By Yasushi Gunji
     A documentary on the history of Japan during the World War II and postwar years is receiving critical acclaim following its broadcast by Franco-German television station Arte in late September.
     The film titled ''The Emperor and the Army'' was produced by Kenichi Watanabe, 58, a Japanese resident of Paris who came to France in 1997 after directing many documentaries in Japan.
     Critics have called it a work that should be used as a criterion to understand Japan. Television stations in Europe, the Middle East and Asia have inquired about it, indicating that it will be shown in many countries.
     Watanabe combined footage of the war and postwar era that he dug up at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration and other places with images of present day Japan and interviews with politicians and a top adviser to a rightist organization for the 90-minute documentary.
     He impartially depicted Emperor Hirohito's relationship with the defunct Imperial Japanese military and the Self-Defense Forces established after the end of the war.
     The documentary provided French and German viewers with easy-to-understand descriptions of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo that tried wartime Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and other Class A war criminals.
     Following that, it showed the process that led to the enactment of the war-renouncing Constitution, the creation of the SDF, successive prime ministers' visits to Yasukuni Shrine where the souls of the war dead are enshrined and the issue of women recruited to provide sexual service for military personnel who were euphemistically called ''comfort women.''
     The French newspaper Le Monde described the ''The Emperor and the Army'' as the fruition of thorough gathering of materials. Le Nouvel Observateur magazine extolled the film as a great work that helps to illustrate the development of Japan's postwar history and why it was thrown into a blind alley.
     Watanabe said the reason he directed the documentary was because he felt a sense of discomfort with Japanese politics under the government of then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.
     He cited the elevation of the Defense Agency to the Defense Ministry, the enactment of the National Referendum Law concerning a revision of the Constitution and the amendment of the Fundamental Law of Education attaching importance to patriotism.
     ''I wanted Europeans to know about the situation in Japan,'' Watanabe said, explaining that the documentary's title referred to Articles 1 and 9 of the Japanese Constitution. Article 1 describes the emperor as ''the symbol of the State and of the unity of the people'' while Article 9 says ''the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right...and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.''
     He interviewed Mizuho Fukushima, head of the ruling coalition partner Social Democratic Party and the incumbent minister of consumer affairs, food safety, declining birthrate and gender equality, and the late Shoichi Nakagawa, a former finance minister and member of the Liberal Democratic Party who died after his defeat in the Aug. 30 general election, and Kunio Suzuki, supreme adviser to rightist organization Issuikai.
     The last part of the documentary showed the late emperor's news conference in 1975 in which he spoke hesitantly but declared inevitable the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. It contained footage of Hiroshima citizens enthusiastically welcoming the emperor during his visit to the city in 1947. The A-bomb dome was seen in the background.
     Watanabe said the emperor's words demonstrated his awareness of U.S. historical perception, adding, ''I wanted to express in the documentary that Article 9 was (in the Constitution) to secure Article 1 under the U.S. occupation (of Japan).''
     The documentary has also been released on DVD simultaneously with its broadcast which took place after it was screened at the Japanese Culture Center in Paris. Television stations in Finland, Belgium, Greece, South Korea and Al Jazeera in Qatar have proposed showing it.
     Its telecast or screening is undecided in Japan.
==Kyodo