After viewing the film on Saturday when it opened it Tokyo, Murakami thinks Eastwood got it right.

"It was marvellous," the 50-year-old carpenter said as he emerged from the theater. "How should I express it? It was the same for both sides, for them and us. Everyone was a victim."

Named best film of 2006 by the National Board of Review last Wednesday, "Letters from Iwo Jima" is the second of two Eastwood films about the 1945 battle, engraved in U.S. memory by a photo of six servicemen raising the flag on the island's Mount Suribachi.

The first, "Flags of Our Fathers," is the tale of three of the Americans who raised the flag and later became propaganda tools in a campaign to sell U.S. war bonds.

Starring Ken Watanabe as Lieutenant-General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, commander of the Japanese forces in the epic World War Two battle, "Letters" focuses on the Japanese defenders.

Central to the film are Kuribayashi, who had served as a military attache in the United States and himself had little hope of victory, and Saigo, a young baker who is drafted and forced to leave his pregnant wife but vows to return home alive.

The title refers to letters the two men, both loving husbands and fathers, write to their families as they prepare for battle.

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