Word: changes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years have passed - 70 of them - other horrors have piled up and the Japanese, who have never fully come to grips with their war crimes, have taken to referring to Nanking as an "incident." It remained for the Chinese-American writer Iris Chang to remind us, a decade ago, in a book full of passages too ugly to read, of just how monstrous this crime against humanity was. She also reminded us that a handful of Americans and Europeans - doctors, teachers, missionary ministers - did their best to save what lives they could. It is this story that writer-directors Bill...
...film makes no attempt to explain these events, and that is, I think, a defect. It merely summons us to witness, asks us to do what we can to prevent similar atrocities. Chang did a little better in her book, suggesting that ordinary Japanese soldiers were so miserably treated by their officers that when they were given the opportunity, they simply surrendered to animalistic instinct. That seems likely - but it also seems somehow inadequate. It occurs to one that this is a story that requires more thoughtful, even theoretical, probing...
...terrible tale's heroines is an American woman named Minnie Vautrin, headmistress of a missionary college for young women, a ferocious defender of the "Safety Zone," compassionate defender of its young women. She survived, went home and, a year to the day after leaving China, committed suicide. Eerily, Iris Chang, having rescued this narrative from oblivion, also committed suicide - perhaps because her book contains images that could never be erased from her consciousness. There are some stories that, if we become too intimate with them, have the power to destroy us. Seeing Nanking will not do that to a moviegoer...
...promises to narrow the gaps between Nanjing accounts. "A joint project can socialize each side to accept that the other side is working in good faith," says Fogel. "It can also reflect on how one's own side may be basing conclusions on something other than hard data." Iris Chang may have begun the truth-finding process when, in an effort to explore her own Chinese identity, she wrote The Rape of Nanking. I'm hoping I can learn something valuable about my own heritage as that difficult and painful process continues...
...years ago, while I was studying Japanese history in college, I discovered just how complicated those feelings could become. That was the year Iris Chang published her seminal book, The Rape of Nanking, about Japan's brutal occupation of the Republic of China's capital in 1937. After reading about the wartime genocide during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese died in a matter of weeks - events commonly referred to as the Nanjing Massacre - I felt a crushing sense of shame...