A past to be ashamed or proud of?: echoes of the Fifteen-Year War in Japanese film

The chapter discusses a wide selection of movies from the 1990s onwards to highlight continuity in both the ‘anti-war’ and ‘revisionist’ traditions of postwar Japanese cinema. On the one hand, a nationalist tendency in war movies stresses loyalty, self-sacrifice and the righteousness of the Japanese cause through the use and reuse of such cultural icons as the kamikaze pilots, the battleship Yamato, and the war hero Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku as well as an almost complete erasure of Asian countries/regions from war narratives. On the other hand, a critical stance on the war persists in a small number of movies that address the experience of war-torn China and colonized Korea and the trauma of war in postwar Japanese society.