Emperor (2012)

I know next to nothing about the post-war occupation of Japan, and this film focuses on the investigation into Hirohito and his circle of advisors in order to apportion blame for the war in general and the bombing of Pearl Harbor specifically.  Tommy Lee Jones plays MacActhur, but the story largely revolves around another one of World War II's intriguing supporting players: Gen. Bonner Fellers (1896-1973), who served as military attache and psychological warfare director under Gen. Douglas MacArthur after Japan's surrender in 1945.  He is portrayed competently by Matthew Fox, who goes about interviewing the major players and trying to come up with an answer for MacArthur about Hirohito's involvement that is both truthful as well as likely to yield the best result for Japan and the U.S. occupying forces.

Fox understands that the execution of Hirohito is likely to cause a major mess, yet he is not content to whitewash the emperor's role--what really happened is likely very different from what is depicted here (or at least there is controversy about it), but the dramatic tension that is portrayed here does encompass the balancing act that likely followed WWII.  The movie depicts a college romance that Fellers had with a Japanese woman that is wholly fiction, and is used in the movie to give a sense of what the cultural landscape of Japan was like before and after the war.  The Americans had little sense of what they were dealing with in Hirohito and his role to his people, and the movie gives some grounding for the discipline of the Japanese, as well as the shame culture that is so different from out own.  This may not be a historically precise movie, bu t it gave me a window into an era that I had thought little about.