If you know anything about the Chinese city of Nanking, you probably mentally precede its name with “rape of.” In 1937, the Japanese army invaded China, and by November its army had overrun Shanghai and began marching toward the then Chinese capital city, 150 miles away. Already the thriving city had been heavily bombed, but when the soldiers arrived, the real devastation began. This American-made documentary uses the recollections of elderly survivors as well as actors reading letters and testimony from the post-World War II war crimes trial. Surprisingly, there are several former Japanese soldiers on camera, at least one of whom seems rather nonchalant as he explains how married women made better rape victims. They tended to resist less, and the experience wasn’t much good unless there were two participants, he says. A Chinese man, on the other hand, weeps 70 years after the fact as he recounts watching his mother and baby brother get bayoneted and die slowly. There’s a good deal of period footage evidencing the cruelty inflicted, although most of it is in short clips. The bright side of the story, if one can say that, is the efforts of the few remaining westerners, most prominently American nurse Minnie Vautrin (Mariel Hemingway), to protect the poor people who had not been able to flee the city prior to the occupation. Nanking doesn’t try to explain why the Japanese decided to invade China, or what made the Japanese commanders encourage such inhumanity, but it provides an easy-to-follow summary of one of the several great horrors of the 20th century.
IMDB link
viewed and reviewed 1/31/08
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