Know Your Enemy: Japan is an American World War II propaganda film about the war in the Pacific directed by Frank Capra, with additional direction by experimental documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens. The film, which was commissioned by the U.S. War Department, sought to educate American soldiers about Japan, its people, society and history, and its totalitarian militaristic government. However, the film never realized its full purpose because its completion was delayed by disputes between Hollywood and Washington, and the abrupt end of the Pacific War soon after the film's release in August 1945. The film's first public screening was in 1977 as part of a PBS special.

Plot
The film begins with a text preamble which states that the Japanese in America valiantly fought for America because they stood for values like "freedom" and "liberty" and in accordance with the preamble, the rest of the film does not portray all Japanese people as aggressors, it only portrays Japanese natives as aggressors. It goes on to describe the lives of the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army. This section of the film mainly focuses on the appearance and diet of the individual soldier, and as a result, it devotes much less attention to his tactics and strategy. The film comments that the soldiers of the Imperial Japanese army are "as alike as photographic prints off the same negative."

The Japanese are said to be devoted to Emperor Hirohito, and the narration states that they "entrust to one man the powers of the President of the United States, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Premier of Soviet Russia; add to them the powers of the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church and top it all with the divine authority of our own Son of God and you will begin to understand what Hirohito means to the Japanese, why they call him the God-Emperor."

After going over Hirohito's divinity and saying that his divine origins are shared by the Japanese people as a whole, the film then describes Shinto, a Japanese religion by saying that it had been a "quaint religion for a quaint people" until 1870 when a mad, fanatical, conquer-the-world doctrine, based on the commandment of Jimmu, the first emperor of Japan, to "let us extend the capital and cover the eight corners of the world under one roof" was woven into it and called Hakkō Ichiu (八紘一宇, literally "eight crown cords, one roof", i.e., "all the world under one roof"). The film describes the Yasukuni Shrine, a Shinto shrine in which all of Japan's war dead are enshrined and from which the spirits of those killed in battle shall return.

After saying repeatedly, "If you are Japanese, you believe these things," then the film slightly shifts gears by asking its audience the following question, "But if you're not Japanese, then what is the real Japan, the Japan of the geographer, anthropologist, and historian?" After a brief geography lesson, the idea of the Japanese people's "pure divine blood" is countered with accusations that it is nothing more than a "plasma cocktail." Then the history section begins and in it, the Emperor is portrayed as having little political power, with the real power being in the hands of daimyōs and their armies of samurai. The samurai are vilified along with their code of Bushido, with the film's narrator saying that it "not only sanctioned double dealing and treachery but looked at it as an art to be cultivated." The arrival of Christianity and the warlords' expulsion of Westerners and isolation of Japan for 200 years in reaction to its teachings of peace and equality are all used to vilify them even more.

The film then juxtaposes the Age of Enlightenment's scientific and artistic advances which occurred in the West with Japan's stagnant isolation during the same period, broken by Commodore Perry's forced opening of Japan in 1853. The Westernization of Japan during the Meiji Restoration is also discussed but it is always discussed in the context of how the warlords used it to further their own ambitions. The elimination of the position of Shogun and the elevation of the previously-powerless Emperor as a rallying point in 1868 with the warlords "reserving for themselves and themselves alone the right to speak for him and guide his policies" gives the film's audience the impression that Hirohito was an effectively-powerless figurehead. The film invokes the Tanaka Memorial, a document which is generally considered a forgery today, as Baron Giichi Tanaka's secret blueprint for world conquest, Japan's Mein Kampf.[1]

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