Emperor Meiji and the Great Russo-Japanese War / Meiji Tennô to Nichiro Daisenso / 明治天皇と日露大戦争 Movie (1957) [372p AVC AAC]

Translation	Perevodildo
Editing	Paul Geromini
	darkcart

The project started when Paul found some alleged DVD rip for this on Avistaz. The encoding leaves more questions than answers: why is it 716x372? Why is it forced to display in 2.25:1? Why is it 30 fps? Why is audio AAC? There’s an alternative DVD encode on Rutracker, but it’s even crustier. Needless to say, it was never released on BD or in any form in HD, and it probably never will. It’s a pretty good looking (for 1957) color film, though of course it couldn’t match the scale of “The Bridge over the River Kwai” or “War and Peace” which came out the same year, and I’m not going to sugarcoat it—the whole of this movie is about as good as one episode of Animentary Ketsudan. We’re merely doing our small preservationist part here.
Unexpectedly, I found some Japanese subtitles for it on opensubtitles.com, uploaded in the summer of '25. I’m not sure what’s the deal with those. They are not straight-up whisper transcripts, because they are way too accurate for that, and some human had definitely went through them at some point, because some unclear lines and words were truthfully marked with “？？？” (yes, the punctuation variant you can only type with a Japanese keyboard layout). At the same time, other unclear parts are marked with “Name” or “Place” (yes, in English), and why would a Japanese person do that? Or why would someone even make hearing-impaired subtitles in his own language in the first place, unless he’s been hired by a TV company, like me? That also seems unlikely in this case, because things like “Place” or “???” like described above wouldn’t fly by industry standards.
In any case, those subtitles were a lucky break, and made the translation process a cakewalk; I only mostly had to adjust timings, fill in the missing words, songs and signs.
I’m not a big live-action guy, so any help reuploading this release to other trackers would be greatly appreciated.

This film contains imagery, words, and themes that are absolutely problematic or offensive. All content of this nature reflects the opinion of any individual who assisted with botching this series. Fuck you!

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