When you watch a trailer for Emperor (2012), you might think it just a period piece about General Douglas MacArthur’s (Tommy Lee Jones) oversight of post-World War II Japan.  As I recall, that was my reaction when it first came out over ten years ago.  The preview features the Supreme Allied Commander in the Pacific stepping off a plane in Tokyo and telling his subordinates to show some “good old fashioned American swagger.”  Given that this is the end of a devastating conflict between the two nations, this line struck me as off putting then and now for two reasons.  First, my Catholic nature is such that being braggadocios in any situation, even a defeated enemy, is not a Christian thing to do.  Secondly, these words smack of jingoist attitudes that, while subdued in the movie, were part of how America fought the Japanese between 1941 and 1945.  Our cross-Pacific rivals were made to be subhuman monkeys, thus justifying some of the worst violence of the fighting between any of the belligerent nations.  This is why few in this country, at the time, batted an eye when we dropped atomic bombs on two of their cities, essentially wiping them off the map along with their citizens.  Luckily, the movie is not about pretty much any of these things, though they are mentioned.  Read on to find out what is addressed.

It is the end of World War II in 1945 and General Bonner Fellers (Matthew Fox) is on a plane on its way to the country ruled by Emperor Hirohito (Takataro Kataoka).  He is part of a staff of officers brought there by General MacArthur in order to begin the occupation of Japan by the American Army and other Allied forces.  General Fellers has a history in the Land of the Rising Sun.  This past is discussed in flashbacks, but I am going to give you this backstory now for clarity’s sake.  While in college in 1932, he had met Aya Shimada (Eriko Hatsune), a rare Japanese student in the United States.  They fell in love with one another, but she suddenly returns home.  He is not given an explanation.  Eight years later and now in the army, he gets leave from a posting in the Philippines and decides to unexpectedly drop in on her.  She is distressed by this move, telling him the reason she left is because her father did not approve of her getting involved with an American.  Still, his persistence wears her down, and soon she is providing help for the paper he is there to write on the mind of the Japanese soldier, which is his official reason for being in the country.  This assistance comes in the form of her uncle, General Kajima (Toshiyuki Nishida), a high-ranking officer in the Imperial military who had spent time in Washington, D.C., as an attaché.  Yet, because it is 1940 and tensions are rising between their two countries, he is all of the sudden told he must leave.  General Fellers last sees a heartbroken Aya running after his car as it drives away.  Now in 1945 he is back in Japan on a different kind of official business.  This first order of the occupation is to arrest as many of the main decision makers in the government as possible and try them as war criminals.  Because of his knowledge of the country, he is the one tasked with doing so.  The reason for this mass round up is because they seek to ascertain whether Hirohito is the one ultimately responsible for leading Japan into war.  To assist General Fellers in this quest, he is given a guide and translator, Takahashi (Masayoshi Haneda).  Because General Fellers knows and can speak some Japanese, he instead employs Takahashi to find out information about Aya.  This, too, is too is interspersed with his investigations of Japanese officials, so I am also going to give you these events out of sequence with the film.  Pretty much every lead that Takahashi obtains on Aya takes them to a building that has been destroyed by American bombers.  This does not give General Fellers much hope, and he begins to despair, especially when it is revealed that, despite him ordering attacks away from certain targets during the war, they were nonetheless targeted.  It is not until he decides to visit the miraculously still alive General Kajima, that he ultimately learns Aya’s fate.  She had died during a raid nine months previously.  Though they were on opposite sides of the conflicts, she continued writing him letters up until the end. General Kajima gives General Fellers these missives, for which the American is grateful.  As for his reporting on whether they should take Hirohito into custody and hang the Japanese monarch, that proves to be an uphill battle.  It is not simply the reticence of those who did not take their own lives to speak to an outsider, but their desire to maintain certain traditions that have guided their society for thousands of years.  Each official to which General Fellers speaks basically tells him that he must talk to the next person.  He is on the verge of recommending that Hirohito’s arrest take place when General Feller’s is visited by Koichi Kido (Masato Ibu).  Koichi is one of Hirohito’s closest advisors, and he is able to give an account of their monarch’s role in convincing the government to agree to surrender.  Though there was an attempted coup in the wake of this decision, Koichi helped preserve the recording of Hirohito’s voice that went out to his people, telling them to lay down their arms.  With this, General Fellers gives his recommendation that Hirohito be kept in place.  General MacArthur listens, and General Fellers is vindicated when he sees his boss and the Japanese ruler speaking.  At the beginning of their conversation, Hirohito takes the blame for the war, hoping to spare his people.  Seeing this, General Fellers walks away, satisfied.

A postscript tells us that General Fellers was later awarded by Emperor Hirohito for the American officer’s service to Japan in the wake of World War II.  This is one of many remarkable acts by the Japanese after the conflict.  They had every right to be embittered, with two atomic weapons used against them and much of the rest of the country a smoking ruin through more conventional means.  Further, while the Imperial Army carried out some unspeakable atrocities in places like Manchuria in China, their expansionist aims were not all that different than many other countries at that time.  These topics are addressed in the movie, though it is not the main focus.  What it does explore is the many apparent contradictions of Japanese culture and society, at least to an outsider.  How can so many people so enthusiastically go to war and commit genocide, and then afterwards equally commit to a complete reversal of their attitudes?  I wish I could say that it has something to do with Christian values, but Japan had been largely anti-Christian for many centuries.  Interestingly, though, the explosive that wiped out Nagasaki detonated directly over the city’s Catholic Cathedral.  Still, the only evidence you get in the film of this barely tolerated community is a Crucifix on the wall in the background of Aya’s apartment.  All the same, the movie speaks to a level of devotion and duty that I wish more Catholics possessed.  Though it was all centered on their emperor, who they saw as a god, the vocabulary used to describe the place he had in their hearts and minds speak to some Christian ideals.  Of the ones discussed, my favorite regards moral authority.  When the pope gives a teaching on Church doctrine, his word is trusted in the same manner, though I wonder how many Catholics know this fact.  As a Catholic, you can disagree with Pope Francis when he addresses temporal matters.  However, when it comes to subjects connected to Faith, he is infallible.  I think the reason so many people reject this idea is because they think it means he is perfect in all areas.  I am sure that Pope Francis would be the first to tell you that this is not the case.  At any rate, this is the only rough equivalent I can think of to the way the Japanese once saw their emperor.

Another of the postscripts to Emperor mentions that after World War II, Hirohito dropped his god status.  That was a wise gesture on his part.  As for the movie, it is okay.  It takes some liberties with the history, but it is still a story about the past, which is an immediate turn off for some.  Otherwise, it is mostly harmless.