Documentary gives voice to Japan WWII vets

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The big picture: Stig Schell is a producer of "Beyond Kokoda," a documentary featuring accounts by both Japanese and Australian veterans of fierce fighting in World War II. KYODO PHOTO

Friday, Oct. 17, 2008

By KEDE LAWSON
Kyodo News
SYDNEY (Kyodo) Sadashige Imanishi's voice falters as he recalls the piles of weapons left behind by dead Japanese soldiers in the jungles of New Guinea.

The big picture: Stig Schell is a producer of "Beyond Kokoda," a documentary featuring accounts by both Japanese and Australian veterans of fierce fighting in World War II. KYODO PHOTO

"That was the first time I thought of them and realized how cruel the war was," Imanishi, a member of the 144th regiment of the Imperial Japanese Army, says before asking the camera to stop filming.

Imanishi, who died last year at the age of 91, plays a central role in a new documentary that for the first time tells of the savage fighting between Japanese and Australian forces during World War II from both perspectives.

"Beyond Kokoda" features a collection of personal experiences, candidly shared by the men who battled each other and the adverse conditions of the Kokoda Track and northern beaches of New Guinea.

Using national archive footage and battle re-enactments, the documentary offers a balanced depiction of the bloody seven-month campaign that saw 6,500 Japanese soldiers killed on the Kokoda Track and 7,200 killed on the northern beaches.

Japan fared badly in the fighting, with the main 144th regiment from Kochi Prefecture seeing less than 3 percent of its members return home.

As veteran Masao Horie says in the documentary, "Java is heaven, Burma is hell, New Guinea is where no one comes back alive."

Australia lost 625 men on the Kokoda Track and 2,500 during the relentless fighting of the beaches campaign.

Soldiers from Japan's South Sea Detachment first landed on the north coast of New Guinea on July 21, 1942, intent on marching across the Owen Stanley Ranges to capture Port Moresby and strategically isolate Australia from America.

However, lacking supplies and on the brink of starvation, they met dogged resistance from the Australian and other Allied forces.

The final Japanese forts fell to Australian soldiers on Jan. 20, 1943.

The two-hour documentary was produced and directed by Sydney duo Stig Schnell and Sean Gibbs, both 32, and Tokyo-based Hajime Marutani, 33.

The trio felt the absence of the Japanese perspective in earlier Australian documentaries had distorted the campaign, effectively detracting from the reality of war with the use of a heavily nationalistic agenda.

Schnell, a former Australian soldier, said the Japanese perspective was essential to document an accurate account of what transpired on the steep, muddy ridges of New Guinea.

"When you start looking at the conflict from two sides . . . both sides are humanized, neither side is demonized and you start to break down these barriers," Schnell said.

"It was important to make people think more rationally about the campaign and offer a fair perspective," associate producer Marutani said.

"I also wanted to inform the Australians that the Japanese were human as well," he added.

Over five years, the trio interviewed 14 Japanese and 36 Australian veterans, in the process capturing the last words of several of the former Kokoda soldiers who died during filming.

The documentary uses 3-D imagery to depict maps of the battles to highlight tactical mistakes on both sides.

"Those pieces are like a kid's board game, as if the generals are playing a kid's board game. It will hit home for a few people," Schnell said.

Hearing from Japanese veterans for the first time also unlocked one of Australia's most enduring mysteries of World War II — the disappearance of Capt. Sam Templeton of the 39th Battalion in the early stages of the campaign.

Templeton's fate was long known among Japanese veterans, but learning of his capture and subsequent death left the Australians "speechless."

Shot across Japan, Australia and Papua New Guinea, the powerful documentary not only captures the recollections of veterans during the campaign but also their experiences after returning home.

The Japanese and Australian veterans alike tell of the difficulty adjusting back to civilian life and the horrific nightmares that continued to plague them.

However, Schnell believes the Japanese veterans fared better in the reconciliation process, citing religion as assisting the process.

The documentary has already been received with vigor in Australia, where the Kokoda campaign remains one of the most significant in the country's military history.

Many Japanese remain unaware of the New Guinea campaign, prompting the trio to raise the profile of what has been coined in Japan as the "forgotten war."

Schnell is in Japan this week to discuss the prospect of airing the documentary on television, which he hopes will bring a "sense of honor and respect to Japanese veterans."

The veterans "carry hundreds and thousands of their friends' memories and we feel a duty to tell their families," Marutani said.

"Our primary goal is that the veterans and their families get to see this documentary, but I'll give it away if it means that every Japanese person watches it," Schnell said.

The recollections from both sides ultimately highlight the shared experience of war, its indiscriminate nature and abiding legacy.

"It doesn't really matter whoever fights a battle, everyone, whether they were Australian or Japanese, they were fighting an enemy, they were fighting the terrain, they were fighting conditions . . . there is no reconciliation in the end," Schnell said.