Page 1 of
2 The rape and revision of
Nanjing By David McNeill
A crop of new movies released to
commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing
Massacre is set to again dredge up the controversy
about one of the 20th century's most notorious
events. How will Japan react?
One way to
learn what happened in one of history's most
noxious, but disputed, episodes is to ask
Mizushima Satoru. After what he calls "exhaustive
research" on the seizure of the then-Chinese
capital by Japanese troops in
1937, estimated to have cost anywhere from 20,000
to 300,000 lives, Mizushima offers a very precise
figure for the number of illegal deaths: zero.
"The evidence for a massacre is faked,"
explains the president of right-wing webcast
Channel Sakura. "It is Chinese communist
propaganda." For support, he brandishes a book
containing what he says are dozens of doctored
photos. One shows a beheaded Chinese corpse with a
cigarette stuck in its mouth. "Japanese people
don't mistreat corpses like that," he says,
stabbing the page for emphasis. "It is not in our
culture."
The world will soon have a
chance to assess these claims when Mizushima's
movie, The Truth of Nanjing hits the
cinemas. The documentary is supported by over a
dozen lawmakers, including Nariaki Nakayama, a
former education minister under ex-prime minister
Junichiro Koizumi and a panel of academics led by
Higashinakano Shudo, a history professor at Asia
University in Tokyo who provides much of its thin
intellectual gruel.
Courts in China and
Japan recently ruled that Higashinakano libeled
survivors (Xia Shuqin and Li Xiuying) of the
massacre in two books that documented their
experiences of atrocities in Nanjing as fantasies.
(For more information on the
Nanjing Massacre see sidebar below
text)
Arguments over what occurred
in Nanjing began almost as soon as Imperial
soldiers marched into the city on December 13,
1937, and have only grown in ferocity since. They
are played out for the digital generation on
YouTube, where hundreds of clips, including Who
Witnessed Nanjing and China Could Not Prove
Nanjing Massacre Happened (sic) are posted, along
with the foulest racist comments.
These
smoldering disputes are finally set to cross over
into mass "entertainment" on the 70th anniversary
of the massacre, with nearly a dozen new movies
backed by US, European and Chinese money set to
pick again at Nanjing's scabs. Most are still
being filmed or are in post-production so it is
too early to say what to expect, but one thing is
certain: Japanese neo-nationalists have little
hope of winning the propaganda war the second time
around.
Mizushima's reputed US$2-million
budget for The Truth (funded by a network
of 5,000-odd supporters) is dwarfed, for example,
by the $53-million Purple Mountain (named
after the picturesque peaks around the east of
Nanjing) currently filming in China. Adapted from
the bestseller The Rape of Nanking by the
bete noire of Japanese conservatives, the late
Iris Chang, the US-Chinese production is aiming
for nothing less than an Asian version of
Schindler's List, director Simon West (of
Con Air fame) told Variety magazine in the
summer.
Award-winning Japanese actors
Kagawa Teruyuki and Emoto Akira will appear in
John Rabe, a German movie also starring
Steve Buscemi and Ulrich Tukur (The Lives of
Others) as the eponymous Nazi, dubbed the
"Schindler of China" for his role in rescuing
thousands of Chinese civilians in the so-called
Nanjing Safety Zone.
Rabe is also the
subject of another German documentary, John
Rabe: The Schindler of Nanjing, produced by
public service broadcaster ZDF. "There is a lot of
fascination with Rabe right now," says director
Annette Baumeister. "For us, we are interested in
whether it was possible to be a good Nazi, you
know?" As yet, her movie has no Japanese
distributor. "We tried to sell the movie to
[public service broadcaster] NHK in Japan. They
said they will make their own movie about the
subject. And maybe they will, someday [laughs]."
The $35-million Nanking Xmas 1937,
helmed by Hong Kong art-house director Yim Ho,
meanwhile, will depict the efforts of the small
community of foreigners in the wartime city to
protect civilians from rampaging Japanese troops.
Then there is Nanking! Nanking!, reportedly
starring some of the biggest names in Chinese
cinema, including Liu Ye and Feng Wei.
The
fact that various arms of the Chinese state are
involved in all these productions will doubtless
fuel the suspicions of Japanese neo-nationalists
that this is a Beijing-steered plot designed to
drag Japan through the international mud. Some are
already muttering darkly about Chinese "black
propaganda". "China is trying to control what the
world thinks of Japan," said Mizushima.
But the directors and writers behind the
movies claim they were forced to tone down content
by nervous Chinese censors fretting about their
impact on relations with the country's biggest
Asian trading partner.
The makers of
Nanking! Nanking!, for example, reportedly
endured months of vetting before getting
permission to shoot, and then on condition that
the state-owned China Film Group be allowed to
jump aboard. "The movie touches on the sphere of
diplomacy," director Lu Chuan recently told the
Associated Press, hinting that his script was
shuffled across the desks of the Foreign Ministry
and the Communist Party's Central Propaganda
Department before being given the green light.
Beijing faces a tricky balancing act.
Nanjing occupies a central place in the
foundational myths of post-1949 China and the
success of the communists in defeating both the
Japanese invaders and the nationalists who failed
to protect the country from them. The government
hopes - quite legitimately - to ensure an event
that was for decades all but ignored in popular
culture is not forgotten, while harnessing it to
its own nationalist ends. At the same time it must
avoid damaging bilateral ties just as its growing
power in Asia butts up against a declining Japan.
Only time will tell if it succeeds. But
one sign that the horrific events of December 1937
to March 1938 are no longer only a bilateral issue
is the growing interest of foreign filmmakers.
Oliver Stone is reportedly in script development
for a movie about Nanjing, and James Bond director
Roger Spottiswoode is in post-production with
The Bitter Sea, about a British journalist
who witnesses the massacre. The movie, which stars
Brendan Fraser, is scheduled 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, is already the most watched documentary
in Chinese film history, claim its makers. The
movie will make extremely uncomfortable viewing
for deniers: it is constructed entirely from
archive footage of atrocities and witness accounts
of survivors narrated by actors such as Woody
Harrelson and Muriel Hemingway.
I know
about the book's controversy in Japan," explains
producer Ted Leonsis, who was inspired to put the
movie together after reading Chang's book. "So we
hired 38 people who spent 18 months all over the
world doing research. Our conclusion was we should
have no point of view, to just document what
happened."
"We felt we should only have
words from people who were there. We were able to
interview Chinese and Japanese survivors and these
accounts are so rich. You know, Minnie Vautrin
wrote 1,100 letters home. So we had all that
material."
Leonsis was motivated to make
the movie after reading about Iris Chang's account
of the rape. "Chinese people and Western people
teamed up to defend thousands of civilians and
their story had never been told. At a time when
we're not very popular outside the US, I thought
it was fascinating that here were Americans who
are considered gods and goddesses in China."
Most frustrating of all for Mizushima and
company, however, is a documentary by Canadian
husband-and-wife team William Spahic and Anne
Pick. The Woman Who Couldn't Forget: The Iris
Chang Story, focuses on the author of the book
credited with dragging what she called "the
forgotten holocaust" back into the daylight
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
