Hollywood History

I’m not quite sure why Mark C. Carnes included, in his entertaining compendium of historical gaffes in popular films, the fact that Japanese speakers in Tora! Tora! Tora! refer to the attack on Pearl Harbor as taking place on December 8—“a date,” Carnes writes, “that is mistranslated into English, for understandable reasons, as December 7.”

This strikes me not as a mistranslation, but as an acknowledgment of the International Date Line’s existence. It was December 8 in Japan when Pearl Harbor was bombed, and the attack is generally referred to in Japanese books as having taken place “December 8 (December 7 local time).”