Under the Blood Red Sun: The Human Scale of War
I was one of the lucky thousand Honoluluans and visitors who sat under the stars at Pearl Harbor one night this summer and watched this grand movie unfurl.
Intimately tied to the harbor and its world famous Pacific Theatre memorial, the story of Under the Blood Red Sun refreshes the events of December 7, 1941 by telling individual stories of a community directly touched by the realization that the unthinkable had become reality. In the audience were some of those who had fought in the resulting war, and many whose families have stories that are repeated through the generations: of love and loss and courage and dignity.
America, stunned by the attack on its own shores, went into a panic and interned thousands of loyal American citizens for fear that they might be enemy agents. This was not difficult to do: just racial profiling at its most blatant. German Americans were not interned wholesale: they were not as easy to pick out of the crowd. The story tells of the choices every person makes when faced with fear and when given power without merit. The problem has not disappeared: today's victims of racial profiling are pretty much anyone who strays out of his own neighborhood.
This is what makes the film so valuable: it delivers the message that seeing through the one dimensional image of a person to his or her individual being is and should be a priority for all persons. It is one of the primary tenets of American philosophy, one that each generation seemingly must relearn.
Under the Blood Red Sun tells the story of war bringing separation between two boys who are close friends, and between members of a Japanese American family who must choose between family pride in a history in Japan and the new world they have chosen, and beyond that, to understand and try to accept the pain of the profiling and what it means for them.
This film says all this without the need to explain itself, simply and lovingly. It is tender and funny, poignant and useful. Like the little girl in the film.
Under the Blood Red Sun is a labor of love by a largely Hawaii based cast and crew, some of whom are new at the job and some of whom are experienced. All have been touched by the story, which has the blessing of those who lived through those dark days-special showings were made for former internees and members of the famous 442/100 battalion of Japanese Americans, and the author, Graham Salisbury, has made time for these brave men throughout the twenty year history of the novel on which the film is based. Salisbury spent the time to achieve historic and cultural accuracy, making this novel and ones which followed it in Salisbury's World War II series not only gripping tales but teaching tools . The series and the film are achievements to be proud of.
