Nanking

In the news: Nanking, an documentary film about the Nanjing Massacre in which some 300,000 Chinese were murdered made the rounds to rave review at the Sundance festival (Google Sundance for more info) last week.

Also, "China has reacted angrily to plans by Japanese nationalists to make a documentary describing as a myth the massacre of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops in 1937.

"The film, entitled The Truth About Nanjing, will insist that the massacre never took place, despite evidence presented at the postwar Tokyo war crimes tribunals that Japanese troops slaughtered at least 142,000 people when they invaded Nanjing, then the capital of nationalist China." (China angered by Nanjing massacre film, Guardian, January 25, 2007).

Nanking is produced by Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of America Online and owner of Washington Capitals hockey team. Leonsis is said to have been inspired by The Rape of Nanking, a best-selling novel by Iris Chang, who committed suicide in 2004. The Japanese movie will be made by right-wing nationalists who have always denied everything.

On Saturday, I watched Nightmare in Nanking, another documentary (by Rhawn Joseph and Joy Wu) on the subject. The first time for me to sit through such a film, and I had to take a break halfway through to recover from the sickness some of the film's grisly images had given me.

Right now, we are in the middle of marking the 70th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, which happened from December 1937 to February 1938.

All of this reminds me a trivial question a certain X-gener (one who was born after 1980 in China) asked me about translation. In news reports, he said, he had seen the horrible events 70 years ago being variously described as Nanjing Massacre, the Holocaust of Asia or Nanjing Incident. He hence asked whether he could translate 南京大屠杀into Nanjing Incident instead of Nanjing Massacre. He was asking if, in effect, he would sound "more objective, impartial" with the word "incident".

My reply to him then I forgot. My answer now is NO, unless you are someone who has no conscience and no sense of proportion whatsoever.

An incident is any event that is unusual. Man A robs Woman B and runs away with her purse and an I-Pod without causing her bodily harm. Policemen C captures Man A and has the purse and I-Pod returned to Woman B, who happily goes with the two men to the police station to record the incident. Each gives their own account of what happened. That's an incident. That's being objective by calling it an incident. But to call the Nanking Massacre a mere incident? That's way too X-generation (young and ignorant) to be sensible, too cool to be comfortable.

After all, we're talking about civilians being buried or burned alive by the tens and by the hundreds at a time, daily and for three months on end. We're talking about people being tied onto posts and knifed to deaths by Japanese soldiers for practice. We're talking about women being raped to deaths, about pregnant mothers being raped and having their bellies sliced open, one of them having her unborn baby poked out of the womb and raised up in the air on the tip of a bayonet (these are just a few of the graphic images presented by the Nightmare in Nanking).

So then, why not just call Nanjing what it was, a massacre. I don't think anyone possibly can sound unkind to the Japanese just TALKING about Nanking whatever terrible word you may come up with in describing it. In fact, I believe people settled on the word "massacre" because they failed to find a word evil enough to match all the terrible crimes perpetrated by the finest young men of Japan at that time. If you found a worse-sounding word, have no scruple - use it - the Japs would more than deserve it, I assure you.

That said, I thought of calling those Japanese soldiers beasts, but realized that no class of beast could ever have done what those soldiers did. So I've decided to be kind and call them what they were, the finest of their generation in Japan at the time - the finest were brought up to serve the Emperor and sent to war in his name, for whatever obnoxious reasons.

Some of the pictures I saw in the Nightmare in Nanking will be seen again in Nanking, but perhaps not in the so-called The Truth About Nanjing. Denying the whole thing altogether is what the cowardly right-wingers are trying to do to their young men today in Japan.

Their finest young men these right-wingers will perhaps want to sent to China again, and the Koreas, the Philippines, the Malays and Indo-China, and Pearl Harbor also.

That's not what Japanese young men need today. What the Japanese young men need today is exactly what the Chinese young men need. They all need to recognize that Nanking happened, that Pearl Harbor was real (I don't think even the right-wingers dispute that), that victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saw, for a reason, something bright and then naught. They need to recognize it and understand the whys behind all of these horrible, er, "incidents".

I'm not advocating hatred for the Japanese. That's too late. I'm advocating knowledge of history and lessons from it. I'm advocating good begets good and Nanking begets Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the bombing of Tokyo, something like that. The way the right-wingers are going, I'm afraid "something like that" may happen to Japan again. The Japanese youngsters all need to know that.

The Chinese young men, the X- and Y-geners, for their part, need to sit through a film such as Nanking, The Nightmare in Nanking, even The Truth About Nanjing and feel very sick afterward. That will be their first step taken towards making sure that Nanking will never happen again.

And don't forget to read the book by the late Iris Chang.