Know Your Enemy: Japan - Film Summary

Film Summary

The film’s main focus is on introducing the history and customs of the Japanese to the American fighting force. Throughout the film, a great deal of effort is put into juxtaposing the ancient customs with the modern aspects of Japan. This effect creates the feeling of a strange people with overtones of normality.

The film begins by discussing the soldiers of the Japanese army. This section focuses mainly on the appearance and diet of the soldier, much more than tactics and strategy. The film comments on the soldiers of the Japanese army as being, “as alike as photographic prints off the same negative.”

Know Your Enemy then discusses Emperor Hirohito as how the Japanese supposedly see him saying "entrust to one man the powers of the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Premier of Soviet Russia; add to them the powers of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and top it all with the divine authority of our own Son of God and you will begin to understand what Hirohito means to the Japanese."

After going over Hirohito's divinity and saying that this divinity is shared by Japanese people as a whole the film then goes into Japanese religion, Shinto saying that it had been a "quaint religion for a quaint people" until 1870 when a mad fanatical conquer the world doctrine based on first Emperor Jimmu's commandment of "let us extend the capital and cover the eight corners of the world under one roof" was woven into it and called Hakko Ichiu. The Yasukuni Shrine is where the dead of all Japan's wars are buried and where the spirits of those killed inbattle will return.

After saying repeatedly if you are Japanese you believe these things the film then shifts gears slightly with the question "But if you're not Japanese then what is the real Japan; the Japan of the geographer, anthropologist, and historian?" After a brief geography lesson the idea of the Japanese pure divine blood is ripped to shreds with them called a plasma cocktail and then begins the history section. Here the emperor is portrayed as having little political power with the real power being in the hands of daimyos and their armies of Samurai. The Samurai are vilified along with their code of Bushido with the film saying that it "not only sanctioned double dealing and treachery but looked as it as an art to be cultivated." Then the arrival of Christianity and the warlords reaction to its teachings of peace and equality by throwing out the West and totally isolating Japan for 200 years is used to further vilify them.

The film then compares the advances which the West made in technology and the concept of liberty while Japan remained isolated until Commodore Perry's forced opening of it in 1853. The Westernization of Japan is discussed but always in the context of how the warlords were using it to further their own ambitions. The elimination of the position of Shogun and the elevation of the previously powerless Emperor as a rallying point in 1868 with the warlords "reserving for themselves and themselves alone the right to speak for him and guide his policies" giving an impression of Hirohito as an effectively powerless figurehead. The film invokes the Tanaka Memorial, now generally accepted to have been a forgery, as Baron Giichi Tanaka’s secret blueprint, Japan’s “Mein Kampf.” The power of the warlords continues to be emphasized in the rest of the film and is summarized by the statement that they never took the moral or ethical principals that went with the ideas they borrowed and that all information is filtered down to the Japanese people having been first approved and altered to suit the purposes of the warlords. This is emphasized by how despite its modernization most of the Japanese people still lived and worked in ways effectively unchanged since the 17th century and that even the white-collar Japanese lived like his ancestors did in the Middle Ages once he got home.

The warlord's control over the Japanese people is used to explain the current expansionist and warlike actions of the Japanese and the film ends with the circumstances of 1945 Japan.