Looking up at the top desk shelf...
Nope never seen any evidence of this atrocity thing.
/Duke BOT
Posted on 11/26/2007 6:58:28 AM PST by Abathar
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan's wartime leaders, hanged as war criminals, were martyrs like Jesus Christ, says the Japanese director of an upcoming film backed by nationalists that argues that the 1937 Nanjing massacre was a fabrication by China.
Satoru Mizushima's "The Truth About Nanjing" is the latest of many films about Japan's invasion and occupation of the city which has been a thorn in Japan-China ties for seven decades due to wildly differing accounts about casualties.
Backed by Japanese nationalist figures, including Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara, and partly funded by donations, the film is billed as part documentary and part fictionalized account of the final 24 hours in the lives of Japanese leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal and hanged for war crimes.
"They resemble Jesus Christ who was nailed to the cross in order to bear the sins of the world. They died bearing all of old Japan's good and bad parts and headed for the gallows," Mizushima told Reuters.
"My film is about real Japanese and how they faced their deaths. In a way, they are the last 'Seven Samurai'." he added, referring to Japanese director Akira Kurosawa's classic movie where a group of samurais battle bandits to protect helpless farmers. Seven Japanese were hanged for war crimes.
Mizushima's movie, to be released next spring, has been condemned by the Chinese government, but the director said his research had proved Beijing's report of 300,000 dead was wrong.
"The Chinese government's position now is, 'Let's strike a bargain as long as you admit it was a massacre.' But we refuse to allow that simply because the whole thing is a lie and we don't accept politically motivated lies," he said.
OTHERS ARE PROPAGANDA
The Allied tribunal after World War Two estimated that about 142,000 civilians and prisoners of war were killed when the Japanese captured the city, then known as Nanking and the capital of Nationalist China.
Japan does not present any figure, although it acknowledges that many civilians were killed by invading Japanese troops.
Mizushima says China made up the casualties in order to gain the upper hand in world politics, and also discredits several witness accounts by Westerners who were in Nanjing at the time, calling them communist "spies."
Seven different films are scheduled to be made about Nanjing this year, the 70th anniversary of its capture, including a Chinese movie based on Iris Chang's best-selling book on Nanjing. Mizushima called most of these films 'propaganda'.
"I don't want to make a film in the same shrill, hypocritical humanist vein the Chinese are trying to sell to the world and about how they were destroyed by Japanese militarism and how they fought to protect their families and freedom," Mizushima said.
Post-war ties between China and Japan have been bedeviled by what Beijing says has been Tokyo's refusal to admit to the wartime atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers.
Relations turned icy under former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, largely due to his annual visits to a Tokyo shrine where convicted war criminals are honored along with Japan's millions of war dead.
Koizumi stepped down in September 2006, and his successors have managed to repair ties.
As part of their efforts, Chinese and Japanese historians are working on a project to narrow the two countries' differences in perceptions of history.
Ping for later...
Not every mass murdering vermin in WW2 was a Nazi.
This from the country who’s war criminals boasted they ate prisoner’s livers? Read Fly Boys, or better yet, go here: http://www.archives.gov/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf
Looking up at the top desk shelf...
Nope never seen any evidence of this atrocity thing.
/Duke BOT
Hmm so it is the film maker’s position that Japanese Imperial Army officers never led any massacres of POW’s and civilians?
As an American, I can recall he Bataan Death March and some of the History behind it, so for me, the Japanese have -0- credibility at playing at apologetics for some of the things that they did in the name of their Emperor.....
Well, Hey, we got guys cranking out “Lions for Lambs”, “Rendition” and “Redacted”.
A least he didn't compare them to The Beatles...
And who says mass murder denial is just for neo-nazis?
You make a very good point there, I hope history is as harsh to them as it will be to this idiot.
US Navy Admiral “Bull” Halsey: (after the attack) “Before we’re through with them the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell”.
The next military balance of power shift in Asia will see Japan serving as China’s bitch in a manner equal to or greater than Japan’s treatment of Chinese and Korean civilians during WWII.
The Japanese never admit blame.
Regards
Does anyone know of a reliable reason for Iris Chang’s suicide?
I blame em.............war POS’s
Add the hideous “Valley of the Elah” to that list. This one has the raping murdering American troops AND a Jewish organ stealing doctor. Big hit in the islamic world.
The short answer is "depression", but that's a trite and superficial pretext of an explanation.
I will always believe that it was because the sheer depth and immensity of the evil and depravity in which she immersed herself in order to do her research simply overwhelmed her...
Her suicide was such a tragedy. :-(
I agree. I also think that her acute sensitivity to injustice throughout her life, even as a child, magnified the despair she felt for persecuted people.
Writers in Davis, CA told me she suffered from bipolarism.
People fail to understand that national or racial guilt is something confined almost entirely to white Western nations. Even very educated, intelligent, and cultured nations such as Japan have large numbers of people (even elected officials) who deny past atrocities. And the rest of the population is mostly of the opinion that even if things like Bataan and Nanking did occur (which they did) they’re old history and we should just forget about it.
It’s totally unlike the West, where we wallow in our past sins, real and in many cases imagined.
I love Japan and the Japanese people. But these crimes did occur and they should admit to it.
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