For me, the most memorable moment of Nanking, the new
documentary by Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, comes in an
interview with a very old man who, in 1937, was a young Japanese
soldier — and a self-confessed rapist. Now he says he regrets his
rapes — just a few among the thousands which were carried out by
him and his comrades at bayonet point on helpless Chinese
girls.
“It’s better when you’re both into it,” he says.
I don’t know whether in Japanese his words have the
translation’s wildly inappropriate echoes of the hook-up culture of
today, but even if they don’t, he is pretty clearly claiming some
kind of retrospective self-justification from sexual freedoms that
would have been scarcely imaginable at that place and time. Such
cold-blooded insouciance is a sort of latter-day equivalent of the
plea of Barabas, the title character of Marlowe’s Jew of
Malta, in mitigation of the charge of fornication: “But that
was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead” — which,
probably, the ex-soldier could also have said. Nanking
itself stands against such disingenuous efforts to minimize the
significance of a horrible crime that is otherwise in danger of
being forgotten as the last of both victims and perpetrators die
off.
Even the name of the city is retained from the 1930s instead of
being updated to the more modern “Nanjing.” It helps to fix in our
minds what happened there 70 years ago last week. After the
establishment of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in
Manchuria in 1931, Japan had sought further to neutralize the power
of the weak Chinese nationalist government, which was the only
thing standing between it and complete dominance of China.
Full-scale war finally broke out between Japan and nationalist
forces in July 1937, and by December Japanese troops were at the
gates of Nanking, then the Chinese capital. Fleeing Chinese
soldiers threw down their weapons and tried to disguise themselves
as civilians among the ever-growing refugee population of the
city.
Under the pretext of seeking out the hidden enemy, Japanese
soldiers burned and looted, murdered and raped their way through
the capital for weeks. Estimates of the death toll range up to more
than 300,000. The only slight check upon their murderous
depredations was the presence there of a number of foreign
nationals belonging to then-neutral countries whom the Japanese
were mostly scrupulous about leaving unmolested. Many were American
missionaries. Messrs. Guttentag and Sturman have taken the letters
and diaries of a dozen or so of these people, all of whom
attempted, often successfully, to intervene with the Japanese
authorities to rescue individual Chinese from the rampaging
soldiers, and hired Hollywood actors to speak their words to the
camera, giving a first-hand account of the massacres.
Among the most impressive of these are Minnie Vautrin (Mariel
Hemingway), the dean of a Christian girls’ school who faced down
the Japanese and managed to keep her pupils out of the hands of the
murderers and rapists, and Dr. Bob Wilson (Woody Harrelson), a
Harvard-trained physician who risked his own life to give sanctuary
to some of the fleeing Chinese soldiers in the American-run
hospital. Another is John Rabe (Jurgen Prochnow), a German
businessman who saw his Nazi sympathies as being not only
consistent with his humanitarian efforts but useful to them by
giving him leverage with the Japanese.
The stories of these Western observers are harrowing enough, but
they are intercut with contemporary film footage smuggled out of
Nanking by one of the missionaries, George Fitch (John Getz), and
interviews with survivors as well as a few of the perpetrators,
such as the rapist mentioned above. Not many who see this film will
ever forget the emotion with which an old man describes being
forced to watch as a Japanese soldier bayoneted his mother and his
baby brother, still at the breast, before his eyes when he was
seven years old, or the old woman who tells what it was like to be
raped when she was only twelve.
Yet on standing back a bit from this emotion, you’ve got to ask
yourself just what the filmmakers thought they were doing here by
putting it up on the screen. At the end they say the film was made
not in hatred of the Japanese but as a reminder of “how horrible
war is,” and perhaps that’s all you can hope to show by such means.
Yet this seems to me a cop-out. It treats “war” almost as a force
of nature (or an act of God) and not as a product of human choices
that can be both right and wrong. In other words, if war is
horrible it is also sometimes necessary. Immediately after these
words, there is a card that tells us of George Fitch’s pleas to the
U.S. and other Western powers to do something to stop the Japanese
atrocities. “But the world stood silent.” You can’t read that
otherwise than as a reproach, yet it is also an implicit demand
that anti-Japanese forces should have gone to war,
horrible or not.
War is horrible all right, but so is the wickedness that war
allows some warriors — but not others — to choose. That’s what we
need to keep our eye on.
