Film on German hero in China seen stirring debate

Reuters - The director of a new film about an unsung German engineer who helped save 200,000 Chinese in Nanjing from Japanese troops said he hoped it would spark debate and help Japan come to terms with its past.

Tukur plays the title role in Gallenberger's "John Rabe"

Florian Gallenberger, whose film “John Rabe” is based on a true story of the courage of a Siemens executive during the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, told Reuters his film could also, belatedly, shed light on Rabe’s long-overlooked heroism.

“We’re fully aware the film could be explosive in Japan,” said Gallenberger, whose native Germany has also faced sometimes turbulent reflection on its Nazi past in the wake of films on the Holocaust and Hitler decades later.

“It’s an extremely controversial subject in Japan and there are fears there could be severe repercussions. I hope the film won’t be silenced in Japan. I’d very much hope this film could help get an opening-up of discussion going in Japan.”

Rabe was an electrical equipment executive in Nanjing, then the national capital of China.

Who is John Rabe? John Rabe (November 23, 1882 – January 5, 1950) was a German businessman who used his Nazi party membership for humanitarian purposes. His Nanjing Safety Zone sheltered some 200,000 Chinese from slaughter during the Nanjing Massacre.

Born in Hamburg, Germany, Rabe pursued a career in business and went to Africa for several years. In 1908 he left for China, and between 1910 and 1938, he worked for the Siemens AG China Corporation in Shenyang (Mukden), Beijing (Peiping), Tianjin (Tientsin), Shanghai and later Nanjing (Nanking).

The six-week wave of killing by Japanese soldiers after Nanjing fell was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan’s invasion of China. Chinese accounts say 300,000 were killed.

But some conservative Japanese politicians and scholars deny a massacre took place. It remains a heated political issue in Japan. An allied tribunal put the death toll at about 142,000.

For China, how Japan remembers the “Rape of Nanking” — as the city was then called in English — has become a test of how contrite its neighbor is about its occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.

SAFETY ZONE

In 1937, Rabe was head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone and helped save Chinese lives by setting up the 7-sq-km zone where about 200,000 people were sheltered.

Rabe had worked in China for Siemens for 30 years and was about to return to the headquarters in Berlin when the invasion began. As Germany and Japan were allies, Rabe used his Nazi party membership and did all he could to protect the civilians.

Rabe was arrested by the Gestapo upon his return to Berlin in 1938 for collaborating with the Chinese. After World War Two, the Allies at first refused to de-Nazify him. He died in Berlin in 1950 in poverty and forgotten but remained a hero in China.

“I have to admit to my great shame that before starting this project I didn’t know anything about John Rabe either,” Gallenberger said after his film’s well-received world premiere at the Berlin film festival.

The German-Chinese co-production, in English and German, features Ulrich Tukur (“The Lives of Others”) in the title role and American actor Steve Buscemi as a U.S. doctor in the city.

Gallenberger, whose film cost about 18 million euros ($23 million) to make, said there have been other films made about Rabe in China. But because Rabe’s story was misused for propaganda purposes, the world never really took notice before.

Now, Gallenberger said, the world is ripe for the story of the man sometimes called “the Oskar Schindler of China,” a reference to the industrialist credited with saving 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.

“It’s taken more than 70 years for John Rabe to get the recognition he deserves,” he said.

“It was our duty to take a neutral view, not a Japanese nor a Chinese viewpoint, and I believe we’ve accomplished that.”

Movie About China’s Schindler Tells Story of Unlikely German Hero

DPA news agency – As a Nazi loyalist, Rabe was an unlikely World War II hero. John Rabe was a member of the Nazi party and the German electronics giant Siemens’ man in China during the build-up to WWII. But he also helped save about 250,000 Chinese from the clutches of Japan’s military machine.

“Ten years ago it was not possible to conceive that there was such thing as a good Nazi,” said Ulrich Tukur, who plays Rabe in a film about his life that had its world premiere at this year’s Berlin Film Festival.

“The Third Reich is indeed typical of the depths that humans can sink to and which are in each of us,” Tukur said in an interview with DPA news service.

But he went on to a say “that every part of the history is built by a never-ending number of pieces of a mosaic.”

A mini-boom

Director Florian Gallenberger

Based on Rabe’s published dairies, Munich-born director Florian Gallenberger’s movie “John Rabe” comes amid a mini-boom in movies about Hitler’s Germany.

This includes British director Stephen Daldry’s “The Reader,” about a teenager living in 1950s Germany who has a passionate affair with an older woman he later discovers was a Nazi concentration guard, and “Valkyrie,” starring Tom Cruise, which tells of a plot to assassinate Hitler.

Starring British-born Kate Winslet, “The Reader” was also screened at this year’s Berlinale.

But the events surrounding Rabe’s story and his efforts to protect the people of a country that he had developed a deep affection for date back to 1937, two years before Hitler’s troops marched into Poland igniting World War II.

The Good German of Nanking

Japanese troops march into a Chinese government building used as barracks after the capture and occupation of NankingBildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: The Japanese occupation of China during World War Two was marked by vicious brutality

The movie shows how Rabe helped Chinese civilians escape the horrors of what is known as the rape of Nanking by helping set up and take over the running of a special security zone.

But it also shows that Rabe ran into opposition in the local foreign community in Nanking, among them American physician Robert Wilson, played by US actor Steve Buscemi.

Dismissing Rabe as “the Nazi,” Wilson rejects at first the idea of the Siemens’ man taking charge of the security zone housing the Chinese. Wilson, however, later becomes Rabe’s deputy.

Rabe is also assisted by a German Jewish diplomat called Georg Rosen, who is played by leading German actor Daniel Bruhl.

As the Japanese move to tighten their grip on Nanking, Rabe comes up with the idea of hoisting a Nazi flag over the Siemens compound, where the Chinese citizens are held up so to keep the Japanese bombers at bay.

Low-key heroism

Remarkably, Gallenberger, 37, uses the elements of danger and horror as well humor to tell his story about Rabe’s calm and low-key heroism during a dramatic and fearful time in history.

Relations between China and Japan are still shaped by the brutality of the imperial Japan’s military’s barbarous crackdown on the Chinese population during 1937.

A convincing portrayal of Rabe’s life, Gallenberger’s movie is also another sign of German filmmakers attempting to regain control of their nation’s history and wrestle it away from the movie industry in Hollywood and London.

Moreover, the Nazi wartime movies that have emerged from Germany in recent years also demonstrate that German filmmakers have new stories to tell about the war.

“I have the feeling that the long shadow of National Socialism is being lifted,” said Tukur. “You notice that this country’s young directors see the culture and the people differently, also with more affection.”

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CBC – Japan’s air force chief will be dismissed for writing an essay that claims the country was not an aggressor in the Second World War.

Gen. Toshio Tamogami wrote an essay entitled “Was Japan an Aggressor Nation?” in which he argues that Japan was not an aggressor in the Second World War. The essay was entered in a contest and posted on Friday to the website of contest organizer, Japanese hotel and apartment developer Apa Group.

“I think it is improper as the air force chief of staff to publicly state a view clearly different from that of the government’s,” Japanese Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada told reporters on Friday.

“Therefore, it is inappropriate for him to remain in this position and I will swiftly dismiss him.”

Among Tamogami’s arguments in the essay are that Japan’s military occupation of China was based on treaties and that the Korean peninsula was “was prosperous and safe” under Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule.

He further argued Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was a result of a trap laid by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and rejected the verdicts of the Allied War Tribunal, which convicted Japanese wartime leaders as war criminals after Tokyo’s defeat in 1945.

“The Tokyo trials tried to push all the responsibility for the war onto Japan and that mind control is still misleading the Japanese people 63 years after the war,” he wrote.

Japan expressed remorse for its actions during the war, often referred to in Japan as the Greater East Asia War, in 1995 in a landmark apology directed at Asian countries that suffered due to Japan’s military actions.

“Even now there are many people who think that our country’s aggression caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Greater East Asia War,” Tamogami wrote in the essay.

“But we need to realize that many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War. It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation,” he said.

Similar views are shared by some right-wing Japanese scholars and politicians but the publicly released comments contained in the essay were expected to rouse anger in China and South Korea, where memories of Japan’s wartime acts and colonization still run deep.

Hamada said the government had to act swiftly against Tamogami so it was clear Japan does not share his views.

Prime Minister Taro Aso has also publicly stated Tamogami’s written statements were inappropriate.

Japan’s air force chief sacked over WWII comments

AFP — Japan sacked its air force chief on Friday after he wrote an essay in which he denied the country was an aggressor in World War II, a stance likely to anger its Asian neighbours.

China, the two Koreas and other Asian nations still have painful memories of Japan’s aggression and colonial rule, and there had been speculation that General Toshio Tamogami’s comments could strain relations.

“What he said was inappropriate for an air chief of staff as it differs from the government’s position. He should not remain in the job,” Defence Minister Yasukazu Hamada told a news conference announcing his dismissal.

Prime Minister Taro Aso, also known for his conservative views on history, told reporters: “Even if he expressed it personally, it is inappropriate.”

Tamogami, chief of staff of Japan’s Air Self-Defence Force, offered the opinion in an essay on the theme of “true views of modern history.”

The general wrote, “Even now, there are many people who think that our country’s ‘aggression’ caused unbearable suffering to the countries of Asia during the Greater East Asia War.”

“But we need to realise that many Asian countries take a positive view of the Greater East Asia War,” Tamogami said, according to the essay’s English version.

“It is certainly a false accusation to say that our country was an aggressor nation.”

The Greater East Asia War was a term used by Japan to describe the conflict in the Asia-Pacific theatre, emphasising that it involved Asian nations seeking independence from the Western powers.

The thesis runs counter to a 1995 statement issued by then prime minister Tomiichi Murayama and endorsed by his successors which apologised for Japan’s past aggression and colonial rule in Asia.

When Aso took office in September, he pledged to stand by the apology.

The Murayama statement acknowledged that Japan through its colonial rule and aggression “caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations.”

But there has been a persistent nationalistic argument in Japan that the Murayama statement was part of the country’s “masochism” aimed at accommodating Asian neighbours.

“Among the major powers at that time, Japan was the only nation that tried to incorporate its colonies within the nation itself. In comparison to other countries, Japan’s colonial rule was very moderate,” Tamogami wrote.

“We must take back the glorious history of Japan. A nation that denies its own history is destined to pursue a path of decline.”

Japan renounced the right to wage war after World War II and calls its de facto military the Self-Defence Forces.

Despite its officially pacifist position, Japan has often come under fire for its perceptions of its wartime past with neighbours closely watching for any sign of a militarist revival.

China suspended top-level exchanges during the 2001-2006 premiership of Junichiro Koizumi, who paid homage each year to Tokyo’s Yasukuni shrine, which honours the Japanese war dead including top World War II leaders.

Under Koizumi, Japan also deployed ground troops in southern Iraq, its first military deployment since the world war in a country where fighting is under way.

Tamogami, who at 60 belongs to Japan’s post-war baby boomer generation, stirred controversy in April when he defended a Japanese airlift operation in Iraq which was ruled unconstitutional by a provincial court.

He said some of his troops might have been hurt by the ruling but, using a comedian’s phrase, said that a majority of them felt “to heck with it.”

Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine honours the Japanese war dead including top World War II leaders

The US Pacific Fleet burns after a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941

Japan launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937 — using Manchuria as a launching base for their troops

More than 300,000 people were killed in the Nanjing Massacre — an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military

Taro Aso has conservative views on history but has pledged not to upset other Asian nations.

CCPR/C/JPN/CO/5, 30 October 2008

HUMAN RIGHTS COMMITTEE, Ninety-fourth session, Geneva,13-31 October 2008

CONSIDERATION OF REPORTS SUBMITTED BY STATES PARTIESUNDER ARTICLE 40 OF THE COVENANT

Concluding observations of the Human Rights Committee

Japan

22. The Committee notes with concern that the State party has still not accepted its responsibility for the “comfort women” system during World War II, that perpetrators have not been prosecuted, that the compensation provided to victims is financed by private donations rather than public funds and is insufficient, that few history textbooks contain references to the “comfort women” issue, and that some politicians and mass media continue to defame victims or to deny the events. (arts. 7 and 8)

The State party should accept legal responsibility and apologize unreservedly for the “comfort women” system in a way that is acceptable to the majority of victims and restores their dignity, prosecute perpetrators who are still alive, take immediate and effective legislative and administrative measures to adequately compensate all survivors as a matter of right, educate students and the general public about the issue, and to refute and sanction any attempts to defame victims or to deny the events.

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You can find more background info about the Huaqing Palace, An Lushan, and Yang Guifei. (Please note that the Yang Guifei statue in Huaqing Palace was sculpted by modern art students. She was more a fantasy of these students than true depiction of history… because she was not fat enough. :)

During the Tang dynasty, being fat was deemed pretty whereas skinny people were seen as second class citizens. There was a saying that “women with a 23″ waist would never find a husband; and women with a 32″ waist would have lots of men to choose from.” Not only fat women were seen as pretty (thus Yang Guifei was very fat), soldiers without a big tummy would never be promoted. Men who were too skinny would not even be qualified to fight for their country.

The following pictures show Tang figurines that can tell how the Tang people defined beauty. Also, though I’ve learnt from history books that Tang exported a lot of Chinese culture and civilization to Japan, I was still shocked when I saw Tang constructions…. they were so similar to historic constructions I’ve seen in Kyoto, Japan. The long time link between the two countries is indisputable. And I could see why the Japanese were so excited and so much national pride was generated when they were able to defeat China during WWII.

For a comparison, I’m also attaching a picture of a historic temple in Kyoto, Japan:

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Dismissing appeals from both the plaintiff and the defendants, the court ruled that Shudo Higashinakano’s book, “The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction — A Historian’s Quest for Truth,” defamed the plaintiff and severely hurt her pride.

Higashinakano, 60, said in his book that Xia Shugin (夏淑琴), 79, lied in her accounts of the massacre. He also accused her of posing as a victim and claimed the Imperial Japanese Army’s infamous massacre of Chinese civilians never took place.

Xia said she was pleased overall. “I’m very happy with the ruling,” Xia said in a statement distributed afterward. “I would like to represent victims of the Nanjing Massacre and show gratitude that the facts of the incident were recognized.”

According to Xia’s accounts, some 20 Imperial army soldiers stormed into her house at around 10 a.m. on Dec. 13, 1937. Xia, then 8, and her 4-year-old sister survived the intrusion despite being bayoneted — but all seven other members of her family, including a newborn, were slaughtered.

Xia was filmed after the attack by a U.S. missionary who was traveling with the Red Cross in Nanjing. The footage is frequently cited by historians as key evidence that the Nanjing Massacre took place.

In the book published by Tokyo-based Tendensha, Higashinakano argues that there were inconsistencies in many of Xia’s recollections, and that the 8-year-old captured by the missionary’s motion picture camera is someone else.

The high court said there is “no grounds for recognizing that argument.”

The district court ruled last November.

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Sirens wailed, calling citizens to silence, a bell tolled, and tens of thousands of people, including frail survivors, gathered for the reopening of a newly expanded massacre memorial in the former national capital in eastern China.

The six-week wave of killing by Japanese soldiers after Nanjing fell was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan’s invasion of China. Official Chinese accounts say 300,000 were killed.

For China, how Japan remembers the “Rape of Nanking” — as the city was then called in English — has become a test of how contrite its neighbour is about its brutal occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.

Aged survivors came out to remind the world of the event. Chen Fubao, 75, clutched a black-and-white photo of his father, who was killed in the slaughter.

“We hope that the Japanese government, especially those in the nationalist factions, will admit the truth in history and learn from the Germans,” he told Reuters. “They should not cover up their crimes any more.”

Beijing and Tokyo have been moving in recent months to ease long-running tensions over history, territory and energy and commemorative propaganda has avoided harsh words about Japan’s current leaders.

Full story here.

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They blew them up with landmines then doused them with petrol before setting them alight, finally using bayonets to finish off anyone still left alive.

This was just one small incident in what has become known as the Nanjing massacre, a six-week orgy of violence in which tens of thousands of Chinese people died.

A day before the massacre’s 70th anniversary, a small group of survivors, dignitaries and visiting Japanese citizens gathered at Taiping Gate to remember the dead.

It is just one of a number of commemoration events being held in Nanjing this week to mark a bloody episode that still reverberates in East Asia today.

We only know about the Taiping Gate killings because of the tenacity of Japanese teacher Tamaki Matsuoka, who wanted to know more about the massacre.

With a number of others, she set up telephone hotlines in several Japanese cities in 1997, inviting former soldiers who had served in Nanjing to call up.

The group interviewed more than 200 old soldiers and, from the information it gathered, was able to identify the exact army unit that had carried out the Taiping killings.

Ms Matsuoka told her story at the Taiping memorial ceremony, which took place on a cold, wet Nanjing morning.

Before helping to unveil a small monument, she said she hoped Chinese young people would not forget what had happened in Nanjing.

School lessons

There is little chance of that. The atrocities carried out by the Japanese in Nanjing, and elsewhere in China during World War II, are drilled into Chinese schoolchildren.

In a speech, 17-year-old Wang Lin, head of the school’s student association, said historical events should not be allowed to simply fade from memory.

Using a well-known Chinese phrase, she said past experience, if not forgotten, is a guide to the future.

She added: “Chinese people love peace, but you will be bullied if you fall behind. This is a serious lesson passed down by our ancestors.”

Diplomatic tensions

But not everyone is as keen about remembering the past as this Chinese schoolgirl.

Although the Japanese government – and most Japanese people – acknowledge what went on in Nanjing, a small group of people claim the massacre has been fabricated.

Others say the 300,000 death toll often cited by the Chinese government is too high.

It was an issue touched upon at the Taiping ceremony by Lin Boyao, who is ethnically Chinese but has lived in Japan since 1978.

“Even today, surprisingly, there are some people who deny the Nanjing massacre is a historical fact,” he said.

“How can they be so shameless? This shows hatred for the dead and brings shame on the living.”

The debate about what exactly happened after the Japanese army entered Nanjing on 13 December is not just about how to remember the past.

Even though the two sides are increasingly close trading partners, Japan’s attitude towards World War II colours Chinese government policy to this day.

Former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s frequent trips to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours convicted war criminals as well as other war dead, soured Sino-Japanese relations for many years.

They only improved in 2006 when Koizumi handed over power to Shinzo Abe, who did not visit the shrine while he was in office – he sent a pot plant instead.

Lasting memories

Inevitably, this debate also fuels the anger of some Chinese people, a sentiment Beijing has occasionally encouraged.

In 2005, there were rare street demonstrations in several major Chinese cities over Japanese history textbooks which critics claimed whitewashed the country’s World War II record.

Despite the possible anger aroused by the anniversary, the owner of a Japanese restaurant in Nanjing said he was unconcerned.

“I’ve been here 15 years and am not worried at all. No-one talks to me about the massacre,” he told the BBC as he waved goodbye to the final customers of the evening.

But the memory of the Nanjing massacre will not simply go away, at least as long as there are survivors such as Xiang Yuansong.

Now 80, Mr Xiang was just 10 when Japanese soldiers entered what was then the capital of China.

His 25-year-old brother was killed by the invaders. He remembers looking for him among the piles of dead bodies.

“We can never forget history,” was his angry comment as he made his way home from the newly unveiled Taiping Gate monument.

NANJING MASSACRE

• December 1937 – Japanese troops invade Nanjing
• Witnesses estimate 250,000-300,000 people killed
• Reports of more than 20,000 women being raped
• Japan claims numbers are much smaller
• Some Japanese historians claim the massacre never happened
• Some of them – from Nanjing ‘s 34th Middle School – were even on hand at the Taiping ceremony to lend their support. They promised to look after the monument.

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Anxious to improve ties with Tokyo, the Chinese government sent only junior officials to a ceremony unveiling a refurbished museum documenting the event. None addressed the crowd of invited students, soldiers, and construction workers.

“There isn’t nearly the attention seen in previous years” in the state-run press, says Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst in Beijing. “There seems to have been a deliberate effort to downplay” the anniversary “tied into the state of Sino-Japanese relations and hopes for their future.”

But as leaders on both sides of the Yellow Sea seek rapprochement, conflicting memories of Imperial Japan’s eight-year occupation of China are proving “the key problem in our relations,” says Bu Ping, a historian who leads a team of Chinese and Japanese scholars seeking common ground.

“Historical events should not normally impact bilateral relations like this,” adds Huang Dahui, the head of Asian Studies at Beijing’s Renmin University. “But they do indeed have an influence.”

The horrors of the occupation are laid out in ghastly detail at the Nanjing Massacre Compatriot Victims Memorial Museum, a granite building on the site of a mass grave, parts of which have been left, strewn with skeletons, as it was found.

Reopened Thursday after two years of renovation, the museum uses photographs – many taken by Japanese soldiers – archive film, and contemporary artifacts to detail the slaughter that the Chinese authorities say left 300,000 dead and 20,000 women raped.

Though arguments continue over the death toll, “how many died is not important; the nature of the massacre is the main point,” says Zhang Xianwen, a history professor at Nanjing University who recently edited an eight-volume collection of the details of 13,000 victims.

Doubts persist in Chinese minds, Professor Zhang adds, that the Japanese authorities fully acknowledge that what Tokyo refers to as the “Nanjing Incident” was in fact “a large-scale massacre in which Japanese troops killed a lot of peaceful citizens and unarmed soldiers.”

Some right-wing Japanese nationalists deny the Nanjing Massacre ever occurred. The Japanese government, meanwhile, has never formally taken responsibility for what the Chinese side says occurred.

“There are a lot of different views about what really happened” in Nanjing, Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Mitsuo Sakaba said recently.

Japan has issued a number of general apologies for its troops’ wartime behavior, starting with its statement in 1972 normalizing relations with China that it was “keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself.”

But that and subsequent declarations did not stop former Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi and other top officials from repeatedly visiting the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo to pay homage to Japan’s war dead, including condemned war criminals.

“If they keep visiting the shrine, apologies mean nothing,” says Professor Huang. “Yasukuni is the symbol of the invasion. It is like rubbing salt in the wound.”

Since Mr. Koizumi stepped down 15 months ago, his successors have avoided going to Yasukuni, paving the way for better relations with Beijing.

Then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited China soon after taking office, and his Chinese counterpart, Wen Jiabao, returned the compliment last year. Current Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is due in Beijing next month, and Chinese President Hu Jintao is expected to go to Tokyo next April, the first presidential trip there for a decade.

Improving ties apparently dissuaded Beijing from making a major occasion of the anniversary, and from remonstrating publicly with Japan for alleged lack of contrition. “To remember the historical is to cherish the momentum of improvements so as to create a better future,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said this week.

“If Japan does not push us, the [Chinese] government will mark the anniversary in a low-key mode,” says Mr. Bu. “There is no need to mark it very loudly.”

But the way Beijing ties current relations to how history is remembered strikes some historians here as dangerous. “It is not normal that when relations are good, the governments don’t talk about history, but when they are bad, they play the history card,” says Mr. Zhang. “History is history … we should learn from it. Commemoration should be normalized, not affected by relations between the two countries.”

That is the goal Bu is pursuing with his team of 20 Chinese and Japanese historians, who are debating more than a dozen tough issues that dog bilateral relations.

Bu says “they should reach agreement on the nature of the war and the evaluation of major wartime events” in a report to be published next June. So far, he says, they have found general agreement on “historical facts,” but encountered difficulty in agreeing on interpretation.

The project is perfunctory, he says, compared with the work French and German scholars did before compiling a joint history of 20th-century Europe. “We still have a long way to go,” he admits. “But at least we have made a start.”

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“When [the Allied Powers] opened the so-called Tokyo war-crimes tribunal [after World War II], they needed evidence that Japan committed greater atrocities [than the Tokyo air raids and use of atomic bombs], so they made up the so-called Nanjing Massacre, which was completely unfounded,” declares Mr. Kase, chair of the Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanjing.

Satoru Mizushima, the director of “The Truth of Nanjing,” a soon-to-be-released film supported by such politicians as conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara, echoes Kase, who served as a special adviser to two past prime ministers. Nanjing, he says, was a “fabrication, a campaign of Communist China.”

During the Rape of Nanjing, as the event is generally known, 300,000 people were killed, 20,000 women raped, and the city ravaged, say Chinese authorities. But 70 years after Japanese soldiers took the then-Chinese capital on Dec. 13, 1937, battles over everything from numbers of casualties to the extent of the brutality in the six weeks after the Japanese marched in remain a point of contention. Japan has not, in its neighbors’ eyes, fully addressed past wrongs – the result, say some experts, of a postwar lack of examination of the emperor’s wartime role; an often-disdainful attitude toward Korea and China, which Japan occupied; and a lack of broad public awareness of wartime history.

In March, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe denied the military’s involvement in wartime sexual slavery, triggering an international uproar. In June, some 100 lawmakers of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party said that the number of those killed by Japanese troops during the Nanjing Massacre was closer to 20,000. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s repeated visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 war criminals are memorialized with the rest of Japan’s war dead, infuriated China and Korea, as have textbooks that experts say whitewash atrocities.

A vocal minority continues to go further in Japan. “I’m sure that there were absolutely no Japanese soldiers’ assaults on Chinese civilians,” says Masaru Naya, a former senior officer, at the Yasukuni meeting. Heidayu Kondo, a captain of the infantry regiment, said it was calm in the city, as did Tomeji Kita, an 89-year-old former infantry corporal.

Countering that view can be challenging. Akinori Fukuda is a leader of the Association of No More Nanjings, a Tokyo-based civic group that invited two Chinese victims to speak earlier this month and showed the not-yet-released independent film “Closed Memories” at the event, in which some Japanese soldiers acknowledge atrocities. He notes the lack of interest. “No media came here to report,” he says. “There were no TV cameras.”

“Reporting the denials sells well, while media downplay or ignore matters considered to bring discomfort,” says Hiroshi Oyama, who served as a chief attorney for Chinese compensation cases related to the war and whose civic group held symposia this year on Nanjing around the world. He was named one of the most impressive people of 2003 in a poll of Chinese media and the public.

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The commemoration, which comes as China’s government pushes to improve relations with Tokyo and avoid inflaming nationalist passions at home, brought the city to a standstill, state television showed.

The city reopened a vastly expanded memorial to the victims of the massacre long known in the West as the “Rape of Nanking.”

Air raid sirens blared at 10 a.m., followed by a moment of silence, and new artifacts testifying to the savagery of Japan’s Imperial Army went on display in the memorial’s collection.

In line with the move to boost relations with Japan, reports on the anniversary and commemorations in the entirely state-controlled media have been understated, avoiding mention of long-standing demands for greater displays of contrition from Tokyo.

That comes amid plans for President Hu Jintao to visit Japan next year — the first visit by a Chinese head of state in a decade. Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is also expected to visit China soon.

“The Chinese government hopes that on the basis of taking history as a mirror for the benefit of the future, to develop long-term good neighborliness and cooperation with Japan,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a regular news briefing.

The events that began on Dec. 13, 1937, in Nanjing are still the subject of debate and controversy.

Angered by resistance as they invaded central China, Japanese troops began a rampage that many historians generally agree ended with the slaughter of at least 150,000 civilians. Soldiers were disarmed and executed and tens of thousands of women were raped in Nanjing, then the capital of China’s Nationalist government.

China puts the number killed at 300,000, making it one of the worst atrocities of the World War II era. The official interpretation of the event as a “national shame” is used in schools and propaganda to rally Chinese behind the communist government, whose policies are portrayed as keeping China strong.

Japan has fringe groups that deny any atrocity took place, saying the massacre was a fabrication of the Communist government. Their denials and Tokyo’s more assertive foreign policy have touched off Chinese fears of a revival of Japanese militarism.

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A testament to the movie’s potential effectiveness can be seen by noticing who it has already inspired. A testament to the movie’s potential effectiveness can be seen by noticing who it has already inspired. I don’t know if somebody approached him, or if he was just inspired on his own, but Lou Reed has written two new songs, “Gravity” and “Safety Zone”, in response to the movie.

“Gravity” is a short, driving song that is more open to interpretation. Given the context of the film it feels to me like Mr. Reed is saying that gravity keeps us here, but we can choose how we act or what we do in any given situation. Since we’re here, we might as well make the best of it and follow the example of those who founded the safety zone.

The invasion of and subsequent sacking of Nanking sound like events from a more barbaric age, not the twentieth century. Then again, we don’t have to look far into our own recent past for examples of behaviour that makes Nanking look like the norm in our world instead of the aberration it should be. Think of the recent excesses in the prisons of Iraq, and a government that says it doesn’t object to the use of torture. Is the message being sent to soldiers in the field about the humanity of the people they meet much different from what the one the Japanese government gave their soldiers? We may not say “take no prisoners,” but the reduction of an enemy to sub-human status is a given.

Full story here.

International human rights day is just around the corner. Let’s remember one of the most barbaric chapters in modern history.

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• ‘Good Nazi’ hailed as China’s Schindler (0)
• Nanjing victim wins libel case (0)
• China recalls war massacre with sirens, warnings (0)
• China mourns for victims of Nanjing Massacre, wishes for eternal peace (1)
• Film remembers writer who insisted Nanking not be forgotten (0)