Japanese films about the war, both fiction and nonfiction, rarely focus on the fighting between Japanese and American forces in the Pacific, though Clint Eastwood's 2006 hit "Letters from Iwo Jima" proved the subject can make for critically acclaimed and commercially successful drama.
Kenichi Oguri's quietly devastating documentary "Memories," the opening film at last year's Kyoto International Film and Art Festival, suggests why. Its focus: the ferocious battle from September to November 1944 on the island of Peleliu, then a Japanese possession, now part of the nation of Palau. Only 19 Japanese soldiers were captured alive, while 10,695 died in the fighting. Meanwhile, of the 47,561 American forces engaged in the battle, 2,336 were killed and 8,450 were wounded.
Given this near annihilation of the Japanese side, as well as the island's relative unimportance in the grander strategic scheme, Peleliu has been mostly absent in local accounts of Japan's war, cinematic and otherwise.