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The "awaken a sleeping giant" quote both in Tora! Tora! Tora! and in Pearl Harbor appears to derive from a statement attributed to Yamamoto in 1942 (the year, not a movie):
"A military man can scarcely pride himself on having 'smitten a sleeping enemy'; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack."
Tora! Tora! Tora! Movie Paraphrase from Yamamoto: "I fear all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve."
Pearl Harbor Movie Paraphrase from Tora! Tora! Tora!:
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant...."
That's why they have a cable TV series entitled History v Hollywood.Naaman Brown (talk) 22:04, 1 March 2008 (UTC)
The fictitious "sleeping giant" quote attributed to Yamamoto needs to be more than a footnote. It seems to have made such an impression on some movie goers that they have accepted it as a historical fact. Bill Gates used parts of the quote in the opening of a major 12/07/95 speech that the Wall St. Journal called a "thinly veiled threat" to Microsoft's competitors. In Gates' speech, he implied that Microsoft was the "sleeping giant" and would respond to its competitors' internet challenges like the U.S. had responded to Pearl Harbor and crush its competitors with its own internet initiative MSN. This speech was widely reported and not one news agency questioned the Yamamoto quote's accuracy.
I am not at all convinced that the quote stems from a 1942 writing by Yamamoto. Tora, Tora, Tora is very praiseworthy of the Admiral and I believe the screenwriter in trying to close with a passage that makes Yamamoto look prescient decided to paraphrase Napoleon's comment on China being a "sleeping giant" which should therefore not be awakened. At the time this movie's screenplay was being written, this was the well known statement from a military person about a nation being a "sleeping giant."
"It was fortunate timing that the U.S. sent its two operational Pacific aircraft carriers, USS Enterprise (CV-6) and USS Lexington (CV-2) on plane delivery duty to Western Pacific islands not long before the Pearl Harbor Raid. Though this reduced the number of fighter aircraft available at Pearl Harbor, it may have saved the carriers. If they had been lost at Pearl Harbor, it would have been much more catastrophic for the Americans. Japanese commanders should have considered aborting the mission. Their intelligence revealed the carriers had left Pearl Harbor. (But they had made a political decision to go to war that these factors could not disrupt.)"
No, it isn't pertinent, and I have deleted that paragraph. It is an editorial comment inserted into the middle of a plot summary. AlbertSM (talk) 01:14, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Tuesday June 7, 2005
10:00-12:00 - War and Image Making:
Two Films on the Pacific War ... Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight”
and Richard Fleischer and Fukasaku Kinji’s “Tora Tora Tora” - Professor Jonathan Lipman
RJBurkhart 10:48, 2 January 2006 (UTC)
Um, can someone actually post a plot for this movie? Raveled
Director's commentary of the DVD says Kurosawa was replaced after two weeks of shooting. Can someone verify if Kurosawa was replaced after two weeks or two years. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.225.164.132 (talk • contribs) 05:27, 27 March 2006
The introduction includes "the series of American blunders that aggravated its effectiveness". The word "aggravated" implies a point of view. I have replaced it with "unintentionally improved". Bazza 14:10, 10 April 2006 (UTC)
I have revised the sentence, "Two American fighter pilots race to Haleiwa and manage to take off knowing full well they cannot survive the mission" to "Two American fighter pilots (portrayals of second lieutenants George Welch and Ken Taylor) race to Haleiwa and manage to take off, despite the overwhelming odds." The original statement called for revision simply due to the fact that both pilots did, in fact, survive the battle, and since George Welch has his own WP page, I think mentioning them both by name is warranted as well. --Warrior-Poet 17:41, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
Due to some rather expansive sections, there is a need to revise sections in the article, especially providing citations for the many statements. FWIW, I invite comments and response as the editing process is starting. Bzuk (talk) 19:50, 3 March 2008 (UTC).
In the booklet included with the Criterion Collection release of Seven Samurai, Peter Cowie writes, "In a poignant footnote to film history, the war epic Tora! Tora! Tora!, from 1970, might have been jointly directed by [John] Ford and Kurosawa but slipped from their grasp and was eventually made by Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda, and Kinji Fukasaku." I can find no more information about this. The pages John Ford and Akira Kurosawa say nothing but that Ford influenced Kurosawa. What hand did Ford have in the development of this film? - Calmypal (T) 19:13, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
Quote: (虎 tora is Japanese for "tiger" but in this case,[citation needed] "to" is the initial syllable of the Japanese word 突撃 totsugeki, meaning "charge" or "attack", and "ra" is the initial syllable of 雷撃 raigeki, meaning "torpedo attack").
So To-ra would mean something like "attack torpedo attack"? Could we have some verification, please? Maikel (talk) 09:58, 6 August 2009 (UTC)
Tora is NOT an acronym. It is the word tiger. It is NOT totsugeki raigeki. Acronyms were not even common usage until DURING WW2 and started by the Americans. Certainly not the Japanese. This whole thing is modern revisionist historians attempting to make something more out of nothing. Tora tora tora is simply the word "Tiger" repeated three times for radio clarity, the meaning of which was a pre-established code to announce that surprise was achieved. Nothing more, nothing less. It does not even make sense for it to be Totsugeki Raigeki... as the transmission was NOT an order to commence the attack. It was to report their having achieved surprise without alerting the Americans.
Claiming it to be An Acronym of Totsugeki Raigeki is people trying to feel smarter than they are by contributing their erroneous two cents. Cg23sailor (talk) 19:46, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
jawp article jp:トラトラトラ's cnclusion is "unclear origin". Generally, such military codes tend to choose intentionally MEANINGLESS strings for secrecy.--125.0.38.56 (talk) 22:45, 14 December 2015 (UTC)
Though I agree with the overall conclusion here (and I'm a couple of years late commenting anyway, I must take issue with one comment further up: "Acronyms were not even common usage until DURING WW2 and started by the Americans." (User:Cg23sailor) Military acronyms were in common use by the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, and had been in common use since before the beginning of the 20th century. Germany's FliegerabwehrKanone (anti-aircraft cannons) were known as "Flak" (a term still in general use) since 1938, and that was a continuation of the acronym "Bak" used for Germany's anti-balloon cannons - a term used since the 1870s. The Soviet Union was flying MiG's (Mikoyan-Gurevich aircraft) by 1940. The suggestion that the Japanese would not have considered using military acronyms by 1941 is, frankly, a bizarre one, and to say they were first used by the US is patently false. Grutness...wha? 09:41, 27 April 2018 (UTC)
I'm unclear how I stumbled across this, but I am surprised by the arguments expressed here. "To'ra" or "Tora" would not be an acronym, but rather a contraction. There are many instances of contraction use in the Japanese language both as modern slang as well as evolved etymologies of formal words and references. The use of To'ra wasn't a verbal communication of the word "Tora", but was a Morse Code signal transmission of "TO RA". This can be found referenced in various military texts. Here's an example: [1] Mespinola (talk) 16:27, 12 May 2021 (UTC)
User:Bzuk does not seem inclined to use discussion as petitioned, but he seems intent on keeping his personal style of references in this article, and opposes any departure from it, even when consensus favours a different style. Once a reference style is established, it is not necessarily the reference style for that article forever -- and furthermore, different editors have tried to use superior reference styles only to get reverted by Bzuk. This is clear WP:OWNership of the article. elle vécut heureuse à jamais (be free) 21:35, 27 August 2011 (UTC)
This article is very difficult to read. I don't know what happened, but much of the writing doesn't make sense. For example some sentences are totally disconnected from the other ones around them, even the first sentence of the article. The second paragraph of the article is completely disjointed from the context of discussing the film. Is there some kind of ongoing spat or other reason for this poor quality? Someone needs to do something about this very poorly written article very badly, but I don't feel confident in editing this kind of absurd-looking thing since it must be the product of infighting. JoshuSasori (talk) 04:43, 9 February 2012 (UTC)
Bzuk seems to have just reverted out a series of edits, one of which was a correction of a spelling mistake of someone's name, one of which was an automated correction of citation requests, and one of which contained a sentence which contradicted itself. Could Bzuk please explain? If the link to the flying squad belongs in the article, then perhaps it should have some explanatory text. Thanks. JoshuSasori (talk) 02:26, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
Hi there Bzuk. I agree Akira Kurosawa was most likely fired, but it was not made official either way. He left the film is meant to be somewhat ambiguous, but I'd like to put it another way without flat-out saying he was fired. He was reportedly unhappy, and he was a stubborn guy. He may have walked away after getting too much grief. You wrote Not according to Fleischer, nothing at all was useable and the screenplay that was used by the Japanese production was unrelated to Kurosawa's work. Fleischer said he was fired (he didn't just leave for health reasons as was stated in the media). I think Fleischer was talking about his footage. As to the script, it's credited to Larry Forrester and frequent Kurosawa collaborators Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni, who worked on a dozen other of his films. So it seems most likely it was the script Kurosawa developed, though it was substantially cut down, if it really was four hours long. So perhaps we could say Portions of the screenplay he developed were still used, but none of his footage. I'll leave it up to you. - Gothicfilm (talk) 22:03, 13 February 2012 (UTC)
I'll do some more digging, but 20th Century Fox did not approve Kurosawa's first voluminous script nor any of the subsequent revisions as they were so centered on minutiae that would only make sense to a Japanese audience steeped in the lore of pre-war machinations, that Fleischer called Kurosawa in for a "showdown" in Hawaii, and was amazed that the veteran director readily agreed to changes in the script. However, the resulting laborious rewrite and slow pace of principal photography again alarmed the US team and a second meeting was held in Hollywood, with Kurosawa again agreeing to make the script more amenable to an American audience. The results, however, were simply a tedious collection of scenes that were basically no better than the first sequences shot, leaving the production with the little more than the realization that the Japanese portion of the production would have to be completely redone, and that Kurosawa was not the director they wanted or needed. The decision to cast him adrift was fraught with peril, as 20th Century Fox had actually been sold on the premise that the epic would feature the work of the renowned Japanese director, and the initial "seed money" was tied directly to the involvement of Kurosawa. Nonetheless, the production was faced with the ultimate dilemma of a massive project that was running behind schedule and over budget. Even with the replacements for Kurosawa, the final film, complete with the trappings of an intermission, still was considered a very long slog for most viewers, and only in recent times, has the film been recognized more for its documentary-like approach to a historical event. FWiW Bzuk (talk) 15:34, 14 February 2012 (UTC).
Sorry for not responding earlier, but although Cuba has luscious beaches, it has lousy Internet service. I am back home today and will fill in some more of the Tora! Tora! Tora! "back story" soon. FWiW Bzuk (talk) 14:49, 22 February 2012 (UTC).
The cast list shows "Admiral James O. Richardson, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet." Richardson had never been Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet. Prior to his relief by Kimmel his title was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet. Kimmel was the first CincPac. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Richardson had reverted to his permanent rank of Rear Admiral and was assigned to the Navy General Board. The list also shows "Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet." Kimmel was Commander-in-Chief, Pacific (not Commander-in-Chief, U.S Pacific Fleet). See the Wikipedia bios on both men for more details.Oldbubblehead (talk) 04:28, 11 January 2016 (UTC)
Though an extremely small part of the movie, the 'incident' involving the yellow trainer biplane being overflown by all the Japanese planes right before their attack on Pearl Harbor -- was it real or a minor "funny" scene inserted into the movie.
There's all this discussion about ship's superstructures and other details in the entry/article, but absolutely no mention of this scene.
Can anyone find out if this was a historically accurate event or a fictitious movie scene or was it meant to be (symbolically) representative of something? 2600:8800:786:A300:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 23:46, 30 September 2017 (UTC)
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Presently, the content of the historical accuracy section seems to have little to do with substantive historical events. Rather, it mostly concerns comparatively small production compromises of a techincal nature. Historical accuracy covers, for example, whether or not the attack on Pearl Harbour commenced fifty-five minutes before the delivery of Japan's ultimatum to Washington—not whether the carrier from which Janapese aircraft took off had a large rather than a small bridge.
The film's opening caption states: "All of the events and characters depicted are true to historical fact". If that is indeed the case then the bulk of the material in this section ought to be deleted (or moved to the production section) and a simple statement to that effect put in its place. Pololei (talk) 23:35, 16 June 2018 (UTC)
@Ldavid1985: please explain your rationale for your revert of my recent edits. You did so without an edit summary and marked your edit as a minor edit, see WP:REVEXP and WP:MINOR. My edits were to add 'US' before the names of military units in the table of cast members with military service, for example changing 'Army' to 'US Army'. This is needed because the text above the article does not specify that these are US units. Moreover, some of the actors who played Americans could have served in the armed services of other nations and the Japanese-heritage actors might have served in the Japanese armed services. Also, your restoration of the pipe [[United States Marine Corps Reserve|Marine Corps]]
is undesirable because linking should be explicit and not hide information. Verbcatcher (talk) 21:16, 6 March 2021 (UTC)
Very odd WW2 high-budget film in that regard. Racing Forward (talk) 12:27, 24 June 2022 (UTC)
ok, i don't want to introduce a trivia section, but i have to ask: what's up with yamamoto's messenger driving and parking on the RIGHT SIDE OF THE ROAD during the opening scene? was japan on that standard pre-war?
AFAIK, the only time that happened was during the okinawa occupation. never in tokyo, and never pre-war. how could they make SUCH an obvious goof?
or am i missing something? 2601:19C:527F:A680:2169:D9D:D6C:B4B4 (talk) 01:01, 7 July 2022 (UTC)