First Yank Into Tokyo

(There are Spoilers) Unusual movie released on September 5, 1945 in the USA a mare three days after the war in the Pacific against Japan was officially ended with the signing of the surrender of the Japanese Empire on the deck of the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

The film "First Yank into Tokyo" is also the first major motion picture that has the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in it and the development of the "A" Bomb as a major factor in it's story-line. Which gives you the impression that it was made in less then a month and quickly rolled out of the Hollywood movie assembly line to take advantage of that war ending and earth-shaking event.

The film itself is anything but earth-shaking with an unbelievable plot that has all-American collage football hero USAAF Major Steve Ross, Tom Neal,given a full make-over to look like a "Jap" as the Japanese were call back then in wartime Hollywood motion pictures. Ross is to infiltrate a Japanese prison camp outside of Tokyo and get the secret formula for an atomic device from captured US scientist Lewis Jardine ,Marc Cramer. Jardines captors had no idea that he was working on a bomb that would blow them to kingdom come in just a few short months! the Japanese thought that he was a just a run of the mill refrigeration technician and serviceman!

Ross now calling himself Sgt. Toma Tachiyama is smuggled into the prison camp, the notorious Camp Kamuri, by a friendly Korean black-marketeer Haan-Soo, Keye Luke, to get the information from Jardine and have him smuggled out of Japan on an awaiting British Sub expected to submerge outside Tokyo Bay in a few days.

Things get a little strange for Ross/Tachiyama when he not only finds that his long lost , and given up for dead, back home in America sweetheart Abby Drake, Barbara Hale, not only survived the Battan Death-March but is working in the prison camp as it's head nurse. Even worse Abby is in love with Lewis Jardine! The very man that Ross is supposed to rescue!

With all these coincidences whizzing through Ross' already battered brain the commandant of the prison camp is non-other then Col. Hideko Okanura, Richard Loo, who back in America was Steve Ross' collage roommate. Col. Okanura knows every move and gesture that he makes which in end gives Ross away as an American posing as a Japanese soldier.

The film is really hard to take even if it was released as a moral booster to whip up the American public to the war effort since the war was all but over by the time the movie even started shooting. It's depiction of the Japanese soldiers as uncivilized brutes who treated both man and women like dirt or even worse was like kicking someone when he was already down and out and no threat at all.

Ross together with his Korean sidekick Haan-Soo hold off an entire Japanese battalion in wave after wave of suicide attacks at the end of the movie. This gives both Jardine and Abby enough time to escape and both Ross and Haan-Soo eventually, off camera, end up getting killed by the charging Japanese hoards.

You can easily see why Steve Ross decided to stay and not go back home with Abby who was still very much in love with him. Having his face changed by plastic surgery he'll never look the same again; a before James Dean-like handsome looking Steve Ross or Tom Neal. With a face like that changing colors in every scene with alien from space-like almond-shaped eyes. With a face like that and what seems like a pair of badly fitted false teeth that makes it very difficult for him to speak intelligently who could blame Ross for voluntarily staying behind and getting himself killed in action!

This movie was so convincing, it might be difficult to watch. The acting was so real you can feel the hatred. I've watched it several times. I was disappointed at the ending, because Major Ross (Ton Neal) and Abby Drake (Barbara Hale) almost reunited. But Major Ross felt that his "changed appearance" would get in the way of their life. He forgot that if he had plastic surgery to change his appearance then he could change it again (just not the way it was before).

I agree that a movie -- or almost any other cultural artifact -- should be judged on the basis of the times and circumstances of its production. It's unfair to judge what people have done in the past through the prism of our own prevailing prejudices. Barbara Field, the African-American historian, was critical of Lincoln's deciding to wait until after Antietam to announce the emancipation of slaves -- this in Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War. That sort of statement has always irritated me, brimming over with self righteousness. (I wonder how historians will judge us a hundred years from now. I hope they're kinder to us.) So I am willing to take the temporal context into account. The simple fact is that a movie that humanized the enemy would not have been made in 1945 -- or for years afterward for that matter. Steinbeck's script for "The Moon is Down" was criticized for turning a German soldier into something resembling a human being. And in "The Desert Fox" (ca. 1950) James Mason's touching performance as Erwin Rommel was blasted. In the later "The Desert Rats," playing Rommel again, Mason was forced to resort to the usual stereotype. How would you feel if you now saw a movie that included a partly sympathetic portrayal of a member of Al Qeda? Given all that, this movie is pretty crummy. The crumminess is not only in the script, although it's certainly there too, but especially in the performances, and most notably in Tom Neal's. He was out of his depth, although the part was simple enough. (He was IN his depth in "Detour".) He doesn't even get the Japanese bow right. The bow is face down, smart and snappy, in real military life. Neal bows slowly from the hips down, keeping his face up all the time, as if involved in some particularly outre tai ji exercise. The make up job is astonishing. And his speech! He evidently has a set of false teeth (all Japs are buck-toothed) which make him sound as if he's speaking through a mouth full of tooth paste. On top of that he struggles desperately to impose a "Japanese" accent which consists mostly of substituting [r] for [l] and vice versa. Let's just say he speaks his lines memorably. Sure it's a racist movie, but it WAS wartime, and it's understandable -- a lot more understandable than rounding up Japanese-American families and shuffling them off to internment camps. THAT manifestation of racism is less justifiable. But the movie is pretty bad nonetheless, unless you can enjoy it as pozlost.

What with the 1943 "Gung Ho", "Guadalcanal Diary," "Purple Heart,"

and other made-during-World War II films I saw as a kid on television,

I had thought I had seen every racist anti-"Jap" propaganda movie ever

made by Hollywood. But "First Yank Into Tokyo" is one I do not

remember seeing as a kid. It is not only the most racist movie I have

ever seen, it is probably simply the worst film I have ever seen in any

category of motion picture. To me as an American who has lived in

Japan for 30 years, the Asian-Americans playing Japanese soldiers are

as obviously not racially Japanese as if someone had made a movie about

William the Conqueror fighting the Battle of Hastings in 1066 with a

cast of Europeans recruited entirely from Athens, Greece and Instanbul,

Turkey. Everything, from the physical characteristics to the

mannerisms, is wrong. On the one hand, the film presents the Japanese as bespeckled, buck

toothed, arrogant goofs. On the other hand, when portraying a

Japanese prisoner of war camp during World War II, the film makes the

place a country club compared to the real horrors encountered by anyone

who was held in a Japanese POW camp during the war.

Overall, the film radiates an overwhelming ignorance and apathy by

the film makers towards any authenticity whatsoever.

This film is almost camp in its sophomoric racism. As a member of a minority that has also experienced this kind of dehumanization at a time when this was not at all uncommon I think that this movie has value as an example of what generations ..even my own daughter will never believe unless they see it. I think we all need these movies in their uncut form as a reminder (embarrassing though it is to the filmmakers) of how dumb we can get with these kinds of issues. I speak as a minority and as a fellow brother to all of you reading this. This is not shocking and the Japanese I am sure have the self confidence (as does my minority group) to point at this as a laughable example of white racism in its most childish form. It does not inspire hate for the whites who made it ...it inspires incredulity and empathy in me personally because it is truly embarrassing. I am sure it is the whites who would most like to eradicate this film and forget they (or the few who believed this) ever exhibited this kind of insipid point of view. It was an emotional time. Sometimes emotions make us say and think stupid things. This movie is an example.