Questions about "Letters from Iwo Jima" + Kuribayashi's Letters

[Eija Niskanen]

Just an addition: there were no Japanese subtitles in Iwo Jima kara no
Tegami when I went to see it in Tokyo. Michael's comments are probably
all very true, and I would add the natural tendency of any language to
change along time - I am sure Finnish (my native language) young
actors need some coaching too, then they do films or Tv dramas
situated say 60 or 100 years ago.

Eija

On 2/26/07, George Robinson <grcomm at grcomm.cnc.net> wrote:
> That is a terrifically helpful answer.
> Thank you very, very much.
>
> George Robinson
>
> Visit my blog at:
> www.cine-journal.blogspot.com
>
>
>
> Michael McCaskey wrote:
> > I'm not quite sure what a "dialect" would be in this context, but here are a couple of speculations.
> >
> > 1) There was a style of speaking, "military Japanese," back then, not much different from what the military establishment in any country requires - a clipped, brusque, assertive style. Like at a US Marine training camp now. Since 1945, most people in Japan have not been involved with the military, and that style of speaking does not come naturally at all for most young men.
> > The DVD version of the recent movie "Otokotachi no Yamato," the saga of Japan's and maybe the world's biggest battleship and how it went down in 1945, has a companion special features disk showing in detail how the actors had to be trained to behave the way Navy personnel did before 1945.
> > There's also a sort of science fiction Anime series, "Zipang," coming out now in a US format with subtitles, which has pre-1945 Japanese Navy characters and near-future "Self-Defense" Navy characters interacting. It shows many differences in the behavior patterns and attitudes of the two types of characters.
> >
> > 2) There's a possibility that the Japanese military units on Iwo Jima might have been organized in some regional area, sort of like the Texas National Guard, and so spoke in a regional manner. I've never heard or read about that, though.
> >
> > 3) Dialect coaches work with the casts of many Japanese movies and TV shows, when some are all characters are supposed to have regional "accents." The result is usually a manner of speaking which has a regional flavor, but is understandable for everyone in Japan. In "Otokotachi no Yamato," many of the main characters are working-class, mostly from Hiroshima, and use a few regional dialect features here and there, but their speech is still universally intelligible. The higher-level officers in the film speak in the brusque, laconic pre-1945 style.
> >
> > 4) I've not seen the film version used in Japanese theaters, so I don't know whether any subtitles are used. Some Japanese film DVDs have optional Japanese subtitles, for the hearing-impaired, etc. I've only seen one Japanese film with "built-in" subtitles, long ago, in a theater in Japan - that was "Otoshi-ana," a film about working-class people, mostly in Kyushu dialect.
> >
> > 5) Finally, from a different angle, there's an interesting article in English in today's Japan Times online, by Sato Hiroaki, about the "letters from Iwo Jima," based on Sato's own detailed reading of all of Kuribayashi's letters, at:
> >
> > http://search.japantimes.co.jp/mail/eo20070226hs.html
> >
> > I hope this helps answer your questions partially. I'm sure others on this list will supply fuller answers.
> >
> > Michael McCaskey
> > Georgetown University
> >
> >
> >
>
>