216 LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA [JAPAnese: IŌJIMA KARA NO TEGAMI]
a rage and attacks the Marine and his fellow troop members with a shovel. He is
knocked out, and then awakens to see the sun setting. The film flashes forward to
2005, where archeologists finish their excavation and discover the bag of letters
that Saigo buried.Reception
Letters from Iwo Jima had its world premiere at the Budokan Arena in Tokyo on 15
November 2006. The movie went into wide release in Japan three weeks later
(9 December 2006), ran until 15 April 2007, and grossed the equivalent of $42.9
million: a bona fide box office hit. The film’s commercial (and critical) success in
Japan was due to the fact that it was in Japa nese, used Japa nese actors, and pre-
sented a refreshingly respectful depiction of WWII Japa nese soldiers— a far cry
from the crude racist propaganda of American World War II– era war films or those
made in the de cades that followed, which were less crude but continued to traffic
in ste reo types and often employed non- Japanese actors using incorrect Japa nese
grammar and non- native accents to portray Japa nese characters. Put into limited
release in the United States for the Christmas 2006 weekend, Letters from Iwo Jima
ran for 21 weeks but, not surprisingly, earned only $13.75 million— a third of the
Japa nese box office gross. Total foreign sales of $54.9 million, combined with
domestic returns, boosted the film’s final take to $68.7 million— almost $50 mil-
lion more than it cost to make. After Flags of Our Fathers underperformed at the
box office, DreamWorks swapped the domestic distribution rights with Warner
Bros., which held the international rights. The critical response in the United States
matched the acclaim the film received in Japan, with many American film critics
naming Letters from Iwo Jima the best film of 2006. The movie also earned a Golden
Globe for Best Film in a Foreign Language and received four Acad emy Award nom-
inations, winning an Oscar for Best Sound Editing.Reel History Versus Real History
Noriko Manabe (a Japa nese doctoral student in ethnomusicology at CUNY Gradu-
ate Center in 2007 who is now a music professor at Temple University) offered a
summary of Letters from Iwo Jima’s inaccuracies, as cata logued by Japa nese blog-
gers. Acknowledging that Japa nese viewers “appreciated the film for its anti- war
message, its sentimental story, and its surprisingly sympathetic stance for an Amer-
ican director,” Manabe also noted that “an articulate minority” have taken issue
with the film’s historical inaccuracies, for example, all the scenes looked “too
clean— those battles, let alone our cities, were far more wretched... Some review-
ers commented that Kuribayashi’s assertion that there was ‘no support’ was not
accurate, as kamikazes (suicide pi lots) had sunk several American warships...
Several commented about the unnaturalness of the characters’ be hav ior and dia-
logue (‘would a low- ranking soldier like Saigo have used such rough language, in
that era?’) Another pointed out, ‘All the mistakes in the customs of the period both-
ered us. Shoji screens were never used for the front door— how can you knock
on paper? And young people had been wearing Western clothing, not kimonos,
since the 1930s.” For Manabe, “The greatest concern is that the film fails to