On April 6, 1945, the largest battleship in the world, Yamato, sailed into history. Hoping against hope, Japan‘s imperial admiralty assumed that the kamikaze attacks then being mounted against the American fleet moving toward Okinawa would halt the advance, whereupon Yamato, without air cover, would sink any surviving American ships. It did not work out that way. Instead, American torpedo bombers sank Yamato the next day, and American forces landed on the Japanese island, only to face the bloodiest fight in the Pacific since Guadalcanal three years earlier.

Films about World War II were once rare in Japan, and then they were often hushed and allusive. Unusually, considering its early vintage, Akira Kurosawa‘s 1951 version of Fyodor Dostoyevsky‘s The Idiot opens with the return of Japanese prisoners of war to their homes from Okinawa; like other of Kurosawa’s adaptations from world literature, the tale takes specifically Japanese contours while eventually returning to Dostoyevsky’s account of existential destruction. Similarly, Shohei Imamura’s taut crime thriller Fukushû suru wa ware ni ari (Vengeance Is Mine, 1979) looks at the corrosive effect of war on the soul, suggesting that war can strip away any shred of decency from morally liminal men such as the sinister Iwao Enokizu, whose career devolves from black marketeer to serial killer.

Junya Sato’s 2005 film Otoko-tachi no Yamato (Yamato) is a direct account of combat, though, as narrated through the eyes of one of the few survivors of its sinking. The following clip shows that it is uncompromising in its portrayal of war’s horror. Kurosawa returned to the theme of war in a segment of his 1990 film Dreams (also known as Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams), depicting another returning prisoner of war’s encounter with the ghosts of the men he has sent off to die in combat. That short tale is as powerful an indictment of war as any I know, though Nagisa Oshima’s 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence comes close. Look for exceptional performances by Takeshi Kitano (also known as Beat Takeshi), the great pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, and another well-known musician, the British pop star David Bowie.

It has been said that Letters from Iwo Jima, released in 2006, is one of the greatest of all films depicting the Japanese point of view on the Pacific War. Indeed it is, and though its lead actors—notably Ken Watanabe as the renowned general Tadamichi Kurabayashi—are Japanese, the director is none other than Clint Eastwood, who bookended the film with another on Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers. No matter: Letters was enthusiastically received in Japan for its unflinching depiction of the war.