The Japanese lost World War II. But they might have won the peace.
Their allies in Germany continue to confront their own guilt. Even those nations that fought for democracy still struggle with the decisions they made to win that war. Symposia are still held on the firebombing of Dresden. No American August goes by without soul-searching essays on the decision to drop the bomb.
But somehow Japan emerged with much of its past, and crimes, erased. Now "Nanking," a new documentary, brings one of them back into the light.
Originally China's capital, by the late '30s Nanking was bustling and prosperous, with a large Western population. Then, in 1937, the Japanese invaded. Within the first six weeks of occupation, as many as 200,000 Chinese were brutally killed; more than 20,000 women and girls were raped.
And yet there were those who stood against it. The most unlikely hero turned out to be John Rabe, a German businessman. A bizarrely naive Nazi, he actually wrote German officials back home, thinking that if Hitler only knew what terrible things were happening, he would stop them. But when the Fuehrer -- not surprisingly -- chose not to intervene, this Eastern Schindler did.
Along with the local American missionaries, Rabe declared their neighborhood a "Safety Zone." Its peculiar international status was declared -- both the swastika and the Stars and Stripes fluttered from windows -- and the frightened Chinese were invited in.
And when the Japanese soldiers came after them, the Nazi and the missionaries stood in the door and barred their way, armed with nothing but their outrage.
It would be fascinating to know what kind of man could support a genocide at home yet fight another one abroad, yet Rabe is dead now and beyond our questions. This documentary's solution -- to bring on costumed actors as "witnesses," reading from their letters -- is a clumsy one. An atrocity which has been so loudly denied by those who committed it doesn't need artful fictions to muddy the waters further.
And there's so much primary material here, too. Newsreels show the march into the city, the gutting of its commercial center, the proudly preening invaders. Other, riskier footage -- including the famous "Magee film," shot by an Episcopal priest and smuggled into America -- details the murders and mutilations.
And then there are the real witnesses, children and teenagers then, in their 80s and 90s now. A man who saw his mother slaughtered still cries uncontrollably as he tells the story. Retired soldiers still talk calmly of the unarmed men they shot in the back, of the women they brutally assaulted. One expresses regret, but only because the sex wasn't very good; it's better, he admits now, when both people want it.
The other villains of World War II long ago confronted their guilt. Even the acknowledged heroes still wrestle with whether they did too little, or too much. Only the Japanese government -- which prefers to brush Nanking off as an "incident," while emphasizing their nation's own atomic victimhood -- refuses to face the facts.
A dozen more films like this and perhaps they'll have to.
Ratings note: The film contains graphic atrocity footage.
Stephen Whitty may be reached at email@example.com or (212) 790-4435.