Nanjing: Memory and Oblivion (review)

As its title suggests, this film is less about the Japanese massacre of civilians in Nanking (aka Nanjing) in 1937 than about the struggle between those who insist it be remembered and those who want it erased from history. Unsurprisingly, though, the film spends a significant amount of its running time presenting the facts under dispute. Otherwise, how would we know what the fuss is all about? Thus the film, as in almost any conceivable film of this sort, takes the side of those who wish the massacre to be remembered. (One wonders how a denialist would make a documentary in support of his position. How could he show what is under dispute except by showing it, and thus establishing it? Documentaries are suitable for evidencing a positive, not a negative.)

The film presents the widely accepted version of what happened: in 1937, the Japanese army marched into Nanking and, over a period of weeks, slaughtered somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand men, women, and children not just indiscriminately but sadistically. Director Prazan assembles his account of the atrocities through interviews with survivors and Japanese veterans, photographs and amateur film footage, newsreel footage, and contemporary newspaper accounts.

In the midst of the savagery recounted in this part of the film, two particularly unsettling stories emerge. One of them, sadly ironic, is about one John Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party and head of Siemens’ Nanking branch. He volunteered to head a “safety zone” which, although frequently violated, harbored thousands of defenseless Chinese. He alerted Berlin to what was happening, but according to the film’s narrator, Hitler was indifferent to the fate of the Nanking Chinese. After the war, in Germany, Rabe was prosecuted for having been a member of the Nazi Party.

The other story is that of two Japanese commanding officers who made what they considered an amusing, gentlemanly bet about which of them would be the first personally to kill a hundred Chinese. When one of the officers clocked in with a hundred and six victims and the other just one less, their competition was deemed to close to call, and so the goal was raised to a hundred and fifty.

That this gruesome contest was reported on with enthusiasm in Japanese newspapers serves as evidence that it most probably happened. But the broader battle over the extent or even the reality of the Nanking massacre strikingly resembles, in structure, the battle over the historical truth of the Holocaust, and is at some points tied to it. Apparently decades passed before survivors in particular and Chinese in general felt like making permanent witness to it. Only in the 1980s was a memorial to the massacre finally established in Nanking, and it was inspired by Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem. The memorial honors three “righteous foreigners,” one of them John Rabe, who risked their lives to help save Chinese and, in one case, bear witness to their suffering by surreptitiously filming it.

A difference is that while the Holocaust was perpetrated by a government on its own people (even if it regarded them as alien), the Nanking massacre was inflicted by a foreign regime, one which still is reluctant to own up to its country’s responsibility for it. The attempt to minimize or erase Nanking from Japanese history has made considerable headway. Supporters and sympathizers are apparently numerous and include artists, journalists, and political leaders. The film also presents some Japanese who are determined to force their countrymen to face the truth of Nanking. Their difficulty, as one of them sadly notes, is that in Germany it is a crime to deny the Holocaust, but there’s no such ban in Japan.

Whether criminalizing the denialists’ claims is a wise policy or an ultimately counterproductive one is a question the film avoids. In any case, it’s not cheering to witness the lengths to which people and countries will go in order to deny or minimize history, and to...