“I went to a bookstore where everything was in French, and the only thing they had in English was 80 days’ worth of old New York Times,” Ted Leonsis (COL ’77) said, reminiscing about vacationing with his family in St. Barts in 2005. While browsing through the issues, he came across the obituary of Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking, who committed suicide at the age of thirty-six. Leonsis threw the issue into the trash, but the obituary remained visible; he eventually fished the paper out of the garbage and tucked it into his briefcase.
His interest piqued by a quick Google search, Leonsis purchased The Rape of Nanking, as well as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe and American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin.
Nanking has been called “the forgotten Holocaust.” On December 13, 1937, the city now known as Nanjing—then China’s capital—fell to the invading Japanese Imperial Army. Over the next six weeks, members of the Japanese military executed at least 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war and raped at least 20,000 women, among other war crimes.
“I was stunned,” Leonsis said. “Why wasn’t anyone [in the United States] talking about this?”
Nanking is the first of Leonsis’ “filmanthropy” works, a term he coined to refer to projects that could shed light on important issues around the world, raising awareness and increasing discussion, volunteerism and activism. The documentary intercuts black and white footage of the air raids on the city and grainy images of broken bodies with firsthand accounts of the violence by survivors and perpetrators alike.
The testimonies make the most poignant moments of the film. In one, a survivor relives the memory of watching a soldier stab his mother and baby brother with a bayonet; in another, the camera lingers a bit too long over the flickering light of a cigarette all-too-casually smoked by a former Japanese soldier seemingly at ease with his past brutalities. The effect is chilling.
Nanking’s only fault is the use of contemporary actors to portray John Rabe, Bob Wilson and Minnie Vautrin, foreigners who stayed in Nanjing during the occupation and helped to establish the Nanking Safety Zone. The words that Jürgen Prochnow, Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway recite are real, collected from diaries and journal entries, but the impact of these words cannot compare to the recounted memories of the elderly Chinese civilians and Japanese soldiers.
Nanking sheds light on this forgotten event in history, but this is not to say that it explains the underlying reasons for the massacre. It is a testament to the strength of the film that viewers are left wondering how teenagers buy into a mentality so perverse that it permits rape of twelve-year-old girls for sport, how officers can place bets on how many people their swords can cut down, or how a small group of noble men and women can still feel like failures after saving tens of thousands of people. The film contains equal parts human depravity and human courage, and manages to show how intricately the two are linked.
The Nanking Massacre continues to be a point of contention between the Chinese and Japanese governments. The Massacre isn’t mentioned in Japanese history books, and some nationalists even refer to it simply as an “incident.” Furthermore, several of the military leaders who were convicted of war crimes are still honored at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. To this day, the Japanese government has never issued an apology for the atrocities committed at Nanjing.
However, as Leonsis makes sure to stress, “This is not an anti-Japanese film. This is an anti-war film. Any country can take a lesson that nothing good happens when one occupies another by force. The people interviewed in this film—none of them were angry. All just wanted peace.”
Nanking opens on February 15 at the Avalon Theater, located at 5612 Connecticut Ave NW. Showtimes can be found on the Avalon’s website at http://www.theavalon.org/.
