Production
Production on Know Your Enemy: Japan began in 1942, and was troubled from the very beginning by the inability of the U.S. government to determine what exactly the foreign policy towards Japan should be. Frank Capra hired Joris Ivens to supervise the documentary in early 1943, but after Ivens delivered a 20-minute preview, Frank Capra told Ivens that the U.S. Army not only disapproved of the approach Ivens had taken towards portraying the Japanese, but that they also had requested that he leave the production team. Ivens’ approach had been to treat the Japanese as open-minded people being directed by a dictator, vilifying Emperor Hirohito. Allen Rivkin, one of the writers working on the script, commented that a large setback for the film’s production was the realization that “we couldn’t call Hirohito a war criminal because we knew we had to deal with him later…and it threw us into a tailspin. That’s why it took so long.”
The scriptwriters ultimately felt a lack of direction coming from Frank Capra, aside from the knowledge that Capra was steering the film in a decidedly racist direction. Although the writers did not realize this, Capra’s racist depictions in the film came at the request of the producers.
In January 1945, the film underwent a series of final revisions to remedy an issue pointed out by the Pentagon: the film had “too much sympathy for the Jap people.” The film was released in its final form in 1945.
The film itself was a compilation of footage obtained from newsreels, the UN, enemy film, fictional Japanese movies for historical background, and re-enactments supervised by the war department. This footage was narrated by Walter Huston and Dana Andrews.
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