Blood On The Sun

Watch On Bruised Onion Studio YouTube Channel

Blood On The Sun (1945)

American war thriller romance drama.

A dedicated American reporter in 1930s Japan is determined to expose that government’s plan for world domination.

The movie is based on the history behind Japan’s alleged Tanaka Plan, aka the Tanaka Memorial document (it was made public after his death in 1929). This allegedly was Prime Minister Baron Gi-ichi Tanaka’s militarist strategic plan for world domination prepared for Emperor Hirohito. It was first printed in China by the Chinese communists and in the US by a communist periodical, leading some to think that it was a forgery. No Japanese version has ever been found.

The Japanese Tanaka Plan was examined in the documentary The Battle of China (1944)], episode 6 of the “Why We Fight” series by Frank Capra. According to the book “Brassey’s Guide to War Films” by Alun Evans, this movie is “fiction highlighting fact, but a strange release date. One would have thought that the unearthing of the Tanaka Plan . . . might have received dramatic attention by Hollywood before Pearl Harbor, rather than at the end of the war. The Tanaka Plan, the blueprint for Japanese world domination–which actually specified the taking out of Pearl Harbor–was uncovered in 1927, but this dramatisation has [James] Cagney as U.S. newspaper man in [19]’20s Japan printing the story.”

The film has largely fallen out of favor in recent years because of its overt anti-Japanese propaganda angle, and because of the casting of several actors of European heritage as Asians. This practice has begun to be referred to as “yellowface” casting.

Prior to production James Cagney trained intensively in the martial-art of judo in preparation for his role. He trained under Ken Kuniyuki, who was a 5th Degree Judo Master. Cagney insisted that he perform his own stunts.

Please follow and like us: