Pearl Harbor the Movie

The actor winks at the camera, which projects his face on two screens, and the crowd of 30,000 goes wild. Then Affleck, flanked by director Michael Bay and producer Jerry Bruckheimer, hops onto the trunk of a yellow Ford Mustang convertible that wheels around the stadium. As the lights dim, color floods a screen that is triple the size of a tennis court. Japan is about to meet Pearl Harbor—again.

The recent star-studded premiere was the final, pre-opening salvo of the Walt Disney Co.'s months-long campaign to sell Japan on the idea that Pearl Harbor is merely a love story and not a fateful chapter in a misguided war effort. Japanese ads for the movie insist, "the world awaits with bated breath."

The world probably doesn't much care, but Disney is using its formidable marketing resources to convince Japanese moviegoers they should. After a critical drubbing and a disappointing box office in the U.S., Disney is hoping to rake in close to $100 million in box-office receipts in Japan, the world's second largest movie market and now the company's best hope of turning the staggeringly expensive film into a blockbuster. In preparation for the movie's July 14 opening in Japan, the studio has shelled out a record $10 million for an aggressive marketing campaign and has, controversially, tailored some scenes to make the movie more palatable to the Japanese public. As Bruckheimer said at the Tokyo premiere: "This is a very important screening for us."

Wars have winners and losers, good guys and bad—and so, too, must war movies. So how does a U.S. company sell a film to the Japanese when its main attraction is a re-enactment of the 1941 surprise attack by their countrymen—an attack that killed more than 2,000 Americans and resulted, ultimately, in Japan's own horrific defeat? Unlike the Germans, who as a nation have never stopped agonizing over their role in the war, the Japanese have spent the past half-century repressing the memories and trying to make the world forget their aggression as well.

"Many Japanese are deeply troubled that Disney would choose to make this movie," says Akimasa Miyake, a professor of modern Japanese history at Chiba University, who has not yet seen the film. "I'm not saying we were right or wrong. I'm saying we fear it could reinforce the image of us as low-down, dirty Japs and give fuel to Japanese conservatives who say America still sees us this way."

The film is opening at a sensitive moment in Japanese-U.S. relations. The recent alleged rape of a Japanese woman on Okinawa by a U.S. serviceman once again sparked an outcry against the continued presence of 47,000 U.S. troops in the country. Further, for many Japanese citizens, Pearl Harbor recalls not the surprise attack of a half-century ago but the accidental sinking of the Ehime Maru, a Japanese fishing trawler, by a U.S. Navy submarine earlier this year.

News accounts of the film's U.S. premiere in Pearl Harbor focused on the proximity of the Navy carrier, on which the celebrations were held, to the spot where the Japanese boat was sunk. "I can't imagine why they had to hold it there, and so soon after the incident," says Masami Inoue, a lawyer representing families of the nine aboard the Ehime Maru who drowned. "It is unthinkably callous."

Pearl Harbor's invasion of Japan also coincides with the rise of a new national mood. The hugely popular Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is determined to rekindle a feeling of pride after a decade of economic doldrums. His plans to revise the constitution, which renounces any offensive military capability, and to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, a contentious memorial for dead war veterans (including World War II war criminals), have elicited outcries abroad but little to none at home.

Two years ago the Diet restored the World War II-era Hinomaru flag and Emperor-worshiping Kimigayo anthem as official standard-bearers for the nation. A film like Pearl Harbor, says the Prime Minister's spokesman, Kazuhiko Koshikawa, is "quite fictitious and one-sided. Japan is portrayed as the enemy, and wrong. The U.S. is portrayed as right."

Disney has spent months trying to counter this attitude. Dozens of young workers in a chaotic Tokyo office dart from desk to desk with armloads of flyers and press kits. A woman digs through a mountainous pile of movie stills; visitors mill under a massive close-up of Affleck. This is the war room, campaign headquarters for Disney's high-stakes launch. Pearl Harbor's budget—one of the biggest in history—is more than double the industry average and means the movie has to earn $400 million worldwide just to break even. But in Japan the company isn't only striving to turn a profit; it also wants to be sure it doesn't tarnish its name. Japan is a nation of Mickey Mouse fans. Tokyo Disneyland is the world's most popular theme park, and a sister site called Disney Sea is scheduled to open nearby in September. "Pearl Harbor is obviously a subject that must be approached with cultural sensitivity," says Dick Sano, who heads the Tokyo office of Buena Vista International, the Disney unit distributing the film outside of the U.S.

That explains the contorted strategy of marketing the film solely as a love story. Japanese billboards for Pearl Harbor insist it is just like Titanic, a colossal hit that raked in $225 million in Japan, whose film fans tend to love action-packed adventures with romantic leads. The trailer shown in Japan is vague about who the enemy actually is, cutting out close-ups of grim-faced Japanese soldiers heading off to bomb Hawaii that are shown in trailers elsewhere.

A 14-page spread on the movie in the fan magazine Pia never even mentions Japan's involvement in the attack. As a result, some critics view the company's marketing strategy as a bait and switch. "A movie is a product, and it should be sold for what it is," says Yuko Sekiguchi, editor-in-chief of the influential cinema magazine Kinema Junpo.

Disney also reshot some scenes and edited others specifically for the Japanese market. Some of the changes were made for reasons of credibility, the sort of alterations that are routine in the movie business. In the U.S. version, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander, rips a page off a calendar to show the date of the bomb attack, Dec. 7. In Japan, the calendar flips to Dec. 8, which was the date of the attack, Tokyo time. Scenes involving Mako, the Japanese-American actor who plays Yamamoto, were rerecorded for Japan. "No one in the States would notice he spoke Japanese with an American accent," says Sano, "but they would here."

Other changes were more about cultural sensitivities. In the U.S. version, Alec Baldwin, playing Lieut. Colonel James Doolittle, declares that if he's shot down during a retaliatory air raid on Tokyo, he plans to crash his plane in such a way as to "kill as many of those bastards as possible." In the Japanese subtitles, the line is almost laughably stilted: "I myself would choose a tasty target." In the closing voice-over of the original version, Kate Beckinsale, playing a nurse, says: "Before Doolittle's raid, Americans knew nothing but defeat; after it, nothing but victory."

For Japan, the statement was deemed overly cocky and has been toned down: "... after it, there was hope of victory." Soldiers in various scenes call their enemies "Jap suckers" and "dirty Japs." In Japan, they're just "Japs." ("We can't change that," Sano shrugs. "That's what they called us back then.")

Despite Disney's spin, Internet chat rooms reflect a certain hostility. Hundreds have joined a thread titled, Committee to Boycott Pearl Harbor. One contributor gripes: "They'll probably make a movie called Hiroshima next, in which heroic American soldiers bomb those evil Japanese and save the world." Another writes: "In Armageddon, you could excuse the message that America is number one because it's science fiction. But Pearl Harbor looks to be pure propaganda."

For Japanese war veterans, many of whom have endured vilification at home, the movie is digging up painful memories. "Pearl Harbor was so long ago," says Yuzo Fujita, 84, a onetime Zero pilot. "Why must they keep bringing it up?"

Another former airman puts it this way: "When it comes to the war, we are always seen as bad. But bad things were committed on all sides. Think of all the people they killed in Hiroshima. I fear young people will see the movie and believe that's the way it happened."

Disney is counting on the younger generation, who make up 80% of the movie-going public. But if the reactions of movie fans exiting the Tokyo premiere are any guide, this won't be a slam dunk. Naho Okada, a 17-year-old student, attended the premiere because Ben Affleck is "such a hottie." But the war scenes made her "uncomfortable," she says. Others were more blunt.

"You can't make a film about this subject and not be critical of Japan," says Eri Watanabe, a 23-year-old housewife, "But I think it's pretty egotistical of Disney to make a movie like this and presume it'll be a big hit here."

The road to war between Japan and the United States began in the 1930s when differences over China drove the two nations apart. In 1931 Japan conquered Manchuria, which until then had been part of China. In 1937 Japan began a long and ultimately unsuccessful campaign to conquer the rest of China. In 1940, the Japanese government allied their country with Nazi Germany in the Axis Alliance, and, in the following year, occupied all of Indochina.

The United States, which had important political and economic interests in East Asia, was alarmed by these Japanese moves. The U.S. increased military and financial aid to China, embarked on a program of strengthening its military power in the Pacific, and cut off the shipment of oil and other raw materials to Japan.

Because Japan was poor in natural resources, its government viewed these steps, especially the embargo on oil as a threat to the nation's survival. Japan's leaders responded by resolving to seize the resource-rich territories of Southeast Asia, even though that move would certainly result in war with the United States.

The problem with the plan was the danger posed by the U.S. Pacific Fleet based at Pearl Harbor. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Japanese fleet, devised a plan to immobilize the U.S. fleet at the outset of the war with a surprise attack.

The key elements in Yamamoto's plans were meticulous preparation, the achievement of surprise, and the use of aircraft carriers and naval aviation on an unprecedented scale. In the spring of 1941, Japanese carrier pilots began training in the special tactics called for by the Pearl Harbor attack plan.

In October 1941 the naval general staff gave final approval to Yamamoto's plan, which called for the formation of an attack force commanded by Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo. It centered around six heavy aircraft carriers accompanied by 24 supporting vessels. A separate group of submarines was to sink any American warships which escaped the Japanese carrier force.

Nagumo's fleet assembled in the remote anchorage of Tankan Bay in the Kurile Islands and departed in strictest secrecy for Hawaii on 26 November 1941. The ships' route crossed the North Pacific and avoided normal shipping lanes. At dawn 7 December 1941, the Japanese task force had approached undetected to a point slightly more than 200 miles north of Oahu. At this time the U.S. carriers were not at Pearl Harbor. On 28 November, Admiral Kimmel sent USS Enterprise under Rear Admiral Willliam Halsey to deliver Marine Corps fighter planes to Wake Island. On 4 December Enterprise delivered the aircraft and on December 7 the task force was on its way back to Pearl Harbor. On 5 December, Admiral Kimmel sent the USS Lexington with a task force under Rear Admiral Newton to deliver 25 scout bombers to Midway Island. The last Pacific carrier, USS Saratoga, had left Pearl Harbor for upkeep and repairs on the West Coast.

At 6:00 a.m. on 7 December, the six Japanese carriers launched a first wave of 181 planes composed of torpedo bombers, dive bombers, horizontal bombers and fighters. Even as they winged south, some elements of U.S. forces on Oahu realized there was something different about this Sunday morning.

In the hours before dawn, U.S. Navy vessels spotted an unidentified submarine periscope near the entrance to Pearl Harbor. It was attacked and reported sunk by the destroyer USS Ward (DD-139) and a patrol plane. At 7:00 a.m., an alert operator of an Army radar station at Opana spotted the approaching first wave of the attack force. The officers to whom those reports were relayed did not consider them significant enough to take action. The report of the submarine sinking was handled routinely, and the radar sighting was passed off as an approaching group of American planes due to arrive that morning.

The Japanese aircrews achieved complete surprise when they hit American ships and military installations on Oahu shortly before 8:00 a.m. They attacked military airfields at the same time they hit the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. The Navy air bases at Ford Island and Kaneohe Bay, the Marine airfield at Ewa and the Army Air Corps fields at Bellows, Wheeler and Hickam were all bombed and strafed as other elements of the attacking force began their assaults on the ships moored in Pearl Harbor. The purpose of the simultaneous attacks was to destroy the American planes before they could rise to intercept the Japanese.

Of the more than 90 ships at anchor in Pearl Harbor, the primary targets were the eight battleships anchored there. seven were moored on Battleship Row along the southeast shore of Ford Island while the USS Pennsylvania (BB-38) lay in drydock across the channel. Within the first minutes of the attack all the battleships adjacent to Ford Island had taken bomb and or torpedo hits. The USS West Virginia (BB-48) sank quickly. The USS Oklahoma (BB-37) turned turtle and sank. At about 8:10 a.m., the USS Arizona (BB-39) was mortally wounded by an armorpiercing bomb which ignited the ship's forward ammunition magazine. The resulting explosion and fire killed 1,177 crewmen, the greatest loss of life on any ship that day and about half the total number of Americans killed. The USS California (BB-44), USS Maryland (BB-46), USS Tennessee (BB-43) and USS Nevada (BB-36) also suffered varying degrees of damage in the first half hour of the raid.

There was a short lull in the fury of the attack at about 8:30 a.m. At that time the USS Nevada (BB-36), despite her wounds, managed to get underway and move down the channel toward the open sea. Before she could clear the harbor, a second wave of 170 Japanese planes, launched 30 minutes after the first, appeared over the harbor. They concentrated their attacks on the moving battleship, hoping to sink her in the channel and block the narrow entrance to Pearl Harbor. On orders from the harbor control tower, the USS Nevada (BB-36) beached herself at Hospital Point and the channel remained clear.

When the attack ended shortly before 10:00 a.m., less than two hours after it began, the American forces has paid a fearful price. Twenty-one ships of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were sunk or damaged: the battleships USS Arizona (BB-39), USS California (BB-44), USS Maryland (BB-46), USS Nevada (BB-36), USS Oklahoma (BB-37), USS Pennsylvania (BB-38), USS Tennessee (BB-43) and USS West Virginia (BB-48); cruisers USS Helena (CL-50), USS Honolulu (CL-48) and USS Raleigh (CL-7); the destroyers USS Cassin (DD-372), USS Downes (DD-375), USS Helm (DD-388) and USS Shaw (DD-373); seaplane tender USS Curtiss (AV-4); target ship (ex-battleship) USS Utah (AG-16); repair ship USS Vestal (AR-4); minelayer USS Oglala (CM-4); tug USS Sotoyomo (YT-9); and Floating Drydock Number 2. Aircraft losses were 188 destroyed and 159 damaged, the majority hit before the had a chance to take off. American dead numbered 2,403. That figure included 68 civilians, most of them killed by improperly fused anti-aircraft shells landing in Honolulu. There were 1,178 military and civilian wounded.

The Japanese success was overwhelming, but it was not complete. They failed to damage any American aircraft carriers, which by a stroke of luck, had been absent from the harbor. They neglected to damage the shoreside facilities at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base, which played an important role in the Allied victory in World War II. American technological skill raised and repaired all but three of the ships sunk or damaged at Pearl Harbor (the USS Arizona (BB-39) considered too badly damaged to be salvaged, the USS Oklahoma (BB-37) raised and considered too old to be worth repairing, and the obsolete USS Utah (AG-16) considered not worth the effort). Most importantly, the shock and anger caused by the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor united a divided nation and was translated into a wholehearted commitment to victory in World War II.

Source: Department of Defense. 50th Anniversary of World War II Commemorative Committee. Pearl Harbor: 50th Anniversary Commemorative Chronicle, "A Grateful Nation Remembers" 1941-1991. Washington: The Committee, 1991.

We, the undersigned, find it impossible to concur with the findings and conclusions of the Committee's report because they are illogical, and unsupported by the preponderance of the evidence before the Committee. The conclusions of the diplomatic aspects are based upon incomplete evidence. We, therefore, find it necessary to file a report setting forth the conclusions which we believe are properly sustained by evidence before the committee.

In the early morning of December 4th, 1941, at a US Navy shortwave monitoring station in Cheltenham, Maryland, a half-hour drive southeast of Washington, DC, senior radio operator Ralph Briggs was just coming on duty. Briggs was 27 years old, had been with the Navy since the age of 20, and had worked with Naval Intelligence monitoring foreign shortwave broadcasts for four years. He had been an amateur radio operator, callsign W9NCM, since he was a teenager.

It seemed like an ordinary morning, as he tuned his receiver to the station and began transcribing what he heard. At 8 a.m. he received the message he had been waiting for. It seemed to be nothing more than a regional weather forecast, the kind that the stations he monitored transmitted every day during their news broadcasts. But Briggs, alone among the radio operators at Cheltenham, knew what the three words meant. They meant that the world was going to change in unpredictable but cataclysmic ways. They meant that many of his friends and countrymen would soon be dead. They meant that America would never be the same again. The three words were casually spoken during the regular news and weather feature from Radio Tokyo, Japan. The words were "East Wind, Rain." Briggs immediately teletyped the message to Washington.

"East Wind, Rain" was one of three possible "execute" messages which Japanese diplomats around the world had been alerted to begin listening for on November 19th. They were told to monitor the regular news and weather broadcasts from Tokyo, just as they always did, but to pay especially careful attention to the phraseology employed to describe the weather.

Just a few miles away from Cheltenham, in Washington, DC, at the Japanese embassy, Chief Petty Officer Kenici Ogemoto also was listening to the weather report. When he heard those fateful words, he immediately rushed into the office of the naval attache, Captain Yuzuru Sanematsu, and shouted "the winds blew." Sanematsu ran with Ogemoto back into the radio room just in time to hear the Radio Tokyo announcer repeat the weather forecast, "Higashi no kaze ame" -- "East Wind, Rain."

Instantly workers at the embassy began destroying their cryptographic equipment and codebooks, while others took the secret documents from their files, piled them in huge heaps in the garden, and burned them. The Japanese diplomats knew that their embassies and consulates in the United States and its territories would soon be seized; and they themselves would soon be interned as enemy aliens pending their exchange for American diplomats in Japan. All their code-making and code-breaking hardware and software, and all their secret papers, had to be destroyed immediately.

The Roosevelt government knew the meaning of the "East Wind, Rain" message. They knew it because American and British intelligence were able to read the Japanese diplomatic code, and they had intercepted and read the message from the Japanese foreign ministry of November 19th, 1941, which instructed Japanese embassies and consulates to be listening for the "winds" execute messages on their shortwave receivers, and which explained the meaning of the messages in no uncertain terms.

The powerful transmitters of Radio Tokyo broadcast the "winds" execute message several times that day, and it was heard and understood not only by Naval Intelligence in Cheltenham, Maryland, but also by other US monitoring stations around the nation; by the monitoring station of the Australian Special Intelligence Organisation located near Melbourne, Australia; by the British Intelligence intercept station on Stonecutter's Island, Hong Kong; and of course by Japanese diplomats around the world.

After Ralph Briggs had teletyped the "winds" message to Washington, it was quickly transmitted to Army Signals Intelligence and to the White House. The teletype equipment then in use at Cheltenham produced an original and a copy at the sending end, and two copies at the Washington end. He also typed out another original and two carbon copies on a regular typewriter. These were all carefully filed.

It was there that he received the initial news of the Japanese surprise attack on the US Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. He, and the rest of the staff at Cheltenham, knew that war was imminent, but felt that America was forewarned and well prepared. He felt certain that the Japanese had fallen into a well-laid trap. In fact, the first and heavily censored news reports of the attack claimed that the Japanese had sunk only one "old battleship" and one destroyer, and that the Japanese had suffered heavy casualties. It was not too long before the truth came out, however, and Briggs and everyone else came to know what the Japanese commanders knew as they radioed back "Tora! Tora! Tora!," meaning "Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!," their signal indicating that the attack was successful and had been a complete surprise.

On the 24th of September, 1941, the Army's shortwave radio monitoring station at Oahu, Hawaii, intercepted a message from Tokyo to the Japanese consul, Nagao Kita, in Honolulu. This monitoring station's job was to intercept all traffic to the Japanese consul there, and also all traffic on the Tokyo-Berlin and Tokyo-Moscow radio circuits. But none of the radio operators or codebreakers in Hawaii were cleared to decode the material -- it was all sent on to Washington in encrypted form, exactly as received.

The message to Nagao Kita divided Pearl harbor up into several numbered target areas for an aerial attack and requested him to make a twice-weekly report to Tokyo on the vessels at anchor in Pearl Harbor and their exact locations. Never before had the Japanese asked for such attack plan information about any American military installation.

The codebreakers in Washington knew the significance of this message -- they even called it The Bomb Plot Message. Yet Washington did not pass this information along to the Army and Navy commanders in Hawaii. At least three messages about the bomb plan for Pearl Harbor passed between Tokyo and the Japanese consulate in Hawaii. All of them were read by Washington, the last that we know of on December 3d. None were passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.

The Roosevelt government not only were reading the Japanese diplomatic code, they were also reading the Japanese naval code. A strange twist of fate helped the American codebreakers just a few days before the attack. The Japanese naval code was normally changed every six months. After each change, it took the British and American codebreakers a few weeks to crack the new code. The next change date was December 1st, but due to the fact that some Japanese naval communication units had not yet received their new codebooks in time, the date for the code change was pushed back to December 4, thus giving our codebreakers valuable extra days of Japanese naval intelligence.

The Japanese also made the error after December 4 of communicating with some units, who still hadn't received their code tables, in the old code while at the same time sending the same messages to others in the new. Slips like this are a codebreaker's fondest dream, and greatly speeded the process of cracking the new code.

Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that all Japanese merchant vessels were to return to their home waters by December 7th. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor. Washington knew through reading the Japanese naval traffic that a huge task force, including a large group of aircraft carriers, was sailing into the Pacific on November 26th for an eight-day voyage and was to reach its standby position and refuel on December 4th. Washington also knew that there was no possible target in the Pacific that required the use of carrier-borne aircraft except Pearl Harbor. This information was not given to the commanders at Pearl Harbor.

On the 27th of November, Washington learned through the Dutch attach in Washington (who had also received a decrypt of the Japanese naval message ordering the task force to sea from his own intelligence men in the Dutch East Indies) that the task force's most likely direction was east and that its most likely target was Pearl Harbor. This information was not passed along to the American commanders at Pearl Harbor.

And on December 2d, the day after which the naval code would normally have been changed, Washington intercepted and read the message giving the date for the attack. "Climb Mount Niitakayama 1208." Mount Niitakayama was then the highest mountain in the Japanese Empire and was the code word for the attack, and 12-8 Japanese time is 12-7 Hawaiian time.

This message was also intercepted and read by British intelligence, who concluded, according to one of their number, W. W. Mortimer of the British Far East Combined Bureau, that since no task force had been sighted in waters south of Japan, the only target that fitted the length of voyage, midocean refueling, and the inclusion of aircraft carriers was Pearl Harbor, and that an attack on Sunday, December 7, (the date given in the Japanese message) would offer the greatest element of surprise there. This information was passed along to Washington, who, once again, did nothing to warn the commanders at Pearl Harbor.