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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.