, also known by its on-screen title of The Saga of Anatahan, is a 1953 black-and-white Japanese war drama film directed by Josef von Sternberg, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. It was adapted by Sternberg from Michiro Maruyama's nonfiction account of the seven years he and a group of World War II Japanese holdouts spent on Anatahan island, which was then part of the South Seas Mandate of Imperial Japan and is now one of the Northern Mariana Islands of the United States. This story also inspired the 1998 Japanese novel Cage on the Sea.

Plot

On June 12, 1944, a small fleet of Japanese supply ships are attacked by American planes between Japan and New Guinea. Only twelve seamen, some soldiers and some fishermen drafted into service, are able to make it to the nearby jungle island of Anatahan, where they remain stranded for seven years. The island's only inhabitants are the overseer of an abandoned copra plantation and an attractive young Japanese woman. Discipline is initially enforced by a former warrant officer, but ends when he suffers a catastrophic loss of face, and a struggle for power and possession of the woman develops. Two of the men discover pistols in the wreckage of an American airplane, and, by the time they can be convinced that the war is really over and are rescued in 1951, five of the men are dead. The warrant officer decides to stay on the island, leaving seven men and the woman as the only survivors to return to Japan.