Actually....this isn't in the film
Let me make one thing clear, City of Life and Death is a very well done movie, and I recommend it to everybody interested in Historical Films . That being said, it is propaganda, or at least a very nationalistic portrayal. It is very well done nationalism, with much more tact and respect than you'd expect from a story about the Rape of Nanking, but it is Chinese Nationalism. Now, I've always had a morbid fascination with genocide, and this, coupled with my avid interest (not a fetish) for Chinese history has caused me to study the Rape of Nanking extensively. The Rape of Nanking was in 1937, when the Japanese Army killed 300,000 Chinese civilians in the old Capital of Nanking (or Nanjing). What made Nanking stand out compared to all of the other destruction of cities committed by the Japanese in China was the sheer extent of the Japanese brutality, including such fun activities as putting babies on spikes, having two sergeants compete to see who could kill the most Chinese with a sword, and of course, mass rape. Japan, as per their normal "Fuck you" policy towards China, pretends it never happened of course. The movie follows three primary characters, whose names I cannot remember because I am a racist. We have Doopy Japanese Sergeant, Awkward Westernized Chinese guy (John Rabe's security) and hot homely Chinese mother figure. All three characters are brought together and torn apart during the brutal Japanese invasion. Side characters include Sad Chinese Prostitute who is rapped to death, Sociopath Japanese Sergeant who is responsible for said rape, Badass Chinese insurgent, Chinese Child Soldier, and Useless Western Characters (they are all useless.)
Now first things first, for Western Audiences this might seem strange but.....if you had to make a movie about Nanking and were required to show the Japanese in a positive light, this is the best way you could have done it. While they are extremely brutal and kill/rape lots of civilians in a wide variety of horrible ways, a massive amount of time is taken to show the nicer side of the Japanese, Japanese soldiers learning to dance, drinking beer together, playing piano, and they often times are extremely nice to the Chinese right up until they shoot them in the face. While this is a good thing, and in many ways is something the "Ideal" Nanking movie would have, (Showing the human qualities of the oppression in order to make the horror of the incident even more powerful) it started to get a little suspicious. There is a scene where a Japanese company is ambushed by Chinese insurgents and suffers massive causalities before finally emerging victorious after a long and brutal battle. While that did happen in Nanking, the Chinese army was so badly orginized and ill equipped that very little actual resistance happened once the Japanese got into the City, and most of the Chinese insurgents were simply defeated by the better trained Japanese forces. The Japanese would claim their was resistance (and there were some isolated incidents) in order to justify their slaughter, however the fact that the movie devoted 30 mins showing the Japanese characters getting their asses kicked by the Chinese before the reinforcements finally arrive to defeat the Chinese, is a telling example of the movies real intentions. The scene achieves two things (I have a point here I swear), it establishes the Chinese as brave and competent fighters, and makes us sympathize with the Japanese as they are getting their asses kicked. Why the movie choose to do the former makes perfect sense, consider how much of a failure the entire Nanking campaign was for the Chinese, focusing on the small isolated incidents of victory makes sense, the Chinese want to not feel like they got their ass kicked. But why show the Japanese getting slaughtered, all it does is make us sympathize with them and explain some of their brutality (the Japanese feel like they are getting vengeance for their lost comrades, later in the film). The film omits Chiang Kai-Shek's defense of the city entirely, or his totally inept defense/retreat from the city, where he positioned the troops to fight, then ordered a disorganized and badly handled retreat where the rich were allowed to leave first taking most of the boats, without telling some of his units that they were leaving. If anything, the Battle of Nanking is an example of both Japanese brutality, but also Chinese military ineptitude, as the Chinese army was infamously corrupt and badly run (Except for Mao, who while not great at least could keep his army together). In fact, the Chinese seemed more interested in fighting each other rather than fight an organized fight. To get back to the point, while the Japanese are shown slaughtering chinese, the Chinese are never shown to be disorganized, inept, or out of control, as the real Chinese army was (I'm not saying Chinese people are somehow inherently inept as a people, just that the Chinese government in charge of Nanking was totally out of control and their was absolute chaos in the city). And while the Japanese are shown as brutal...honestly and this is going to sound heartless, the film depiction wasn't that bad. In the film, the Japanese shoot civilians, murdered all of the surrendered Chinese Soldiers (who died screaming for China's victory of course), rape women, burn people alive, and mutilate bodies. Oh and they gang rape women to death. And I imagine your thinking "Wow, that makes them sound horrible, what the fuck do you mean that isn't that bad?' Well, if we look at the Japanese army's war record, that is how they treated every city, hell even most cities throughout the world were treated like that in times of war. It was brutal yes, but it wasn't the Rape of Nanking, it was just the Chinese occupation of Hong Kong, or the Philipies or New Guinea. In the real sack, they did such lovely acts as
Putting babies on spikes (Seriously, its not just anti German propaganda)
used civilians as live bayonet practice
Systematic Gang rape (literally in lines)
Rape of small children (boys and girls)
Rape of the elderly
Rape of men (I"m not saying that this is somehow more or less upsetting than the rape of women, however its unexpected and isn't shown in the film)
Forcing family members to rape each other
Forcing Buddhist Monks who had take vows of celibacy to rape young women at gun point
Raping women with bayonets, broken bottles, and bamboo sticks and leaving them to die
Impaling pregnant women with bayonets (In fact the Japanese seemed to have targeted them in particular for brutal death)
Corpses crowding up the streets (while we see bodies in the streets in the film, they are occasional, now literally crowding up the place. Some of the pictures of Nanking shown the streets literally covered with corpses)
Massive amount of bayonet murder (while many people are shot in the film, not a single person is stabbed, when the massacre is infamous for Chinese women being torn apart by Japanese bayonets, and POWs being executed by Bayonet
Herding civilians unto land mines
Lining up POWS, covering them with petrol and lighting them on fire (this is shown in the film briefly, but the victims are in a house and its less methodical/horrific)
Rape of the Elderly
Cutting off POW's head with swords as they were forced to dig their own graves.
Mass Arson
Mass Rape, the film shows rape, but according to John Rape, their were up to 100 cases a night, not the occasional cases as shown in the film.
Lets look at some of Rabe's Quote (according to Wikipedia)
The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital.
Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who have [sic] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. I think he will live.[45]
From Reverend John Magee who was at the City
During the Japanese reign of terror in Nanking – which, by the way, continues to this day to a considerable degree – the Reverend John Magee, a member of the American Episcopal Church Mission who has been here for almost a quarter of a century, took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese .... One will have to wait and see whether the highest officers in the Japanese army succeed, as they have indicated, in stopping the activities of their troops, which continue even today.[49]
On December 13, about 30 soldiers came to a Chinese house at #5 Hsing Lu Koo in the southeastern part of Nanking, and demanded entrance. The door was open by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha's death, begging them not to kill anyone else. Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and they shot her. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1 year old baby. After being stripped and raped by one or more men, she was bayoneted in the chest, and then had a bottle thrust into her vagina. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia's parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. The soldiers killed her with a revolver. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 2–3 men, and the younger by 3. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 7–8, who was also in the room. The last murders in the house were of Ha's two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword
From Tang Junshan
The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. As he was trying to rape her, the woman resisted fiercely ... The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. Then the soldier stabbed the fetus, with its umbilical cord clearly visible, and tossed it aside.
You get the idea. So while the film is certainly brutal, its nothing compared to what actually happened, its like a movie where a child is shot compared to a movie where a child is eaten alive by a dog. While both are horrific, the latter is simply more powerful and terrible to see. Remember, between 300,000 to 350,000 Civilians died within the span of a few months, most through torture, and that isn't counting the POWs. Now I'm not saying any of the massacres shown in the film aren't true, because they did happen, the POWs were machined gunned down, the "comfort women" were rapped to death, and the bodies were mutilated. And i'm not saying the Japanese shouldn't be shown sympathetically, on the contrary i think that it is a very good thing to show them as people, because no matter how horrible they were, they were (and are) still human beings. However, I think the film's reasons are dishonest. The film isn't nationalistic in the sense that this is a call to arms for the Chinese to go kill the monstrous Japanese, it is instead a call to arms for Chinese empowerment. The only characters who aren't shown sympathetically are the Westerners, who are depicted as weak, inept, cowardly and stupid. John Rab is shown as an old bureaucrat, who cowardly leaves the city abandoning the safety zone to the Japanese. While Rab had his faults (he was a Nazi after all) and did eventually leave in 1938, he was an absurdly brave man, who saved up to 250,000 men, often by running infront of Japanese solders demanding that they leave the Chinese alone. Yes he did leave, but by the time he left in late 1938, the worst of the massacres were over. The City falls in October 1937, and the killing end in late January-Early February 1938 . John Rabe left in February 28th, 1938, so by then the city, while not a 'nice' place, was certainly not hell on earth. In the film, he sort awkardly asks them to leave his compound alone, which they promptly ignore, and cries alot. The other western characters aren't much better, most of them don't have many lines, and those they do have involve them being pushed out of the way as they try vainly to protect civilians. The "good" japanese character is shown as very timid and horrified by what is going on around him, and not really able to grasp the reality of the situation. Most of the Chiense characters are really strong actually, the only one who is a pansy is John Rab's assistant, who is super westernized and kind of a suck up, however after his daughter is killed by the japanese he stands up to them and dies a hero's death (in a scene that is a homage to the priests death in Rome Open City). And the "traditional" Chinese character, the really hot Chinese mother figure is a hero all throughout, keeping the people together, standing up to the Chinese, and gets caught trying to rescue Chinese POWs. As she is being taken away, she shames the Japanese character into killing her to avoid gang rape, and he later kills himself after letting a pair of prisoners go.
So what is this trying to accomplish here? Its about Chinese empowerment, about making the Chinese the moral victors of Nanking. the Reason why its so traumatizing to the Chinese is not just because the Japanese were brutal as fuck, but also because the Chinese couldn't do anything about it. 300,000-350,000 Civilians were killed, along with 50,000 soldiers and 80,000 women raped in the Chinese Capital, against only 240,000 Japanese, only 6,000 of whom where killed. And unlike the Russians, they never got a sacking of Berlin to gain vengeance, the Japanese were in Japan until they surrendered to us. the British, Russians and Americans had to save China, who the Japanese were slaughtering (If not defeating) for almost two decades (1931-1945). One of the Reasons why the Chinese hate the Japanese is that they were helpless to them, the Japanese are the boogiemen of China, this tiny little country that crippled the nation (to be fair china had a 40 year civil war going on but still). If the nastier brutalities of the nanking massacre were shown, such a s the infamous "killing contest", then the Chinese woudl be humiliated. Being shot in the back is one thing, being forced to rape your mother at gun point is quite another. the Chinese are massacred, but they are never reduced in the way the Japanese tried to do during the real events. By making the Japanese very human, they are less threatening and dominating to the Chinese, in fact they are shamed and humiliated by the Chinese resistance. The Chinese in the movie show a great deal of bravery, and they don't need the westerners to help them up. Why is China doing this? Because in this day and age, China doesn't need to hate Japan, at least not politically, but as a growing superpower, they do need to break free from Western bonds. this movie is taking an event which is the humiliation of China and making it into the monument to Chinese bravery. The Movie ends with the two Chinese POWS who survived the massacre, one of which is a young boy, being realized by the guilty Japanese. As they walk away, the Japanese says "It takes more courage to live than to die" and then kills himself. The two chinese walk off, and look at the flowers around them and start laughing with joy. they aren't traumatized or scarred forever, they are moving on, while the Japanese lies dead in a ditch. In another scene, John Rab is forced to tell the Chinese women that 100 of them would be taken away by the Japanese as "Comfort Women". John Rab, crying and feebly saying "I"m sorry" asks for volunteers, while his Chinese assistant (The traditional female one, not the Westernized male one) adds that if they do this, food will be provided for their children. one by one, 100 Chinese women raise their hands and volunteer for the grim task, where they will be raped to death. However, they do so with stoic faces and determination.
The Film is really astonishingly beautiful and I really think people should go see it, however this is *Not* the rape of Nanking, this is a Chinese attempt to exorcise the Demons of the Nanking trauma. Now i'm not saying their were not brave and noble Chinese, in fact they were thousands of them during the massacre, however that being said, it was the dozen or so Westerners who saved 250,000 people by creating this save zone in the first place, nobody asked them or expected them to, and if it wasn't for the Westerners literally running in front of guns waiving their papers, its likely thousands more of the Chinese would have died. In fact, most of the documentation of the Rape of Nanking was done by the West, after the Way, Mao's government was acknowledged by Japan in return for not bringing up the Japanese war crimes, and ever since the Chinese government has been in an awkward place. Talking about the Nanking massacre is awkward because China, the Middle Kingdom, the pinnacle of Civilization, the greatest kingdom in the world, proved unable to defeat Japan, because they were too busy in a pointless, bloody and ruinous Civil war. Thus in the film, no mention is made of the Civil War, or the Communist Party (after all, many people don't like Mao in China and this movie is made for the Chinese). Like Schindler's List, this is a great Film, however it is sensationalistic and is trying to draw you into a trap of perception that you need to actively try to resist in order to see the film for what it is, a manipulation of historical facts for narrow national interest
