Nanking – A Powerful Documentary Inspired by the Late Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking

When I first saw the bombs landed on Iraq’s capital Baghdad on CNN, I felt the tears at the back of my eyes. I had the same feeling when I watched the Japanese in “Nanking” dropping the bombs onto the city of China, Nanking – even a more intense feeling. I was gasping for air. It is hard to watch because wartime documentary films are not Hollywood films. Those were the real houses built by real people lived by real people and the corpses scattered on the ground were real. The crying of the survived ones was as real as those who were dead. Since young, I spent lots of time reading the history of China during WWII – especially on the Japanese invasion. The atrocity of the war and the suffering of the people. I have read pages and pages of historical articles and I have probably seen more gruesome pictures of the execution of the Chinese by the Japanese than I should have at that young age. One picture that still vividly lives in my mind till today is a sea of dead semi-naked Chinese women lying flat on the ground with long sticks inserted into their private parts. I read that the Japanese wouldn’t want to waste bullets on Chinese women, sticks would do the job.

War is horrible and of course, I don’t despise the Japanese (though I am angry with them for not admiting what they have done in the past till today). I despise the war. The documentary film “Nanking” was played out by a group of contemprary actors taking the role of the missionaries, university professors, doctors, and businessmen. These foreigners witnessed the cruelty of war and they stayed behind to establish a safety zone for the Chinese refugees in Nanking. The interviews of the war survivors were conducted with the real people who did survive the war. Hearing them recounting what they had been through made me want to tear. The emotion is so real and overwhelming. These are people of over 80 years of age and you could visualize the scenes with their words.

“Nanking” also displays some of the video clips taken during the war and some, I would suppose, are unofficial interviews with the Japanese soldiers. What “Nanking” has brought out is aligned with my expectation on how the history should be told. At the end of the film, my friend and I turned to each other and hope that we won’t see a war at our doorsteps in our generation, and the next, and the next after, and the …