The campaign against Unbroken is the latest effort by Japan's right wing to sanitize the country's wartime history and punish critics of their viewpoint.
It also comes as former American POWs – many now in their 90s and in poor health – are pressing for apologies from Japanese companies that used them as slave laborers during the war.
"This is a movie that people in Japan need to see so that they understand how the POWs really were treated," says Kinue Tokudome, a writer and researcher who has campaigned on behalf of American POWs.
Unbroken tells the story of Louis Zamperini, a star of the 1936 Berlin Olympics who was shot down over the Pacific and survived more than two years of horrific treatment in Japanese prison camps.
The film is based on the best-selling book by author Laura Hillenbrand. The movie debuts in the United States on Christmas Day but has not been scheduled for release in Japan.A right-wing group, the Association for the Dissemination of Historical Fact, claims the book and film are filled with "fabrications" and has called on distributors not to show the movie in Japan and for Jolie to be barred from entering the country.
A Japanese-language petition at Change.org that calls for a boycott of the film has attracted about 9,500 supporters – including more than 1,000 over in recent days.
Rightists also have threatened violence against universities that have employed former members of the Asahi Shimbun, a liberal-leaning newspaper that earlier this year retracted some of its reporting about "comfort women" that was based on a discredited source.
"Comfort women" is a euphemism for mostly Asian women coerced into providing sex for the Japanese military during World War II.
According to the U.S. Defense Department, nearly 40% of Americans taken prisoner by the Japanese during World War II died in captivity. That compares with just 1% of Americans who died in German POW camps.
Zamperini, a bombardier, was aboard a B-24 Liberator that crashed in the Pacific during a search for a missing plane in May 1943 – not during a dramatic air battle, as depicted in the movie. He and one other crewman survived 47 days in a raft before washing up on a Japanese-held island in the Western Pacific.
Although his initial captors treated him well, Zamperini and other POWs were subjected to continual beatings, starvation and mistreatment after arriving at prison camps in Japan. They were forced to work in Japanese mines, ports and war-production facilities in clear violation of the Geneva Conventions.
Zamperini was a long-distance runner who gained fame as one of the youngest members of the 1936 U.S. Olympic team. He was subjected to particular torment after captors learned his identity.
Zamperini passed away in July at age 97, long after expressing forgiveness for his wartime treatment. He returned to Japan in 1998 as a torchbearer during the run-up to the Nagano Olympics.
The Japanese government issued a formal apology in 2009 to American and other POWs, and has since hosted groups of former prisoners on annual goodwill visits to Japan.
More than 60 companies – including major manufacturers such as Mitsubishi Corp. and Nippon Steel – used POW labor during the war. In most cases, they paid Japan's Imperial Army a fee for the privilege and used employees as supplemental guards and jailers, according to Tokudome, who heads the U.S.-Japan Dialogue on POWs, a non-profit organization based in California.
Mark Schilling, a longtime film critic for The Japan Times, says it is unlikely that Unbroken will be screened in Japan, but that market forces will play a greater role than right-wing pressure.
Jolie's film, he says, has neither bankable stars in lead roles, nor portrays Japan in a particularly sympathetic manner – a key element for war films to attract audiences in Japan, regardless of where they were made.
"If the Japanese characters are portrayed in a bad light, you're fighting a losing battle from the beginning, especially given the current difficult market for foreign films in Japan," Schilling says. "The right wing protests are the final nail."
