The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 5 | Issue 12 | Article ID 2599 | Dec 01, 2007

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Look Back in Anger. Filming the Nanjing Massacre

David McNeill

Look Back in Anger. Filming the NanjingMassacre

David McNeill

A crop of new movies released to commemoratethe 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacreis set to again dredge up the controversy aboutone of the 20th Century’s most notoriousevents. How will Japan react?

One way to learn what happened in one ofhistory’s most noxious but disputed episodes isto ask Mizushima Satoru. After what he calls“exhaustive research” on the seizure of thethen Chinese capital by Japanese troops in1937, estimated to have cost anywhere from20,000 to 300,000 lives, Mizushima offers avery precise figure for the number of illegaldeaths: zero.

“The evidence for a massacre is faked,”explains the president of right-wing webcasterChannel Sakura. “It is Chinese communistpropaganda.” For support, he brandishes abook containing what he says are dozens ofdoctored photos. One shows a beheadedChinese corpse with a cigarette stuck in itsmouth. “Japanese people don’t mistreat corpseslike that,” he says, stabbing the page foremphasis. “It is not in our culture.”

The world will soon have a chance to assessthese claims when Mizushima’s movie, TheTruth of Nanjing hits the cinemas. Thedocumentary is supported by over a dozenlawmakers, including Nariaki Nakayama, aformer education minister under ex-PrimeMinister Koizumi Junichiro and a panel ofacademics led by Higashinakano Shudo, a

history professor at Asia University in Tokyowho provides much of its thin intellectual gruel.

Courts in China and Japan recently ruled thatHigashinakano libeled survivors (Xia Shuqinand Li Xiuying) of the massacre in two booksthat documented their experiences of atrocitiesin Nanjing as fantasies.

Arguments over what occurred in Nanjingbegan almost as soon as Imperial soldiersmarched into the city on Dec. 13, 1937 andhave only grown in ferocity since. They areplayed out for the digital generation onYouTube, where hundreds of clips, includingWho Witnessed Nanjing and China Could NotProve Nanjing Massacre Happened (sic) areposted, along with the foulest racist comments.

These smoldering disputes are finally set tocross over into mass “entertainment” on the70th anniversary of the massacre, with nearly adozen new movies backed by US, European andChinese money set to pick again at Nanjing’sscabs. Most are still being filmed or are in post-production so it is too early to say what toexpect, but one thing is certain: Japanese neo-nationalists have little hope of winning thepropaganda war second time around.

Mizushima’s reputed $2-million budget for TheTruth (funded by a network of 5,000-oddsupporters) is dwarfed, for example, by the$53-million Purple Mountain (named after thepicturesque peaks around the east of Nanjing)currently filming in China. Adapted from thebestseller The Rape of Nanking by the bêtenoire of Japanese conservatives, Iris Chang, theUS-Chinese production is aiming for nothingless than an Asian version of Schindler’s List,

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Director Simon West (of Con Air fame) toldVariety magazine in the summer.

Award-winning Japanese actors KagawaTeruyuki and Emoto Akira will appear in JohnRabe, a German movie also starring SteveBuscemi and Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of Others)as the eponymous Nazi, dubbed the “Schindlerof China” for his role in rescuing thousands ofChinese civilians in the so-called NanjingSafety Zone. Rabe is also the subject of anotherGerman documentary, “John Rabe: TheSchindler of Nanjing,” produced by publicservice broadcaster ZDF. “There is a lot offascination with Rabe right now,” says directorAnnette Baumeister. “For us, we are interestedin whether it was possible to be a good Nazi,you know?” As yet, her movie has no Japanesedistributor. “We tried to sell the movie to(public service broadcaster) NHK in Japan,”“They said they will make their own movieabout the subject. And maybe they will,someday (laughs).”

John Rabe (front left) with members of theInternational Safety Zone Committee

The $35-million Nanking Xmas 1937, helmed byHong Kong art-house director Yim Ho,meanwhile, will depict the efforts of the smallcommunity of foreigners in the wartime city toprotect civilians from rampaging Japanesetroops. Then there is Nanking! Nanking!,reportedly starring some of the biggest names

in Chinese cinema, including Liu Ye and FengWei.

The fact that various arms of the Chinese stateare involved in all these productions willdoubtless fuel the suspicions of Japanese neo-nationalists that this is a Beijing-steered plotdes igned to drag Japan through theinternational mud. Some are already mutteringdarkly about Chinese “black propaganda.”“China is trying to control what the worldthinks of Japan,” said Mizushima.

But the directors and writers behind the moviesclaim they were forced to tone down content bynervous Chinese censors fretting about theirimpact on relations with the country’s biggestAsian trading partner.

The makers of Nanking! Nanking!, for example,reportedly endured months of vetting beforegetting permission to shoot, and then oncondition that the state-owned China FilmGroup be allowed to jump aboard. “The movietouches on the sphere of diplomacy,” DirectorLu Chuan recently told the Associated Press,hinting that his script was shuffled across thedesks of the Foreign Ministry and theCommunist Party’s Central PropagandaDepartment before being given the green light.

Beijing faces a tricky balancing act. Nanjingoccupies a central place in the foundationalmyths of post-1949 China and the success ofthe Communists in defeating both the Japaneseinvaders and the nationalists who failed toprotect the country from them. The governmenthopes -- quite legitimately – to ensure an eventthat was for decades all but ignored in popularculture is not forgotten, while harnessing it toits own nationalist ends. At the same time itmust avoid damaging bilateral ties just as itsgrowing power in Asia butts up against adeclining Japan.

Only time will tell if it succeeds. But one signthat the horrific events of December 1937 to

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March 1938 are no longer only a bilateral issueis the growing interest of foreign filmmakers.Ol iver Stone i s reported ly in scr iptdevelopment for a movie about Nanjing, andJames Bond director Roger Spottiswoode is inpost-production with The Bitter Sea, about aBritish journalist who witnesses the massacre.The movie, which stars Brendan Fraser, isscheduled for release in March next year.

The powerful Documentary film Nanking,directed by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman(Twin Towers) and released earlier this year, isalready the most watched documentary inChinese film history, claim its makers. Themovie will make extremely uncomfortableviewing for deniers: it is constructed entirelyfrom archive footage of atrocities and witnessaccounts of survivors narrated by actors suchas Woody Harrelson and Muriel Hemingway.

“Hands up”, a photograph included in Guttentag andSturman’s Nanking

“I know about the book’s controversy in Japan,”explains producer Ted Leonsis, who wasinspired to put the movie together after readingChang’s book. “So we hired 38 people whospent 18 months all over the world doingresearch. Our conclusion was we should haveno point of view, to just document whathappened.”

“We felt we should only have words frompeople who were there. We were able tointerview Chinese and Japanese survivors and

these accounts are so rich. You know, MinnieV a u t r i n(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnie_Vautrin)wrote 1,100 letters home. So we had all thatmaterial.

Leonsis was motivated to make the movie afterreading about Iris Chang’s account of the Rape.“Chinese people and Western people teamed upto defend thousands of civilians and their storyhad never been told. At a time when we’re notvery popular outside the US I thought it wasfascinating that here were Americans who areconsidered gods and goddesses in China.”

Most frustrating of all for Mizushima and co.,however, is a documentary by Canadianhusband-and-wife team William Spahic andAnne Pick. The Woman Who Couldn’t Forget:The Iris Chang Story, focuses on the author ofthe book credited with dragging what shecalled “the forgotten holocaust” back into thedaylight and igniting a movement to rememberthe massacre among the Chinese Diaspora inNorth America.

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Iris Chang

Chang, who committed suicide three years ago,is the inspiration and unofficial patron saint tomost of the new movies, a galling developmentfor her enemies in Japan. Her book was pickedapart by conservatives here who accused her ofexaggerating, sloppy research and – the biggestsin -- failing to distinguish between the truthand wartime Chinese propaganda. She alsolargely ignored the work of courageousJapanese scholars and journalists such asHonda Katsuichi, who authored a Seventies(Japanese) bestseller based on interviews withsurvivors and witnesses, and Fujiwara Akira,until his death the dean of Nanjing scholars.Japanese publishers cite her errors as thereason why the book, released in 1997, hasnever been translated into Japanese.

The damage runs deep, say historians. “IrisChang reopened the issue and brought it to the

attention of the international community,” saysMark Selden, research associate in the EastAsia Program at Cornell University. “But hercareless research and overstatements openedthe way for neo-nationalists to discredit (inJapan) not only the book but - guilt byassociation - much of the solid scholarship thatJapanese researchers were producing,”

Whatever about the book’s faults, it did dig upa stinking political corpse that had been buriedfor years, and drew attention to the overlookedRabe diaries, another key source for many ofthe new film projects. “The Nanking holocaustwas swept under the carpet by all concernedfor geo-political reasons,” Spahic told journalistThomas Podvin this year. “Her book more thanany other event changed that forever.”

For better or worse then, Chang has helpedpush the issue out of academia and intopopular culture, where its impact will be farless predictable, or manageable. At the veryleast, anti-Japanese sentiment is likely to beinflamed in China, where nationalist passionsare already high. A tsunami of bad publicity isalso certain to come from Europe and America,as Tokyo is fully aware.

“It is a delicate issue so we hope filmmakerswill not create negative emotional reactions,”says government press secretary SakabaMitsuo. He says a joint academic committee setup with China to study the issue in a “non-political way” will clarify what happened inNanjing. “We expect much of this study group,so we hope the movies don’t make the work ofthe experts difficult.”

That seems unlikely. Few of the millions whowill see the movies are likely to appreciate thatmuch of the most sophisticated research on theatrocities committed by Japanese troops duringWorld War II occurs in Japanese academe,although only a tiny fraction appears inEnglish. Or that decades of official censorshipand fudging have left many young Japanese

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woefully ignorant of what took place. No doubtthe movie makers will retort that Japan isreaping what it sows by allowing a small cliqueof ultra-nationalists, emboldened by support inKasumigaseki, to hold sway over the debateabout Nanjing.

As for Mizushima and other deniers, how willthey react to taking such a monumental beatingin the propaganda war? “I think that it willreinforce their siege mentality,” says NakanoKoichi, a political scientist at Tokyo’s SophiaUniversity. He says that many of the peoplebehind Mizushima's production overlap withthose who took out a fu l l -page pa idadvertisement in the Washington Post in Junethis year, rebutting accusations made againstthe Japanese government and on the issue ofsex slaves.

“They seem to think that they are the solepossessor of "truths" and "historical facts"under siege (by the anti-Japan Chinese amongothers), and that those "truths" will prevail, ifonly they are widely and correctly disseminatedin the international community, particularly tothe American audience. Of course, they areonly deluding themselves, and they end updigging a deeper hole for themselves.”

Will any of these movies be seen in Japan? Asyet, none is scheduled. A spokesman for amajor distribution company, who wished toremain anonymous, said releasing them herewould be “difficult” though not impossible. “Itwill depend on the impact they have abroad.”

Sakura’s Mizushima, meanwhile, says his moviedoes not have an official release date, althoughthe company plans to show the first two-hourinstallment to invited journalists in mid-December. The documentary is one of a three-part series, starting with the disputed TokyoTrials and the 1947 execution of seven warcriminals by the US occupation, includingM a t s u i I w a n e , t h e m a n a c c u s e d o forchestrating the Nanjing invasion. Mizushima

could be found filming the executions in aTokyo studio this month in the NikkatsuStudios. His set designer had recreated theexecution gallows and actors were rehearsingby being dropped through trapdoors. “It is veryemotional. I hope this will make the Americansregret what they did,” he said. “But I don’tsuppose it will.”

Mizushima Satoru in front of a mockup of the gallowsused to hang Japanese war criminals convicted at the

Tokyo trials

What might we expect from parts 2 and 3? Hegives some hints in his reply to a key question:Was the Imperial Japanese Army guilty of anywar crimes? “None,” he replies. “In war,atrocities will always be carried out by a smallnumber of individuals, but did the Japanesearmy systematically commit war crimes?Absolutely not.”

Sidebar: The Nanjing Massacre

While the details and the number of deathscontinue to be debated, most historians agreethat the Nanjing massacre — also known as the"Rape of Nanjing" — was an atrocity, in which80,000 or more Chinese civi l ians andsurrendered soldiers were kil led (theInternational Military Tribunal on the Far Eastin 1946 considered credible a figure of200,000) and tens of thousands of womenraped following the Japanese capture of the

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city. Despite compelling documentary evidence,eyewitness accounts – including some byJapanese soldiers -- and photographic evidence,Japanese revisionists continue to reject chargesthat war crimes and atrocities occurred there.The country's undigested war history continuesto poison one of the world's most importantbilateral relationships. Recent anti-Japaneseriots in China have forced Beijing and Tokyo toset up a joint education panel to narrow majordifferences of interpretation over wartimeevents. Some on the Japanese side argue thatNanj ing has become so pol i t ic ized —particularly the often-cited figure of 300,000deaths inscribed in the Nanjing memorial —that measured academic discussion has becomealmost impossible. "It is very difficult indeed,"says Kitaoka Shinichi, a law professor at TokyoUniversity who is part of the Japanesedelegation to the panel. "But we have to findsome way of narrowing the gap between us.

Nanjing Memorial: 300,000 victims

"Neo -na t i ona l i s t s cho la r s such a sHigashinakano and Fujioka Nobukatsu opposesuch discussions, arguing that Japaneseacademics have nothing to gain by talking totheir Chinese counterparts. "There is no pointin talks," says Fujioka. "The Chinesegovernment has decided there was a massacre— so what good can come out of them?"

Higashinakano and Fujioka are the leading

figures in what critics have called themaboroshi-ha, or illusion school, of Nanjing andAsia Pacific War research which rejects allallegations of war crimes in the taking of thecity and indeed the f i f teen-year war.Higashinakano says 30,000 published photos ofevents from the massacre are faked. The twoprofessors' work is criticized by manyacademics in Japan and even by some withinthe revisionist school, who say that while thecasualty figures remain disputed, theirresearch lacks credibility. "There are a lot ofcrazy people on both sides who collect aroundthe Nanjing debate," says Hata Ikuhiko, ahistory professor at Nihon University whowrote the seminal 1986 book Nankin Jiken (TheNanjing Incident). Hata argues that roughly40,000 Chinese died in the taking of the city,although he disputes the application of theterm "massacre" to the simultaneous killing ofcaptured soldiers and says wartime Chinesepropaganda inflated the casualty figures.

The following lawmakers are listed assupporters of The Truth of Nanjing on theSakura Channel’s website:

House of RepresentativesNishimura Shingo (ex-DPJ), Matsubara Jin(DPJ), Toida Toru (LDP), Watanabe Atsushi(LDP), Akaike Masaaki (LDP), Washio Eiichiro(DPJ), Ryu Hirofumi (DPJ), Matsumoto Yohei(LDP), Inada Tomomi (LDP)

House of CouncilorsMatsushita Shimpei (independent), Oe Yasuhiro(DPJ), Nakayama Nariaki (LDP)

David McNeill writes regularly for a number ofpublications including the Irish Times and theChronicle of Higher Education. He is a JapanFocus coordinator.

This is a substantially expanded version of anarticle that appeared at The Japan Times onDecember 6, 2007. Posted at Japan Focus on

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December 6, 2007.