I saw the talked-about film Emperor. It follows, almost hour by hour, the roughly one month from August 30, 1945, when General Douglas MacArthur (Tommy Lee Jones) landed at Atsugi as SCAP commander, to September 27, when he met the Emperor at the U.S. Embassy. Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox), ordered by the general to pursue those responsible for the Pacific War, takes on the Showa-history riddle of “the Emperor’s war responsibility” — that is the billed historical suspense.
The source is former Mainichi reporter Okamoto Shiro’s nonfiction “Please Save His Majesty: Kawai Michi and Bonner Fellers” (retitled Emperor for the paperback). The Emperor’s war responsibility is a heavy theme, and views will differ, but as Fellers says in the film that “a thousand years of inquiry would not settle it,” the work is less a solving of the truth than one viewpoint shown well as entertainment…
Every year at this season war films open. Some, like Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) on the Pearl Harbor raid, seem to sell combat; there have also been Japan’s Longest Day (1967, the day from accepting the Potsdam Declaration to the Jewel Voice Broadcast) and the American pair Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) on late-war Iwo Jima. A U.S. film with no combat scenes may be unusual in two ways.
Papers and others have covered it widely; two stories I found interesting:
One is location work. Shooting was basically on sets rebuilt in Auckland, New Zealand. Director Peter Webber has praised himself in interviews for “building a truthful 1932 America and 1940 and 1945 Japan, the world of that time” — MacArthur’s office on the sixth floor of Tokyo’s Dai-ichi Life Building (still preserved), the U.S. Embassy, the air-raid shelter that was the Emperor’s temporary home, the cabin of the C-54 MacArthur flew, all finely recreated.
There was a little Japan shooting too: the Imperial Palace. The director said Japanese producers worked hard for
permission: “No one has been allowed to film on the Palace grounds before; we are the first.” Even so it seems they only shot in front of the Palace. Fox, as Fellers, grumbled in an interview that “the rules were intense. You could not eat or smoke. We had limited time and were watched constantly,” then added, “But I felt I was in a very sacred place.”
The other is the climax meeting of the Emperor and MacArthur (photo upper right the film, lower right the real one). Producer Narabashi Yoko has said in magazines that Kataoka Kotaro of kabuki, as the Emperor, and Jones as MacArthur first met on the day of that scene. They asked to greet beforehand and were deliberately stopped. Watch with that in mind and yes — that is why the tension hangs.