 Know Your Enemy: Japan is not to present Japanese fairly or accurately. This film stands in stark contrast with the Why We Fight series. In the earlier films, Capra presented the Japanese with more hostility and animosity than the Germans and Italians, but he made an effort to present the Japanese fairly. Instead of giving possible reasons for the animosity feelings for Japan, Capra emphasizes the feelings without attempting to explain them in Know Your Enemy. Outrageous cliches, such as a gong ringing to begin every section and, again, Japanese pronouncing "L'sn like "R's,n dominate the film. 3 Historians should not classify Know Your Enemy: Japan as a documentary film. This is a propaganda film. Capra's intention is to convince the American public and troops to keep fighting a nearly completed war. In order to convince 2 Ibid. 3 Capra, Frank Capra's The War Years: Know Your Enemy: Japan. (RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video, 1945), Videocassette, 1990. 47 the public, he wants Americans to view themselves as superior. Capra's first argument of Japanese inferiority is that the Japanese are not different from one another. The narrator calls the population an "obedient mass with a single mind." Capra presents the peasant class as industrious, but he also describes them as a "human machine producing rice and soldiers." 4 He also has empathy for teenaged girls whose parents sell them to brothels and factories in order to make a little money. 5 Although Capra sees the peasants as machines, but he implies that this is not the peasants' fault. The government designs education to teach children to think identically with one another; to do this, the government contracted teachers to "teach in the shortest possible time only the knowledge and skills necessary to make the student an obedient, loyal subject of the divine Emperor." Capra says that Japan had a "thought police" to keep people from thinking differently. This thought police arrests people for simply thinking dangerous, subversive thoughts about the government or the war effort, and the police alone determine who is thinking 4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 48 these thoughts. In the film, gangsters with automatic weapons represent this type of police. 6 The Japanese ~fanaticalu devotion to their emperor is Capra's second reason why they are inferior to Americans. According to the documentary, all Japanese people worship Emperor Hirohito as the highest god. 7 In mythology, the sun-goddess, Amaterasu Omikami, became human, and her son became the first Emperor; 3 all following emperors are part of the sun and gods. 9 The narrator, Walter Huston, has a sarcastic tone when speaking of Japan's worship of Hirohito. Wherever the Emperor's flag leads, the soldier follows ~in a blind emotional rush." Since the Emperor is the chief god, "whatever takes place in Japan, it is he, the god-emperor, that causes it." The narrator continues, ~From [the Emperor], all things emanate, and in him, all things subsist. He makes the Japanese rice grow, and he 6 Ibid. 7 After World War II, Hirohito denied his divinity; B.A. Robinson, "Brief History of Shinto." Religious Tolerance Organization. [article on-line]; available from; accessed 20 November 2004; Robert Sullivan, ed. "The Son of Heaven." Life Collector's Edition: Pearl Harbor: America's Call to Arms. 1 (October, 2001): 26. 8 Robinson, "Brief History of Shinto." 9 The documentary continues with the Japanese idea that they all have a little bit of the sun in their blood. According to the mythology presented in Know Your Enemy: Japan, all emperors are true sons of the sun god. However, they marry human women. Over time, a little bit of the sun-god gets into every Japanese person. This is why they can join the gods after they die valiantly. However, only the emperor, who is a god while still alive, is the true son of the sun; Capra, Know Your Enemy: Japan. 49 makes Japanese soldiers conquer the world." 10 The documentary continues this idea that Emperor-worship drives Japanese soldiers to "conquer the world" and commit brutal acts in his name. The narrator intones, "In [the Emperor's] name, [Japanese] bring to other people justice, enlightenment, truth, and peace." Images shown during the narration oppose the narrator's conclusion; Capra uses footage of soldiers herding Chinese prisoners of war, dead and wounded civilians, starving people, and a dead baby lying in the street to show that Japanese actions overshadow their words and goals. 11 Know Your Enemy: Japan shows Capra's belief that the Japanese are incredibly militaristic. Japanese leaders and citizens set out to follow Hakko Ichiu, the command of the first emperor, which states, "The Emperor of Japan is the emperor of all the races of the world." Therefore, Japan has to control all nations. When Japan opened to the West, the United States and other western nations brought industry, new forms of government, and Christianity to the closed nation, which Japan seemed to adopt, but it used these elements to develop its militarism and to obey the Hakko Ichiu. The nation used the Western industry, "not to 10 Ibid. Emphasis retained. 11 Ibid. 50 raise the standard of living, but to prepare for conquest. " 12 In Japan, "to be a soldier is the highest human achievement." 13 According to Japanese mythology, to die in battle would make the soldier into a god. 14 The Samaria code, Bushido, emphasizes this mythology. Capra is presenting the reality of Japanese culture. Bushido is the code of the warrior. In Japanese culture, money should not influence true warriors, but loyalty to superiors and personal honor should be the motivating factors. 15 Capra uses this code to make the Japanese seem incapable of human emotion. In one section of the documentary, mothers lay urns that contain ashes of their dead soldier sons at the foot of a shrine to the Japanese warrior god, but Capra argues that peasant mothers do not grieve when their sons die in battle. Rather, the women rejoice that their sons are now gods. "6 Capra did not understand the Japanese national religion, Shinto, and thinks it is "a nice, quaint religion 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 "Bushido.u Encyclopedia.com. [encyclopedia article on-line); available from ht~://; accessed 7 April 2005. 16 Capra, Know Your Enemy: Japan. 51 for a nice, quaint people."17 Shinto involves various gods, the chief of which is the sun-goddess and ghosts of dead ancestors. Exceptional people, such as emperors, become gods. 18 However, the director continues that "there [is] a diabolical joker in Shintoism.... The state has forced into the teachings of Shinto a mad, fanatical doctrine; a doctrine that has brought suffering and death to untold millions.,:g The director sees the Japanese as incredibly violent. Contrary to their belief that one of their ancestors is the sun-goddess, Capra says that Japanese ancestors were cruel barbarians, and the people have not evolved from their barbarous nature. Opposing Japan's expansion "brought suffering and death to untold millions of innocent [Asians] and now to thousands upon thousands of Americans." The narrator, Walter Huston, says, "Treachery, brutality, rape, and torture are all justified in use against non- Japanese. " 20 Capra also sees the Japanese as deceitful. He continues his image of Japan as the dagger that he introduced in Why We Fight: The Battle of China. Once 17 Ibid. 18 Capra, Know Your Enemy: Japan. See also Robinson, "Brief History of Shinto." 19 Capra, Know Your Enemy: Japan. 20 Ibid. 52 more, the dagger with the Rising Sun symbol, which represents betrayal, slams into opposing countries, such as China, India, Australia, and the United States. He also argues that the national pastime of Judo and the Samurai code, Bushido, expand this traitor image. Capra defines as "the art of giving in, making [the] opponent lose his balance, then tripping, choking, hit, chop, poke or kick (the] vital spots." This definition depicts Judo as treacherous and deceitful because Japanese will do anything to defeat their opponents, even by tricking their opponents into believing that the Japanese are defeated. When referring to the peace negotiations between Japanese Ambassadors Nomura and Kurusu and Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Capra theorizes that Japanese diplomats "think in terms of Judo." The Samuria code, Bushido, is "the art of treachery and the double cross." 21 Capra thinks that Bushido influenced Japanese military, as the Samurai transformed into military leaders. 22 Finally, Capra's documentary presents Japanese as sub-human. He calls the Japanese population "machines." An animation that Capra uses in Know Your Enemy: Japan compares the population to an octopus. The animation shows 21 The Samurai warriors of the Feudal age turned into the modern military; Ibid. 22 Ibid. 53 a dagger-wielding octopus, which represents Japan. This octopus stabs other countries, including the United States. 23 Generally, Nazi Germany did not receive the same kind of negativity from Capra. In both of his documentary series, he argues that the Germans were not essentially evil but mislead by a fanatical dictator. In none of his documentaries that