City Of Life And Death

Friday I went to a press screening for Lu Chuan's 2008 film, City of Life And Death, which is opening in NYC (May 11th) and L.A. (June 17th) after years of delay, and starkly depicts a snapshot, albeit an epic one, of the holocaust described in Iris Chang's classic book, The Rape of Nanking (1998). A big-- and surprise-- hit in China and Hong Kong two years ago, it's hard to imagine the movie will go beyond art houses in the U.S. So far it's scheduled to play in a dozen American cities, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Denver Atlanta, Honolulu, Boston, Minneapolis, St Louis, Sante Fe, Albuquerque... Generally, American film goers aren't interested in East Asia and aren't interested in 1937, which is where and when the film takes place. When I first wrote about the Rape of Nanking in 2007, there wasn't a single Digg.

The film is in Chinese, Japanese, English and German. It wasn't any kind of a hindrance. One of the earliest scenes is of victorious Japanese soldiers pulling down a statue of Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, in a scene that would be reminiscent to any American of American soldiers pulling down the statue of Saddam Hussein once Baghdad had been captured. Thought through, it isn't a flattering comparison of course, but that's probably what Lu had in mind. For those not familiar with what went down in Nanking, then the capital of China, when Japan captured it in 1937, allow me to quote from the press kit:

"The Nanjing Massacre is a very special memory for every Chinese person," says City of Life and Death director, writer and executive producer Lu Chuan. Though born decades after the massacre, Lu Chuan was, like the rest of his countrymen, thoroughly indoctrinated in the official history of the 1937 crimes that clamed an estimated 300,000 victims, from boyhood on. "Every Chinese citizen knows that history," he says... The Second Sino-Japanese War, as Imperial Japan's pre-WWII assault on China is known, was the culmination of half a century of enmity between newly industrialized Japan and the fledging Republic of China. As the Imperial Army prepared to assault the Republic's capital Nanjing on December 9 of 1937, the mood amongst Japanese foot soldiers and commanders alike was vengeful. "The reason that the [10th Army] is advancing to Nanking quite rapidly," wrote a Japanese journalist embedded with the Imperial Army at the time, "is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish."

Emboldened by their swift victory on December 13, the Japanese occupation spiraled into a level of savagery at Nanjing that would claim an estimated 300,000 Chinese lives in just 6 weeks. The thousands of victorious, young, battle-weary Japanese soldiers had been raised and trained within the xenophobic social order of an empire that had never occupied a foreign capital. Emperor Hirohito had declared [much the way George W. Bush did more recently] that the Imperial Army was not subject to war crimes laws, and thousands of young Chinese men, all assumed to be Chinese soldiers, were rounded up and shot, burned alive, blown up with landmines, bayoneted or drowned in the Yangtze River.

Eyewitness accounts detailed daily acts of savagery and barbarism perpetrated by the Japanese on the rest of the city population. According to the New York Times' correspondent on the scene, "The killing of civilians was widespread. Some of the victims were aged men, women and children. Nearly every building was entered by Japanese soldiers, often under the eyes of their officers, and then men took whatever they wanted.

"After killing the Chinese soldiers who threw down their arms and surrendered, the Japanese combed the city for men in civilian garb who they suspected of being former soldiers. In one building in the refugee zone 400 men were seized. They were marched off, tied in batches of 50, between lines of riflemen and machine gunners, to the execution ground." A Japanese correspondent described massive execution lines, piles of burning corpses and a "contest" held between Japanese officers to see who could collect the most severed heads.

Gang rapes, abductions, lethal sexual assaults and dismemberment of Chinese men, women and children of nearly every age (some pregnant) were documented by foreign residents of Nanjing into 1938. American missionary Minnie Vautrin compiled a detailed diary of the civilian atrocities she witnessed during the massacre. "In my wrath, I wished I had the power to smite them for their dastardly work," she wrote of Nanjing's captors.

"How ashamed women of Japan would be if they knew these tales of horror."

History and human nature proves her wrong-- not about Japan or about women but about the impact of war on civilians back in the homeland. How ashamed were most Americans about similar atrocities in Vietnam? How ashamed are we about what our military is doing today in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya? The people there have been dehumanized by the mass media, just like the Chinese were in the Japanese media. Who cares about ridding the earth of vermin? And Lu told the story of Nanking from a more universal perspective than just bashing the Japanese. Maybe he'd listened to Donovan's Universal Soldier when he was growing up.

"In China," he said, we are educated to see one very basic and simple truth-- from the time that they're young, everyone in China is educated to hate the Japanese. Japanese troops were very brutal, so Japanese people are very brutal and we have to hate the Japanese, It's textbook, you know? They're not human beings; they raped women; they raped very young girls; they even raped their own women. But two years of research and writing some ideas changed in my heart. I found the basic truth that the massacre is not a special talent of the Japanese people. It's a talent of human beings, you know? All kinds of people kill all kinds of people. The devil is always in everyone's heart, so as human beings we need to be very careful. It's not just a tragedy for the Chinese killed in Nanjing, it's a tragedy for the Japanese soldiers who killed them. The Japanese are normal, ordinary people just like us. War is the thing that makes people transform into animals."

I guess this could be a good time to start talking about Republican insistence on American exceptionalism... but it's too ugly in light of the film. Here's the trailer: