The IJN ship, destroyer Yukikaze had sunk a number of American and British ships. I get that the politics is distasteful. But for the context of the film, the principal bad guys should be the Americans.
Contemporary Japanese WW2 films almost never mentioned China, for obvious reasons. The principal enemy in these films had been the US. While it is disgusting to glorify the Imperial Japanese military in WW2, it can be ironic to see them stirring up nationalism against the Americans.
It's actually an interesting war story to tell at least from the Japanese perspective, I'm surprised it hadn't been adapted sooner.
The Yukikaze was one of the, if not the luckiest, IJN warships during the late stage of the Pacific War that saw the ship participating in major battles that ended in the sinkings of both the Musashi and Yamato, as well as the majority of the escorts, yet the Yukikaze got home safe from all of those.
To boot, every single one of her sister ships of the class were also sunk in the war, which led to many Japanese sailors believing her to be actually cursed as all the battles she was in resulted in catastrophic losses for the IJN, yet Yukikaze always 'miraculously' survived.
In the end the ship was transferred to the ROC navy as war trophy and served out her remaining life there.
