A Kinder, Softer Movie

By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen/Tokyo

Flashbulbs popped and schoolgirls screamed as Ben Affleck appeared from behind a plume of smoke in the middle of the Tokyo Dome. "I love you, Ben!" someone shrilled. Affleck winked, and the crowd of 30,000 went wild.

This was the gala Tokyo premiere last Thursday of the movie Pearl Harbor, which will open in theaters across Japan on July 14. Walt Disney Co. hopes the film will make close to $100 million in box-office receipts in Japan, which would help its bottom line after a relatively disappointing box office in the U.S., and explains why the company is spending a record $10 million to market it here.

Disney is playing for high stakes. Japan is a nation of Mickey Mouse fans. Tokyo Disneyland is the world's most popular theme park, with 17 million visitors last year. Moreover, Japan is the world's second largest market for Hollywood films, and its moviegoers love action-packed adventures with romantic leads. They have contributed more than $200 million of Titanic's $1.8 billion global box office. But in Pearl Harbor, the villain isn't an iceberg--it's Japan. So Disney's marketing has had to be creative. "It's obviously a subject that must be approached with cultural sensitivity," says Dick Sano, Japanese head of the Tokyo office of Buena Vista International, the Disney unit distributing the film abroad. Trailers and ads focus solely on the love story; more controversial, Disney reshot or edited some scenes for the Japanese market.

Some of the changes were made for reasons of credibility. In the U.S. version of the film, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the Japanese commander, rips a page off a calendar to show Dec. 7; in Japan the shot will reveal Dec. 8, which is when the attack occurred Tokyo time. But other changes were made for those reasons of cultural sensitivity. 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 Japanese subtitles, that line is vague: "I myself would choose a tasty target." In the closing voice-over of the original version, Kate Beckinsale, playing a nurse, declares, "Before Doolittle's raid, Americans knew nothing but defeat; after it, nothing but victory." That statement was deemed too cocky for the war's losers; in the Japanese version, it was rerecorded as "after it, there was hope of victory." Soldiers in various scenes call their enemies "Jap suckers" and "dirty Japs." In the Japanese version, they're just "Japs." ("We can't change that," Sano shrugs. "That's what they called us back then.")

Even with the changes, however, the film will open at a tricky moment in Japan. For many of today's Japanese, Pearl Harbor recalls not the surprise attack of a half-century ago but the accidental sinking of a Japanese fishing boat by a U.S. Navy submarine earlier this year. Japanese TV coverage of the film's U.S. premiere focused on the proximity of the Navy carrier on which the celebrations were held to the spot where the Ehime Maru 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 victims who drowned in the accident. "It is unthinkably callous."

The film's release also coincides with a new mood in Japan. Junichiro Koizumi, the new and hugely popular Prime Minister, is determined to restore national pride; he plans to visit the Yasukuni Shrine, a memorial, which most of his predecessors have avoided, that's controversial for heralding convicted war criminals as well as other war dead. A film like Pearl Harbor, says Koizumi'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."

So what sort of film would be acceptable? Perhaps the current release Merdeka, which paints Japanese World War II soldiers as heroes who save Indonesia from brutish white settlers. "Japanese today have lost their pride," says Katsuaki Asano, Merdeka's executive producer. "But were we really so wrong? The rest of Asia is grateful to us for helping them toward independence. I think Japanese moviegoers will see Pearl Harbor and feel disgusted at being portrayed once again as the bad guys."

Some Japanese may indeed think that, even those of the younger generation, whose members make up the majority of audiences. "As a Japanese, I felt uncomfortable seeing the destruction our side caused," says Naho Okada, 17. She thinks a minute. "But Ben Affleck is really cute." It's that sort of cultural sensitivity that sells tickets.