So as many of us already know, the sort of mythical status of Erwin Rommel leads many to believe that Rommel was a sort of flawless honorable soldier. And while he was, by all accounts, an admirable general and person, in my experience many accounts exaggerate his 'goodness' (by implying he was never a Nazi, that he was 'just doing his job', etc).
After doing some cursory research (and also re-watching Letters from Iwo Jima), I'm curious as to why General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (commander of Japanese forces during the battle) doesn't get a similar treatment? By most accounts he was a rational, logical commander who routinely visited wounded enlisted men and forbade banzai attacks.
Is this just because he's less well known?
Its because Kuribayashi was only a commander during the invasion of Hong Kong and defense of Iwo Jima, so he didn't have a long track record unlike Rommel who is famously known as "The Desert Fox" for his genius on the tactical battlefield level and commanded the Afrika Corps from its inception in 1941 to its destruction in Tunisia in 1943. And unlike Manstein or Hienz Guderian his forces weren't in the Soviet Union and therefor did not commit the number of atrocities that his counterparts were responsible for. In addition his involvement in the July plot means he has become a prominent figure of the "Clean Wehrmacht" movement. All of this lead to a huge amount of wartime and post-war media about Rommel from documentaries to books and films, most of which idealized him as just a German patriot doing his duty, whereas there is little documentation on the life of Kuribayashi in part due to a lack of command roles prior to Iwo Jima and the imbalance in interest in the European war compared to the Pacific.
Edit: I would like to note that Rommel is a key part of Clean Wehrmacht because it was used by the Allied nations during the post war years to support German rearmament and historical revisionism and using Rommel as a sharp-witted but clean face of the German army. Indeed, the British made a big huff over Rommel even during the war, which is where "The Desert Fox" comes from.
Sources: The Myth of the Eastern Front by Robert Smelser and Edward J Davis
Wehrmacht: History, Myth and Reality by Wolfram wet
The Historical Atlas of WW2 by Alexander & Malcolm Swanston
I think if we're looking for a Japanese version of Rommel then it has to go out to Tomoyuku Yamshita also known as "The Tiger of Malay." He executed a masterful campaign reaching down the Malay peninsula towards Singapore and then inflicted Britain's greatest defeat arguably in history while being outnumbered almost three to one.
He would later be held culpable for war crimes that he allegedly failed to stop. He did execute some of those responsible in Singapore and apologized personally for the actions (an action unprecedented in the Far Eastern theater) but was out of control of Japanese troops during the last weeks of the Philippines campaign. His trial reads very much like a scapegoat action and it was protested against by several justices such as Frank Murphy.
Sixty Years On: The Fall of Singapore Revisited by Brian Farrell