TV REVIEW : An Overview From Both Sides of ‘Pearl Harbor’

“Pearl Harbor: Two Hours That Changed the World” (at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) is illuminated by the insightful writing of host David Brinkley and an unusual co-production arrangement between ABC News and NHK, Japan’s oldest TV network.

The dual Japanese and U.S. viewpoints are the show’s strength, bringing an overview rather than a myopic national view to that day 50 years ago Saturday “that will live in infamy.”

Among the 20 survivors telling their stories, the Americans recall the agony--”broken bodies hauled from the water like fish”--and the Japanese the glory, or, as one proud old ex-squadron leader grins, “the joy to be chosen as one of the first to strike the opening blow” against the United States. Don’t expect to hear any apologies from these former Japanese warriors who, at most, say that Pearl Harbor “was a mistake.”

Otherwise, the show underscores the ambiguity Japan feels today about starting the war and how, to the Japanese, it’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not Pearl Harbor, where the greatest sin was committed.

Brinkley notes that 1.4 million Japanese tourists visit Hawaii every year, “but most of them stay away from Pearl Harbor.” But not all. We hear a young Japanese tourist at the memorial to the Arizona exclaiming that she is “truly shocked” at what she has found out about Pearl Harbor: “We never learn these things in school and our school did not encourage us to study these things.”

Among the Americans taped for the show (including President Bush), Robert Fiske, who was a Marine bugler stationed on the West Virginia, blows one final taps over the sunken Arizona and recounts with tears the horror of “the tapping (by trapped sailors entombed in watertight compartments) that kept up until just before Christmas, when it finally quit.”

Brinkley and director Roger Goodman deftly chart events leading to Pearl Harbor, including the U.S. oil embargo, Japan’s lopsided view of the United States as a flabby, corrupt people as portrayed in Hollywood movies and, perhaps most tellingly, the arrogant racial superiority felt by Americans (gross newspaper cartoons from the time back up the point).

The producers carry the Pearl Harbor story to the present, tying its social and political implications to the mutual bashing going on between the countries today. Even current Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa gets in the act, remarking on communications gaps and perceptions of mistrust.

But, ultimately, what lingers in the mind’s eye is the bubbly image of leaking oil rising to the surface from the Arizona’s rusty hull. Of 2,403 Americans killed, 1,177 of them are entombed inside that ship. We see its barnacled outlines in underwater shots.

“A drop of oil rises to the surface about every 20 seconds,” says Brinkley. “It is sad and spooky, like a message silently floating up from an underwater tomb.”