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The Cowra Breakout (1984)

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clip Death is the only way education content clip 1

Original classification rating: M. This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

Stan has been placed in charge of security in the Japanese compound. His friend, Hayashi (Junichi Ishada) begs him to try to reverse the order to move some of the prisoners to another location. Stan desperately tries to understand what Hayashi seems to be saying – that a Japanese soldier should do everything in his power to be killed rather than bring shame on his family by being held in captivity. When Stan asks Hayashi what he will do, he replies simply, 'I am Japanese’.

Curator’s notes

by Janet Bell

This is great drama, portraying the tragic inevitability of the clash of cultures. The strength of the script is that we are able to find good and bad Aussies and good and bad Japanese.

After the breakout, the surviving Japanese POWs were loaded onto a troop ship and returned to Japan where their traumatised society was less interested in the fact that they had been prisoners of war, than that the country should urgently begin to rebuild itself.

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