Japanese nationalists slam ‘demon’ director Jolie
TOKYO — Japanese nationalists have accused “demon” Angelina Jolie of racism and have called for her to be banned from the country for directing the film Unbroken.
The actress has found herself in the crosshairs of a resurgent right-wing movement in Japan determined to whitewash a litany of war crimes committed by that country during the Second World War.
The movie, which is scheduled to be released in the United States on Christmas Day, tells the story of Olympic athlete Louis Zamperini, who was captured by the Japanese in the Pacific during the Second World War.
Zamperini, who died in July at the age of 97, was a United States Army Air Force captain who survived a crash into the ocean south of Hawaii in May 1943, only to be taken prisoner by the Japanese navy off the Marshall Islands 47 days later.
He was severely beaten and mistreated until the end of the war, with Mutsuhiro Watanabe — whom the prisoners nicknamed “The Bird” — singling him out for particularly harsh treatment.
Watanabe once forced the malnourished and weak Zamperini to hold a heavy length of wood over his head for 37 minutes before punching him in the stomach.
Jolie’s film is based on Laura Hillenbrand’s book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption, published in 2010.
Japanese nationalists are particularly incensed at descriptions in the book of prisoners being “beaten, burned, stabbed or clubbed to death, shot, beheaded, killed during medical experiments or eaten alive in ritual acts of cannibalism.” Hiromichi Moteki, the secretary general of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, a nationalist pressure group, told The Daily Telegraph: “It’s pure fabrication. If there is no verification of the things he said, then anyone can make such claims. This movie has no credibility and is immoral.”
In comments on social media, critics have accused Jolie of “racial discrimination” and of defaming Japan, while others are calling for her to be denied entry to the country in the future and for protests at cinemas that decide to show the film.
A petition on the website Change.org has attracted more than 8,000 signatures and demands Jolie — whom it describes as a “demon” — halt distribution of the film on the grounds it is “contradictory to the facts.”
However, activists attempting to encourage Japan to face up to its brutal imperial past said criticizing Unbroken took the denial of history to a “new level.”
Mindy Kotler, the director of Asia Policy Point, said: “There is plenty of documentation on the abuse and tortures inflicted upon PoWs. There is also plenty of eyewitness and forensic evidence of Japanese cannibalism of prisoners as well of fellow soldiers.
“With the majority of war crimes trials and much of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal focused on atrocities against PoWs, discrediting PoW testimony is an important step toward discrediting the war crimes trials. This is the objective of it all. It is outrageous and reprehensible to deny what happened to Louis Zamperini. It will not be something that the U.S. government will be able to ignore.”