jessecrx

I was looking at my collection the other day and I was thinking about Schindler's List, Band of Brothers and Glory and these movies show a very upclose and personal look at some of the most horrific times in our history.... especially those concerning the Holocaust.....

I was watching the History Channel a while back and I saw a short special about the "Rape of Nanking" and the events that took place during the Japanese invasion of China. I had never heard of this stuff in school or even in the movies.....it really hit home and made me want to know more about what happened and most importantly....why.

With movies like the ones I mentioned that touch on tragedies and horrific events(yeah, even the horrible Pearl Harbor) I was wondering if any director/movie studio has had the guts to make a movie based on the Rape of Nanking.

Thanks

jessecrx

Thanks Rockmjd!

So would you consider this to be more of a documentary style film(docudrama?) or an actual movie similar to Schindler's List?

EDIT: I just read the description on DDD.com and it looks like a definite winner. Thanks again!

UAIOE

Ya know, I had always heard that the Chinese weren't big fans of the Japanese but I'd never heard anything about it except for references to the Japanese not being liked.

Untill i saw that same show about the "Rape of Nanking".

I too wonder why more isn't said in school about the Japanese occupation of China.

Grimfarrow

Well, the massacre at Nanjing is described in Japanese textbooks as an "incident". To this day, Japanese have been very effective at whitewashing the event, and a large percentage of people believe the massacre was invented. Simiarly, the whole "Comfort women" issue has been brushed aside, with the government never owning up to what happened to these women.

Psych1

Actually, most school books in Japan skip over WWII with language such as " In the late 30's a military regime took over the government and got us into a terrible war, and then in 1945 ------" It is a period of history not talked about or examined.

CuriousGeorge

Empire of the Sun

directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Christian Bale.

the invasion, and occupation, is the backdrop for this highly underrated and overlooked early Spielberg gem. Damn, I sound like a cheesy movie reviewer.

It's one of my favorite movies, nonetheless.

edit: no real 'massacre/rape of nanking' references tho'.

Jazzbutcher

On a related note, Iris Chang, author of the bestseller The Rape of Nanking killed herself recently.

Groucho

For whatever reasons, the Japanese atrocities during WW2 have been pretty much ignored by American educators. Most students are well-versed in the Holocaust, but have no idea about what went on in the Pacific arena.

Asia is still just "the other side of the world" to most of us. The fact that 21,000 people died there yesterday is nothing more than a footnote during breakfast.

cultshock

There was a series of 4 HK films made between 1988 and 1995 (the above mentioned film was the 4th of the series according to imdb) which often go by the English title MAN (or MEN) BEHIND THE SUN. These films all cover various Japanese atrocities in China before and during WWII. I'm not sure how historically accurate they are, but they are for the most part, exploitation films that tend to focus with unflinching detail on the violence, gruesome medical experiments, etc. perpetrated on the Chinese by their Japanese occupiers. I've only seen the first two of the films, but they were quite graphic (one or two scenes apparently involve real corpses, including that of a child during a autopsy scene, and there is some real animal violence depicted as well). These films certainly aren't for everyone, but they do give an apparently accurate picture of some events that took place during a point in history that is often ignored or glossed over today.

TomMiller

>For whatever reasons, the Japanese atrocities during WW2 have been pretty much ignored by American educators. Most students are well-versed in the Holocaust, but have no idea about what went on in the Pacific arena.

This is true. I can't recall how many discussions I have been in where the expansionism of the Japanese Empire has been re-imagined to be some sort of justifiable anti-imperialist, anti-western crusade, as opposed to a naked land grab with atrocity levels approaching those of Nazi Germany.

I'm not sure why this is. My suspicion is that it is partly a reaction to the anti-Japanese racism that swept the US during the war. I think there is/was a fear that the behavior of the Japanese would be used to justify racism in a way that Germans were somehow immune to. Also, Germany's own introspection on the subject (in contrast to Japanese denial), plus the Nuremburg trials, the emigration of many Holocaust survivors to the US, and the greater magnitude of German atrocities were factors as well, all leading to more attention paid to Germany. As such, I think Japanese atrocities were mostly eclipsed by the attention paid to Germany's.

But there is room in modern history books for both. I haven't paged through high school text books for many years, but I am surprised that Nanking in particular isn't getting more attention. It certainly gets the attention of historians.

Hiro11

No shit. Before I married my wife and traveled to Korea, I had no idea that Japan occupied Korea for 35 years (1910-1945) in a particularly brutal fashion. What's funny to me is how most Americans lump Chinese/Japanese/Koreans into the same bucket and are total unaware of the major animosities and tensions between the ethnicities.

How much "Modern Asian History" (or "modern African history" for that matter) did you take in high school?

Eplicon

My dad lived in China during World War II, so he easily related to the atrocities in "The Rape of Nanking" since he witnessed firsthand account a lot of similar incidents. One story he told me was that during the war, there was a shortage of blood and Japanese soldiers would simply grab kids off the street to use them for blood transfusions. If I remember correctly, they would drain all the blood out, thus killing the person in the process. My dad said he was nearly one of the casualties when one soldier grabbed him for such a purpose. But he screamed and cried out for his mother so ferverntly and loudly that the young soldier, either out of compassion or being just as scared as my father was, let him go.