Letters from Iwo Jima

The movie depicts one of the pivotal battles in the Pacific between the Americans and the Japanese. The island of Iwo Jima is the entry point for an invasion of the Japanese mainland. The island is defended by General Kobayashi, a gentle man with a brilliant mind. Having visited America, he is unable to see the Americans as monsters, but is forced to see them as human beings.

In the middle of the movie there is a deeply moving scene. The Japanese have just captured an American soldier, named Sam. They treat him well, but he dies from the wounds he has suffered. After his death the Japanese soldiers finds a letter from Sam´s mother. As the letter is being read out to the soldiers, the soldiers become unable, in an instant, to see the Americans as monsters. The letter is just the same, as the letters they all receive from their mothers. A letter of sadness, love and the desperate wish to see a son return home.

The movie gives a wonderfully balanced and complex picture of Japanese culture and the dynamics of the human psyche. The movie contains heroes, maniacs, and ordinary boys who don´t want to fight and who would rather return home to their wives, daughters, bakeries and carpenter shops.

It seems that every culture contains deep traces of beauty, strokes of cruelty and pockets of insanity. In war, these things come into stark contrast against a backdrop of death lurking just around the corner. The movie explains in a caring way why people possibly might fight for their country, but most definitely die for their friends.

The irony of war seems to be that on both sides, the same kind of people fight each other. Craftsmen, bakers, teachers. Some of them might be filled up with a holy desire to defend the homeland, but most of them are just ordinary men, who want to live ordinary lives.

Possibly the greatest feat of heroism we can perform as human beings is not to kill each other in defense of our homeland, but rather the ability to see each other as human beings with fears, hopes, families and passions. In war, this seems to be an act of utmost difficulty. The horrific logic of war seems to entail that the enemy is demonized and your own case be glorified. That the same psychology is utilized by any army, is obviously enormously difficult to see from within the war.