20100328 Japanese director documents accounts of Nanjing Massacre

Osaka, Japan (dpa) – When Tomokazu Takeda, a young Japanese director, was asked to help produce a documentary on the Rape of Nanjing, he only recognized the name, but did not know what had happened in that Chinese city.

   And he never imagined the work would lead him to memories of his late grandfather.

   “I recalled one sentence that contained the words in our textbook. I never thought of what Japan had done,” Takeda said.

   The 84-minute independent film Torn Memories of Nanjing is to be presented Tuesday at the 34th Hong Kong International Film Festival. The film consists mainly of vivid accounts of the atrocities by Chinese victims and former soldiers of Japan‘s Imperial Army.

   On December 13, 1937, Japanese troops marched into Nanjing, the Chinese capital at the time, and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese people including many civilians in a six-week orgy of violence.

   That violence left 300,000 people dead and 20,000 women raped, Chinese authorities say. In Japan the number of dead is believed to be much lower. Many Japanese including some historians and journalists even flatly deny the slaughter, calling the events an “incident.”

   To counter such claims, Tamaki Matsuoka, a former elementary public school teacher and co-director of the film, spent a decade interviewing more than 300 Chinese victims and 250 Japanese soldiers.

   Soldiers involved in the killing “were talking vividly as if it happened yesterday,” Takeda, who is in his early 30s, said.

   Juhei Teramoto, a former soldier, said in the film, “[In Nanjing,] superior officers told us to commit robbery, murder, rape and arson and do anything.”

   Takeda was even shocked to hear some former soldiers interviewed brag about how many women they had raped.

   “You know, we were young men and we were the ones who might die the next day, so we wanted to sleep with a girl,” Teramoto said.

   Many of the soldiers, Takeda said, “still did not see Chinese people as human beings. It seems they had no opportunities to correct or reflect on that view after the war.”

   However, when a 90-year-old former Japanese soldier travelled to Nanjing with Takeda and Matsuoka and went right to the monument commemorating victims, he collapsed in tears, the director recalled.

   The soldiers’ stories made Takeda remember his grandfather, who was dispatched as a soldier to Nanjing after the 1937 killings.

   His grandfather was usually calm but once he got drunk he became very violent, Takeda said. “My parents told me that grandfather apparently was haunted by Chinese ghosts from time to time. And he was often screaming, ‘Chinese are going to attack me,‘” Takeda said.

   Like his grandfather, very few former Japanese soldiers passed on their wartime experiences to the next generation, he said. “Had they talked about it, that would have been much more educational than what we learn at school.”

   Meanwhile, people in China continue to teach the next generation about their suffering during the war, he said. “So, there has been a widening gap between the two countries in terms of their understanding of the war.”

   When Takeda told acquaintances in his age group about the film, some of them told him not to get into that topic and others said China was also in the wrong.

   “They seem to confuse the present with the past and they just want to talk about a ‘good Japan,’” he said.

   That view seems to typify a lack of broad public awareness of wartime history in Japan, which emphasizes sufferings such as the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and ignores the actions of the Japanese abroad.

   “I believe humans want to face in a direction where they feel comfortable,” Takeda said.

   When Takeda visited several Chinese victims, he continued to wonder what his grandfather had done there, he said.

   But then, some Chinese reminded him that the Japanese soldiers were also victims, a reminder probably for him as the representative of a younger generation.

   However, Takeda doubted they would say the same thing to the soldiers themselves, as many victims were still afraid of older Japanese.

   “We were told to fight for the sake of the emperor, but we were actually fooled into going to war,” Teramoto said.