A group of American children pause during a baseball game to gaze at the sky. Above them are dozens of Japanese fighter planes. The poster that carries this image across the United States this week needs only two words to identify what it is selling: Pearl Harbor. But the launch of the film is provoking a debate about much more than just the latest big budget movie with Oscar aspirations.
On December 7 1941, 150 Japanese aircraft bombed the US fleet in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, killing more than 2,000 people, wrecking much of the fleet and provoking the US into declaring war four days later.
The film, which had its première last night, has refocussed attention on the place Pearl Harbour occupies in the national psyche.
"This is the closest the US has ever come to an invasion of its shores and for that reason alone it has a place in our historical consciousness," said Barry Glassner, professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and the author of The Culture of Fear - leaving aside the small war of 1812-14 when the British burned down the White House.
"The notion that the United States can never be attacked or invaded is very much part of the American sense of uniqueness and security. Pearl Harbour is seen as the exception that proves the rule," he said.
There have already been rows over how the film is being promoted. Disney wanted to promote it with a special charity edition of the television programme, Who Wants to be a Millionaire? featuring war veteran politicians such as John McCain and John Warner, but the idea was rejected last week by the senate ethics panel.
There has been anger, too, among the 4,000 Disney employees laid off in cuts affecting the entertainment industry. They object to the estimated $5m (£3.5m) spent on promotional junkets to launch the $135m film, which stars Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale and Josh Hartnett.
Other Americans view the hype around the film with mixed emotions. Many of the 800,000-strong Japanese-American community, based mainly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Denver, Chicago and New York, fear that the film reopens old wounds: 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned during the war, some with as little as one-sixteenth Japanese blood and others who had been adopted by white families.
"We're very concerned about this movie," said John Tateishi, national executive director of the Japanese-American Citizens' League in San Francisco. "The title alone is provocative for a lot of Americans. They're not willing to accept that we're American citizens. For Japanese-Americans the second world war was an entire experience of being rejected as a US citizen, being imprisoned by our own government."
He said there was a misunderstanding among many Americans about the fact that Japanese-Americans were horrified that the country of their grandparents had attacked them."Japan attacked us and Japanese-Americans experienced Pearl Harbour just as any other American did. Japan has never been my country but we were stigmatised by what happened."
Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles has been a centre of the Japanese-American community for more than a century. It is no longer the place where the city's 100,000 Japanese-Americans live, its restaurants, temples, and shops are their cultural home.
Takeshi Nakayama, editor of the main LA-based Japanese-American newspaper, said that on the last anniversary of Pearl Harbour there had been attacks on Japanese buildings in Little Tokyo."There is still anti-Japanese sentiment but people are more subtle about it now."
Pearl Harbor looks set to repeat the success of Saving Private Ryan, which also dealt with the second world war. Even the fact that Pearl Harbour was essentially a defeat for the US has been overcome in the new film.
As the critic Tom Carson observed in the New York Times: "The moviemakers plan to cheer us up by ending Pearl Harbor with the first American raid on Tokyo, a bit like wrapping up Titanic by having Kate Winslet... kill the iceberg."
