Japanese looked at the Americans the same way.

They said, "Oh, these people are apes and they're ignorant.

And they have no honor

and they have no courage.

The Japanese were master propagandists.

The enemy is basically a demon or a devil.

That is the major image of the Anglo-American powers.

And they feel that their race, the Yamato race,

has a destiny to fulfill,

a right to conquer.

Teachers told us that Japan is a very special country

because of this unbroken line of our imperial successions

and the emperor was divine.

The Japanese believed that in contrast to the purity of their bloodline

that they'd maintained for thousands of years,

the Americans had befouled their bloodlines

by becoming a mongrel nation.

Those stereotypes make killing easier

because I'm shooting beasts

or I'm killing monkeys. I'm killing demons.

I'm exterminating the brutes and the ogres and the devils.

The Japs are fighting for their own turf now.

Every damn foot we go south

they'll get meaner and meaner.

The Japanese soldiers,

they were trained in what I would call a culture of cruelty.

It was common for Japanese commanders

to beat senselessly their own troops.

And they're taught that to surrender is ignominious.

So if you take a prisoner,

you're taking a soft, materialistic American

who is not willing to die for his country.

The Japanese culture was without mercy,

without compassion.

The Japanese would kill you

even if they were wounded.

And the corpsmen went to help the wounded Japanese,

they would kill the corpsmen with a grenade.

You soon learned with the Japanese

that you had to meet brutality with brutality.

In that environment it was easy for some marines,

and some soldiers for that matter,

to succumb to behavior

whose brutality revolts to this very day.

( Spits )

- ( Shouts ) - Out of the way, Hirohito.

- Move! - Shoot him!

Sit down.

Hanks: The motivations of the marines that went,

they weren't necessarily there to do the right thing.

They were, but they were also there to take vengeance,

to get retribution.

There's this feeling that the Japanese

are fighting in an inhuman fashion

and we've got to fight in the same way to defeat them.

Marines quickly became every bit as brutal

as the Japanese or more so.

They would just shoot them again and again

to be sure they were dead. You could not trust them.

This fury built up in you.

What's the matter with these people?

Their military code is such that they're not gonna give up.

Here was a country that was defeated.

They can't win.

So you have an enemy that has lost but won't surrender

and will fight with even greater desperation.

American marines as well as soldiers

had begun to ask themselves

whether ending the war with Japan would literally involve killing

every last man, woman and child in Japan.

Dower: The Japanese were dying in the tens and tens and tens of thousands.

But the Americans were taking enormous casualties also

that were unacceptable by our standards.

We couldn't continue to go on.

That's why we push for the air raids

and for the nuclear weapons.

Hair used to come up on the back of my neck

when I was around Japanese for a long time after the war.

And then somewhere up about 1970-something

I softened up a whole lot.

Those guys were doing like we were doing--

What they had to, I guess.

That feeling towards Japanese

stayed with me for many years.

I've calmed down on that a lot.

But I had a different feeling

towards civilians than I did to soldiers.

I never hated them.

There was no sense of animosity.

And the Americans didn't behave

as if they had been the winners

and they wanted to look down upon the Japanese

or that they were going to enslave the country or anything like that.

MacArthur stressed stability.

And he also insisted on the importance of reforming the country.

It's a war of extraordinary hatred.

But when the war ends, that hatred disappears

and the people who were being socialized

to think of each other as beasts on the one hand

and ogres and demons on the other,

suddenly are able to work together

and even to move into respect for each other

and real deep friendships in some cases.

You just step back and you say,

"This was madness, this war."