Battle of the Sea of Japan / Nihonkai daikatsen (1969)

By the late sixties, a number of movies about WWII had appeared featuring heroic characters who had died early in the war – Yamamoto was an especially popular subject – and Toho Studio in particular was looking for ways to use its Godzilla trained special effects unit. After Storm Over the Pacific, they at last …

Admiral Yamamoto (1968)

Another of Japan’s attempts to deal with the war somewhat realistically and still find heroes, Admiral Yamamoto is part bio-pic and part war epic, with Toshiro Mifune repeating his characterizations of the perfect Japanese Admiral, as well as marking the first of at least three portrayals of Yamamoto himself. The movie provides a much more …

Classmates / Aa doki no sakura (1967)

While many Japanese movies in the 60s were exposing the failures of the Japanese army during WWII, there was also a new audience for war movies in which the Japanese could be heroes again. Interestingly, almost all of these dealt with the Navy, which is consistently depicted in a far more positive light than the …

Retreat from Kiska / Taiheiyo kiseki no sakusen: Kisuka (1965)

If there are any people who know less about the WWII campaign in the Aleutian Islands than Americans themselves I haven't come across them, so any movie about the subject would be worth notice. But this is one of the most remarkable of all stories of World War II, for it deals with a Japanese …