Enemies | Brothers: German POWs in Japan (2013)

Feinde | Brüder: Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in Japan (2013)

敵が友になるとき～日本のドイツ人捕虜収容所 （２０１３）

It is rare to hear a positive stories about prisoner-of-war camps, but the story of Bandō prisoner-of-war camp (板東俘虜収容所) on the island of Shikoku is just that.  In November 1914, when the siege of city of Tsingtao (China) came to an end, German soldiers were rounded up and sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Japan.  The most renowned of these is the camp at Bandō, in what today is the city of Naruto in Tokushima Prefecture, where nearly a thousand prisoners were imprisoned until 1920. 

The Hamburg-based filmmaker and author Brigitte Krause took on the story of the camp in her latest documentary Enemies | Brothers: German POWs in Japan (2013).  Krause has an extensive knowledge of Japan, having spent time at Nihon University College of Art in 1985 on a DAAD scholarship for film studies and having shot several live action films and documentaries in Japan over the years (see: AGDOK Filmography). 

The film opens with the children of Bandō Kindergarten singing a nursery song adaptation of Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony.  This is significant because the first time Beethoven’s 9^th was ever performed in Japan was by prisoners in the Bandō camp.  The song has gone on to have great significance in Japan with it being performed throughout Japan during New Year’s celebrations. 

This is just one of countless lasting effects of this historic contact between Germans and the Japanese.  Krause explores the personal stories of several of the detainees and their families using historical documents and photographs.  The detainees’ stories are supplemented by historical information gleaned from experts, both amateur and professional.

One of the more fascinating characters is Hans-Joachim Schmidt from Kutzhof in Saarland.  Schmidt’s discovery of photographs and letters of POWs in the attic of his new home, led to him start an online archive of historical and biographical information related to the detainees (See: http://www.tsingtau.info/). 

Renate Bergner, who was guest of honour at the film screening I attended in Frankfurt, told of her father’s experiences in the POW camp.  He left with such a positive impression that he ended up living in Japan for two decades after the war.

A whole film could be made about the life of Kazue Shinoda, a Japanese woman who was adopted as a child and did not discover that her grandfather was German until she was an adult.  Krause follows her journey of discovery from meeting her German-Japanese mother at the age of 24, to Shinoda tracking down and visiting her astonished German cousins (her grandfather had told no one back home about his Japanese family) in Saarland with the assistance of Schmidt. 

The only suffering endured by the POWs in Bandō seemed to be homesickness and boredom.  In order to combat the latter of these two ills, detainees turned the camp into a mini-village with its own garden, bakery, theatre group, and newspaper, among other things.  They also seem to have had much contact with the local residents, with events such as holding an exhibition of German wares for the curious townspeople.  One of the long-lasting traditions introduced by the Germans was the art of baking.  Fourth generation baker Tsunemitsu Oka of the German Bakery in Naruto not only had the art of German baking passed down to him, but also went to Lüneberg, Naruto’s partner city (see: Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft zu Lüneburg e.V.), to study under the direction of a baker there.

The credit for the POWs relatively comfortable experience in captivity is given by many to Col. Toyohisa Matsue, who was in charge of the camp.  His compassion towards the soldiers was rooted in his samurai family’s own experience of being exiled to rural Aomori during the Meiji Period.  In Krause’s film two of his granddaughters relate their experiences of him as a stern, mustachioed head of the family.  We were lucky at the screening that Col. Matsue’s great-grandson coincidentally works for a Japanese bank in Frankfurt and was able to join us to answer questions about his famous forefather.

The film edited in the typical fashion of a German television documentary, with voice-over narration and Japanese interviewees overdubbed with German.  On the whole, Enemies | Brothers is an educational film accessible to all ages. Copies of Feinde | Brüder on DVD and Blu-ray can be purchased via the film’s official website.  The website claims that it is available with English, French, and Japanese subtitles.  Make sure that you request the subtitles you want, because the DVD that I have disappointingly has no such options.  

The screening of Enemies | Brothers that I attended at Sallbau Dornbusch on November 13, 2014 was co-sponsored by Nippon Connection and DJG Frankfurt.

To learn more about the German POWs in Bandō:

• Doitsukan: Das Deutsche Haus in Naruto  鳴門市ドイツ館
• “Japanese POW camp was a little slice of home.”  Tapei Times. 23 March 2004.
• Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien: Bandō-Sammlung
• Forschungsgruppe „Deutsche Kriegsgefangene aus Tsingtau in japanischen Internierungslagern“
• Tsingtau und Japan 1914 bis 1920: Historisch-biographisches Projekt

CREDITS

Direction/Script/Editing:

Brigitte Krause

Camera:

Brigitte Krause

Horst Herz

Sound:

Naomi Ito

Aya Kaneko

Yuki Kawamura

Music:

Maia Hall (piano/keyboard)

Birgit Maschke (violin)

Hiroshi Akagaki (mandolin)

Kyosuke Suzuki (shakuhachi)

Naoki Sato (flute)

Sanae Mizukami (oboe)

Jin Teramoto (bassoon)

Kenichi Kawabata (clarinet)

Production Assistant:

Nao Nakanishi

Translation / Interpretation:

Naomi Ito

Aya Kaneko

Noboru Miyazaki

Narration:

Saskia Petzold

Boris Pietsch

Featuring:

Hans-Joachim Schmidt

Kazue Shinoda

Renate Bergner

Kiyoyuki Kosaka

Prof. Dierk Günther

Takayoshi Morizumi

Mieko Matsue

Kaoru Takahato  

Tsunemitsu Oka (German Bakery in Naruto)

Hiroshi Akagaki

Marugame Research Group

Prof. Barbara Rossetti-Ambros

Fumiko and Toshio Takahashi

Ilse and Christine Walzer

Children and Teachers of the Bandō Kindergarten

Letters and Writings of the POWs:

Viktor Walzer

Hermann Schäfer

Paul Engel

The Bandō POW newspaper: Die Baracke

POW Illustrations:

Willy Muttelsee

K.M. Suhr

Photos and Film Clips of:

Shikoku Hoso

Das Deutsche Haus, Naruto 

Photos courtesy of:

Hans-Joachim Schidt

Renate Bergner

Kazue Shinoda

Tsenemitsu Oka

Mieko Matsue

Kaoru Takahato

Heribert Ambros

Wolfgang Wallraven

Photo albums belonging to the Schäfer, Pabst and Fröhlich families

Sound Design:

Peter Sankowski

Producers:

Brigitte Krause FilmproduktionHamburg

East-West-Visions E.V.

Additional Funding:

Saarland Medien Gmbh

The Japan Foundation

Filmförderung Hamburg-Schleswig-Holstein

The Last Air Raid Kumagaya (最後の空襲くまがや, 1993)

In 1978, Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita, made the powerful ground-breaking film Pica-Don (ピカドン, 1978) which depicts the bombing of Hiroshima on the 6^th of August 1945 from the perspective of the victims of the atrocity.  An early example of an animated documentary, the Pica-Don was based on the testimonies and drawings of the survivors.  This use of animation to depict the unimaginable was done with the intent of educating people around the world about the horrors of war in effort to bring about world peace.  It is this same desire for “love and peace” that led the Kinoshitas to become involved in the founding of the Hiroshima International Animation Festival in 1985 (Source: hiroanim.org)

With The Last Air Raid Kumagaya (最後の空襲くまがや / Saigo no Kūshū Kumagaya, 1993), Renzō and Sayoko Kinoshita continue to drive home the message about the futility of war.  As they did with Pica-Don, they based this 29-minute long animated film on historical records, interviews with witnesses/survivors, and the documents belonging to survivors. 

The first part of the film is critical of domestic propaganda.  A female narrator says that the common people of Japan were ignorant of the “evils of war”, such as the atrocities’ committed by their military in the South Pacific and Okinawa.   The film suggests that people believed the propaganda, which hid from them the fact that the Japanese were fighting a losing battle.  The narrator says that in the closing days of the war, the general populace believed the myths of their country’s victories abroad and were oblivious that their emperor was on the verge of surrender. 

It is in this context that the story of the last American air raid on Japan unfolds.  The central character is a 7 year old girl called Sachiko.  She has just lost her immediate family in the firebombing of Tokyo and takes the train to her uncle’s family in Kumagaya in Saitama Prefecture.  She is not out of danger yet, for the train gets shot at by a plane along the journey.  Her uncle meets her at the station and he and his whole family welcome her with open arms.  With her cousins, Sachiko explores the beauty of the natural landscape around Kumagaya. 

Sadly, these beautiful days of late summer are not to last.  The final movement of the film depicts the final air raid of the war.  The city descends into fear and chaos and Sachiko gets separated from her family with tragic results.  This film has no happy ending, for war brings no happy endings except in schmaltzy Hollywood features.  Just when you think the film has served up more sadness than you can bear, the shock ending is a real kick in the gut.  Along with Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (火垂るの墓, 1988), this film not only has a strong anti-war message, but it also the highlights the suffering of children in times of war.   

The terrible irony of what happened in Kumagaya on August 15, 1945, was that as the people were reeling in shock in the ashes of the attack, Emperor Hirohito’s speech announcing Japan’s defeat came on the radio.  It is hard to imagine how the people of Kumagaya, and other cities bombed that final day (Osaka, Tokoyama, Isesaki) felt about the futility of their suffering at that moment.

This short film, animated beautifully with handmade cutouts, can be screened at the Peace Museum of Saitama (埼玉県平和資料館).  It is a useful educational film, but I would not recommend it for children under the age of 14.  It has deeply distressing imagery and raises some important political debates that require careful guidance by educators.  Although we do glimpse the American planes responsible for the air raids, I would argue that the film actually points the blame for the suffering of the Japanese people during the war on the Japanese government itself.  It is not easy material, but certainly useful when taught in the greater context of propaganda and war.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2014

Three Came Home (三人の帰宅, 1950)

In 2001, I was writing a paper on Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), and decided to find out if any American films had tried, as I feel Oshima did, to understand the horror of Pacific War from both the Japanese and the Allied perspectives.  Among the predictable John Wayne war films like They Were Expendable (John Ford, 1945) and Back to Bataan (Edward Dmytyk, 1945), I discovered the remarkable 1950 film Three Came Home (Jean Negulesco, 1950).

The story is an adaptation of Agnes Newton Keith’s memoir Three Came Home (1948) about her experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II in North Borneo (today called Sabah) and Sarawak.  An American writer married to British forester Harry Keith, Agnes made a name for herself shortly before the war with her bestselling memoir Land Below Wind (1939) which painted a idyllic portrait of her early married life, the land and the people of Sandakan – then the capital of British North Borneo.

The film begins with the growing unease of the British inhabitants of Sandakan as they hear radio reports about the escalating war.  After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore, many husbands begin sending their wives and children back home.  Agnes; however,  refuses to leave her husband’s side.  When the Japanese invade British North Borneo, Agnes, Harry, and their young son George become prisoners-of-war. 

Agnes and George are separated from Harry and imprisoned first on Berhala Island and then they are shipped to the Bau Lintang camp near Kuching.  The women and children do not receive any special treatment and are forced to live on the edge of starvation in primitive conditions.  A Hollywood film of that era could not really capture the horror of the living conditions in the camp (lack of clothes and diapers, lack of hygiene and clean water, widespread disease) as Agnes does so movingly in her book, but the film does not sugar coat the situation either.  It is a rare look at the Pacific War from the perspective of an American mother.  The film was also shot on location as much as possible which gives it an air of authenticity. 

Husbands and wives separated by a trench.

Although Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay embellishes some parts of the story (a massacre of horny Australians, the stereotyping of the brutal Nekata as a hulking oaf) and leaves out some important aspects (the complexity of Anges’ relationship with Lieutenant Colonel Tatsuji Suga, how she made toys for her son, how she buried notes that she dug up later in order to keep a record of her ordeal), on the whole the film captures the essence of Agnes Newton Keith’s wartime experience.  She went through hell on earth in that prisoner-of-war camp, but emerged from the war with a surprising lack of bitterness.  Somehow, despite having had a miscarriage brought on by the stress of detainment and witnessing/experiencing torture and other cruel behaviour from the Japanese soldiers, Agnes did not learn to hate the Japanese.  She learned to hate war and what war does to humanity.  The film retains her sense of balance by showing the small gestures of good will made by some Japanese soldiers (such as the doctor secretly giving Agnes medicine)  in contrast to the cruelty and inhumanity of others (Nekata, the anonymous soldier who assaults her).

The casting of Three Came Home was really key to making this work for Jean Negulesco.  Claudette Colbert (It Happened One Night, The Gilded Lily) plays Agnes – ideal casting because the women were about the same age and Colbert had a great range as an actress.  Colbert was nearing the end of her peak as an actress as there were (and still are) few good roles written for older women in Hollywood.  She unfortunately was injured during the Three Came Home shoot and lost out on the role of Margo Channing in All About Eve (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) – a role which Mankiewicz had written with her in mind.

Col. Suga weeps - a man broken by the horror of war

The real success of the film hinges on the casting of Sessue Hayakawa (The Cheat, The Bridge on the River Kwai) as Col. Suga.  Hayakawa had been a major Hollywood star during the silent era, but his star had waned with the coming of sound and he was stuck in France for the duration of the war under the German Occupation having gone there to star in French films directed by Max Ophüls, Marcel L'Herbier, and others.  Humphrey Bogart’s production company tracked him down to have him star as Baron Kimura in Tokyo Joe (1949).  As a seasoned actor, Hayakawa brings sense of humanity to the role of Suga – without giving this depth of character to the enemy, Negulesco would not have been able to really capture the core message of Agnes’ memoir:   

“If there are tears shed here, they are for the death of good feeling.  If there is horror, it is for those who speak indifferently of ‘the next war’.  If there is hate, it is for hateful qualities, not nations.  If there is love, it is because this alone kept me alive and sane.” (Three Came Home, p.9)

Wings of Defeat

Chris MacGee recently published an amazing interview with Japanese-American director Risa Morimoto about her documentary Wings of Defeat, which premiered at the HotDocs festival in Toronto back in 2007. The film is about kamikaze pilots during the Pacific War with moving interviews with both pilots who trained as kamikazes but survived the war and Americans who witnessed and survived kamikaze attacks. It is high on my wish list of films to see. Those of you in North America can catch it on PBS on May 5th. It is also now available on DVD. Here is the trailer for the film, followed by a clip from the supplementary documentary following the reception of the film by American veterans.

Letters from Iwo Jima (硫黄島からの手紙, 2006)

Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima is a remarkable film on many levels. It is rare for a war film, whose focus is usually on the heroism and patriotism of a country’s soldiers, to consider the human face of the enemy. Such films are even rarer in the history of films about the conflict between the Japanese and Americans during World War II.

During the war, audiences in the English speaking world were trained to view the Japanese enemy as a monolithic entity with films that emphasized myths and stereotypes about the Japanese. For example, there’s a deliberate play on words in the way the marines in Wake Island (John Farrow, 1942) – the first combat film set in the Pacific - refer to the Japanese as “Those yellow Nips” – ‘yellow’ signifying both the colour of their skin and their perceived cowardice.

The 1944 film The Flying Sullivans – which inspired Spielberg to make Saving Private Ryan – turned the true story of five brothers who died together into wartime propaganda. Upon hearing the news about Pearl Harbor, one of the brothers says that the war will be over in a matter of weeks because the Japanese, “They can’t fight. They close their eyes when they fire off a gun.” Here cowardice is defined as the inability to face the enemy, to look them in the eye and have a true Hollywood showdown.

The Japanese enemy is rendered faceless sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically in the films of this period – particularly in the series of John Wayne Pacific War films. In John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945), for example, the enemy is represented by the deadly technology they use, such as fighter planes and warships, in contrast to the close-ups of the faces of Americans and Filipinos during the attacks.

Technology does result in the facelessness of modern warfare but in the case of the Pacific War, this impression was created by domestic propaganda at the time and does not reflect the true circumstances on the ground. Veterans of the attack on Pearl Harbor have testified that the Japanese pilots were flying so low that they could see their faces. Films like the terribly dull Japanese-American co-production Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) and the stomach-turningly saccharine Pearl Harbor (2001) remedy the historical inaccuracies to a certain extent, but are difficult to sit through unless you are a history buff (Tora!) or a fan of souped up romances starring Ben Affleck (Pearl Harbor).

When the faces of the Japanese enemy can be seen, they are generally shown in one of two ways: as foolish-looking buck-toothed stereotypes or as taking pleasure in warfare and cruelty. Ironically the films that have done the most to understand the humanity of both the Japanese and the Allied Forces have been films about Japanese P.O.W. camps. Outside of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese forces against Asians during the war, the P.O.W. camps were the site of some of the most horrific war crimes imaginable. Yet, films like Three Came Home (1950), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), and Oshima Nagisa’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983) all made great strides in trying to understand the motivations of both the captors and their prisoners.

Clint Eastwood’s concern about the perspective of the Japanese in the battle of Iwo Jima haunted him throughout the preparation for Flags of Our Fathers (2006) so much that he encouraged one of his research assistants, Iris Yamashita, to dig deeper into their story. The result is a deeply moving film that follows the Japanese soldiers at Iwo Jima from their preparations for the American invasion up until their last heroic push at the end of the battle. In Letters from Iwo Jima, Eastwood dispenses with many stereotypes of both Japanese and American soldiers and tries to tell the Japanese side of the battle with dignity.

Inspired by the Picture Letters of Army General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, the story of the Japanese soldiers if told through the letters they wrote home to their loved ones. As almost all of the 20,000 plus Japanese on the island were killed, anecdotes from letters are really the only way their histories can be recounted.

Ken Watanabe, a face familiar to international audiences from his outings in The Last Samurai and Memoirs of a Geisha, plays General Kuribayashi. Kuribayashi and Baron Nishi (played by Tsuyoshi Ihara) add an element of poignancy to the film for both men had spent time in the United States and had many American friends. Kuribayashi knows that the Japanese are doomed to failure due to America’s industrial superiority. His understanding of the enemy and his unconventional leadership style lead to many interesting conflicts between officers in the film.

The Baron Nishi character is also based the historical figure Takeichi Nishi, who won a gold medal at the 1932 Olympics in Los Angeles. One of the most moving moments in the film comes when he translates a dead American soldier’s letter from his mother to the soldiers in his unit. The young soldiers are deeply moved by the letter to the point that young Shimizu (Ryo Kase) says that his own mother could have written such a letter. This is just one moment of many in the film where Eastwood demonstrates that despite different belief systems and social customs, Japanese and American soldiers are actually not so different from each other in terms of their hopes and dreams for themselves and for their families.

The character that we are invited to identify with the most strongly is Saigo, played by Kazunari Ninomiya. Saigo is filled with doubts about the war, misses his wife so much that he writes her letters whenever he has a chance, and longs to survive the war so that he can meet his newborn daughter.

Ninomiya was a clever casting choice on the part of Eastwood. Not only does he play the role with the needed dignity and delicacy but Ninomiya has a large fan following from his career in the boy band Arashi. This means that a lot of young Japanese people will go out and see the film. In fact, on the opening weekend here in Japan, the film took the number one place over many hotly anticipated new releases. From what I understand, World War II (particularly Japan’s aggression in the early part of the twentieth century) does not get taught with much depth in schools in Japan and I think it is important for young people to learn about this difficult time in their nation’s past.

As the film progresses, the Japanese slowly but surely decrease in numbers, and knowing that very few Japanese survived Iwo Jima I wondered throughout the film how they were going to end the film without overwhelming the audience with despair. In the end, I think they did a good job of demonstrating the extent of the tragedy and futility of war but leaving us with one small ray of hope for the future (have no fear, no spoilers here!).

Perhaps the choice of colour for the film had a great deal to do with helping hold the viewer at a point of objectivity (though I do admit I had tears in my eyes on more than one occasion). The image is almost completely drained of colour, to the point that at the beginning I thought that it had been shot in black in white or sepia. It has the appearance of a faded old colour photograph. In the scenes with explosions going off, the orange is so bright in contrast to the dull colours of the surroundings that it has the quality of the hand-tinting that was done to silent films.

This is the first film I have ever seen in which American soldiers are actually shown to do unethical and unheroic things. Having watched countless John Wayne war films the shock was truly enormous, and marks for me an important shift in the war film genre. Letters from Iwo Jima reminded me of something Agnes Newton Keith wrote in the prologue to Three Came Home, her memoir of her years spent in gruelling conditions in a P.O.W. camp with her young son:

“The Japanese in this book are as war made them, not as God did, and the same is true for the rest of us. We are not pleasant people here, for the story of war is always the story of hate; it makes no difference with whom one fights. The hate destroys you spiritually as the fighting destroys you bodily.”

I highly recommend that everyone go out and see the film. It pulls down a lot of stereotypes (“warrior culture”, samurai spirit, uniformity of society, etc.) about the Japanese that have stood for much too long in Western culture.

© Catherine Munroe Hotes 2006