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.
One of the eyewitnesses was a NAZI businessman, John Rabe:
http://www.amazon.com/Good-Man-Nanking-Diaries-John/dp/037540211X
Rabe was a German businessman who saved the lives of 250,000 Chinese during the infamous siege of Nanking. But Rabe was also a member of the Nazi party and a man whose motto was “Right or wrong-my country.”
When the Japanese air raids began over Nanking, where Rabe was regional director of the German industrial giant Siemens, Rabe’s wife, along with most foreigners, evacuated the city. But Rabe stayed to protect his Chinese staff and co-workers; as he put it, “I cannot bring myself for now to betray the trust these people have put in me.” As the magnitude of the Japanese assault became apparent, Rabe, along with American doctors and missionaries, created an International Committee whose purpose was to set up a Neutral Zone where Chinese civilians could take refuge. Six hundred of the poorest Chinese were soon living in Rabe’s own house, symbolically protected by an enormous canvas painted with a swastika; thousands more took shelter in the arbitrary Neutral Zone that Rabe continually begged the Japanese to respect. Lacking food and medical supplies, Rabe was mobilized to continue his good works by the atrocities he witnessed; his descriptions of the sadistic rapes, torture and slaughter perpetrated by Japanese soldiers are chillingly vivid.
I wonder how they blew his testimony off?
No one seems to care about the 80 million chinese murdered by Mao and his chicom thugs. no one was punished. No admissions were made. We trade with them as if nothing ever happened. Why?
Good point, I have often thought of that myself.
I watched a chop-sockey movie last night, Hero, starting Jet-Li.
It was a thinly disguised propaganda flick that said the Party had the right to kill any number of people in the name of “Our Land” and its enemies needed to recognize this fact.
I suppose the reason we still trade with ‘em is that the PRC killed 80 million of its own people, rather than invading someone else.
You’re right.
I've got some good Chinese movies on my Freeper page that were banned by the commies or which somehow managed to slip through the cracks. The Blue Kite is an excellent film.
Well to be fair we have Americans who all but worship the Nazis and Hitler, and some of them make movies, too.
The real irony is the Japan did so much damage to the nationalists in China that they helped pave the way for the ChiComms, who are now a major threat to Japan...
bump
I guess Japan has their own Michael Moore, and a subset of the population equally hungry for his spew.
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