Nanking: Inflaming
China's 70-year wound By
Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - That
Nanking, a powerful new US documentary on
the rape of the city (now known as Nanjing), has
been approved for domestic screening in China
reveals that the ghosts of the gruesome events 70
years ago still haunt Sino-Japanese relations.
The weekend release of the film in China
coincided with the 70th anniversary of the
full-scale invasion of the country by the Japanese
Imperial Army, with the China Film Group approving
Nanking as one of a
limited number of foreign films allowed for
release on domestic screens this year.
The
90-minute documentary in English with Chinese
subtitles focuses on a group of Western
missionaries and businessmen who remained during
the massacre and tried to set up a safety zone for
Chinese refugees. It uses original material from
their journals and diaries, mixing it with
archival film footage of 1937 and chilling
testimonies by survivors.
Despite its
credentials - it is co-directed by Oscar-winning
documentary director Bill Guttentag and Dan
Sturman, and has won rave reviews at the Sundance
Festival in the United States - the documentary is
likely to inflame old nationalist tensions between
the two Asian neighbors.
For China, the
Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Rape of
Nanking, recalling the former English spelling of
the city's name) remains a raw wound that has
never healed. Many in China believe the Japanese
never properly atoned for the atrocities committed
by the Imperial Army. Although referred to as the
Asian Holocaust, the massacre remains obscure and
is little understood by many outside Asia.
In late November 1937, the Japanese
Imperial Army launched a massive attack on
Nanjing, the new capital of then- Nationalist
China. When the walled city fell on December 13,
the Japanese army unleashed pillage, murder and
rape that lasted for six weeks.
The city
was transformed into a mass graveyard, with tens
of thousands of men mowed down by machine-guns,
used for bayonet practice, burned and buried
alive. An estimated 20,000-80,000 girls and women
were raped, mutilated and murdered.
Even
70 years on, China and Japan still disagree on the
number of people who perished during the Nanjing
Massacre. Chinese historians say well over 300,000
people were murdered. The postwar Tokyo War Crimes
Tribunal established that 142,000 civilians died
at the hands of Japanese soldiers in Nanjing.
Last month, a group of Japanese
parliamentarians created a furor when they said
archival documents showed that only 20,000 people
had been killed and China was exaggerating the
numbers for propaganda.
Western historians
agree the massacre was of horrific proportions,
but expand little on its chronology and reasons.
In his book Delivered from Evil: The Saga of
World War II, Robert Leckie summed it up:
"Nothing the Nazis under [Adolf] Hitler would do
to disgrace their own victories could rival the
atrocities of Japanese soldiers under General
Iwane Matsui," the commander-in-chief of the
Japanese Imperial Army for the Shanghai-Nanjing
region.
The new documentary is based on
The Rape of Nanking, the 1997 best-selling
book by Chinese-American writer Iris Chang.
Researching the subject, she was puzzled that many
victims had remained silent. "It soon became clear
to me that the custodian of the curtain of silence
was politics," she wrote. Chang - who committed
suicide in 2004 - attributed the historical
neglect of the massacre to political reasons
rooted in the Cold War.
After the 1949
communist revolution in China, neither the
People's Republic of China nor the exiled
Nationalist government on Taiwan (in the name of
the Republic of China) ever demanded war
reparations from Japan because the two governments
were competing for Japanese trade and political
recognition. The United States, faced with the
threat of communism from the Soviet Union and
mainland China, formed an alliance with its former
war enemy, Japan.
But while little covered
in world history, the massacre remains a sensitive
issue for Japan, for the real commander of
military actions in Nanjing was not General Matsui
but Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, uncle of Emperor
Hirohito. After the war, the imperial family was
exonerated from responsibility for the wartime
atrocities of its army. Prince Asaka was never
tried.
It was also at Nanjing that the
idea of comfort houses - Japan's wartime military
brothels - was born. Responding to Western powers'
criticism at the massive rapes in Nanjing, the
Japanese high command made plans around that time
to create a vast network of brothels where
thousands of "comfort women" would sexually
service soldiers. Japanese historians say the plan
was launched in the hope that the existence of
official brothels would reduce the incidence of
random rape among local women and diminish the
opportunities for international condemnation.
But even this legacy of Nanjing is
disputed between the two countries. Tokyo has
refused to compensate surviving comfort women for
their suffering, insisting that private
entrepreneurs, not the imperial government, ran
the military brothels. In March, Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe infuriated Beijing when he
claimed there was no proof that the Japanese
military coerced women into prostitution.
However, China has just released its first
study into the wartime use of sexual slavery. The
investigation concludes that Japanese troops
forced women to work as sex slaves for at least 16
years - longer than the official duration of the
war between the countries, which lasted from
1931-45. The study, conducted by a team of Chinese
lawyers, found that Japanese troops took over
homes, community halls and even temples for their
wartime comfort houses.
The United States
has found itself increasingly drawn into this
historical row. Last month the US Congress passed
a resolution demanding an unambiguous apology from
Japan for coercing Asian women to work in the
military brothels.
Now Nanking,
produced by Ted Leonsis, former vice chairman of
AOL, is bound to add more layers to the neighbors'
discord. As director Bill Guttentag noted before
its Chinese premiere, one would be hard pressed to
find another event that is 70 years old but can
still stir up so much controversy.
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