'Good Nazi of Nanjing' Sparks Debate

A film about a member of the Nazi party who saved thousands of Chinese during the massacre in Nanjing recently opened in Germany. The BBC's Zoe Murphy looks at the possible impact this unlikely hero's story may have on Sino-Japanese relations.

On Christmas Eve in 1937, German businessman John Rabe visited the mortuary in China's then capital, Nanjing.

He later described in his diary the charred body of a civilian man whose eyes had been gouged out, and a boy of perhaps seven, whose corpse was punctured with bayonet wounds.

"I wanted to see these atrocities with my own eyes, so that I can speak as an eyewitness later," he wrote. "A man cannot be silent about this kind of cruelty!"

Japanese troops had stormed the capital, carrying out mass executions and raping tens of thousands of local women and girls, in a six-week orgy of violence that became known as the Rape of Nanjing.

Risking his life, Rabe remained in China and, along with a handful of Westerners, set up a "safety zone" in Nanjing that is thought to have prevented the massacre of more than 200,000 Chinese during one of the bloodiest episodes of the Japanese invasion.

As Germany and Japan were allies, Rabe used his Nazi party membership to do all he could to protect civilians in the zone - including 650 sheltering refugees in his own house and garden.

With a flash of his swastika armband and through sheer force of personality, he intervened in acts of looting and attempted rape by the Japanese troops.

The diaries of this unlikely and unsung hero only became public knowledge in the late 1990s, when they were published in Germany. They have now been made into a film, simply titled John Rabe.

The film's producers hope that the involvement of Japanese star Teruyuki Kagawa will prevent the film from being silenced there.

Teruyuki Kagawa plays the emperor's relative, Prince Asaka, who was the top ranking Japanese officer in Nanjing at the height of the atrocities.

During the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in 1946, Prince Asaka denied any massacre of Chinese and said he had never received any complaint about his soldiers' conduct.

Controversially, the film speculates on his involvement in the decision-making process.

Teruyuki Kagawa says: "When faced with this film, many people will be shocked [to learn] the Japanese carried out such cruel acts.

"I think Japanese people will find the two hours very hard [to watch]."

The wikipedia article on Prince Asaka (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Asaka) says that he was recalled to Japan in 1937, promoted and assigned to a High Command staff position in Japan where he remained until the end of the war in 1945. This was standard Japanese practice for dealing with important but controversial personages.

I bolded the actor's comments because it points up a convenient fiction that older Japanese live with. It is similar to the claims made by German civilians living next to concentration camps: "We didn't know what was going on there."

When I first married my Japanese bride (31 years and counting), she suffered from the Japanese educational system's approach to teaching about WWII; the war narrative starts a day before Hiroshima in 1945 and the horrific nature of the two atomic bombings absolved the Japanese of any blame for what their armed forces did before. Combine that with an unwillingness to believe anything negative about Japan written by foreigners and you have a pretty strong road block to coming to grips with the real conduct of the Imperial Japanese and Navy outside Japan.

However, she is a voracious reader and over the years she has read various accounts about wartime incidents and activities written in Japanese by Japanese. Reaading a Japanese account of Unit 731 (the infamous Japanese biological warfare experimental unit in Manchuria) really caused the scales to drop from her eyes.

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