[Japanese Devils, a documentary of personal confessions of war crimes by Japanese Imperial soldiers in China during World War II, was invited to the Sarajevo Film Festival, in August, 2002. Accompanying the film and its director to Sarajevo, the author, an American, sensitive to the postwar Japanese experience, discovered a people and city still deeply traumatized by war. The visit prompted a series of questions about the origins of genocide, the consequences of targeting civilians in war, and our collective responsibility to question and listen to the stories of perpetrators, as civilians increasingly become explicit targets in hostilities.]
When Japanese Devils, the historic documentary in which Japanese veterans face the camera to recount the brutal crimes they committed against Chinese civilians in the 1930s, was invited to the Eighth Sarajevo Film Festival (2002), I knew I wanted to accompany it. I was especially keen to witness the response to this harrowing film in war-torn Sarajevo.
I first encountered Matsui Minoru’s Japanese Devils at the Berlin Film Festival in 2001 and have worked closely with the producers since then to bring the film to audiences around the world. Japanese Devils is unique in providing uncoerced first-person accounts of war atrocities — not from the victims’ viewpoint, but from the perspective of the perpetrators, who sit comfortably in their living rooms, half a century after the events. These witnesses are in a unique position to offer such testimony, having spent five years in postwar Soviet labor camps, followed by six years in Chinese “reeducation” camps, from 1950 to 1956. The explicit goal of their incarceration was to “rehabilitate” them from brutal war criminals into thinking and feeling civilians, by confessing to their individual crimes and coming to terms with the consequences of their war-time acts.
The unprecedented, frank testimony of the so-called Japanese Devils has elicited correspondingly open responses from audiences around the world. Instead of the anger one might reasonably expect from people of Chinese descent on hearing explicit confessions about the torture, rape, and murder of Chinese civilians decades earlier, many viewers have thanked the director for tackling this incendiary material.
An American Child in Japan
The peculiar contradictions of my childhood have left me obsessed by war, and more specifically with how memories and scars of war persist through years of postwar reconstruction and subsequent mythicization. I was ten years old, the only American fourth grader in my Japanese school, when I learned of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. That day, our teacher wrote the words “America” and “atomic bomb” on the blackboard, and we opened our textbooks to a chapter entitled “The Defeat.” All forty of my classmates turned around to stare at me. I did not need them to tell me I was implicated. As an American, raised in Japan, my childhood was shaped by a profound sense of pain and guilt for the damage American bombs had wrought upon Japan.
When, as an adult, I stumbled upon Tomatsu Shomei’s extraordinary photographs of Nagasaki’s Catholic hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors),[1] I felt compelled to create a wider Western audience for his work. I translated the survivor narratives that accompany his photographs and came to understand that the survivors’ memories of an obliterated Nagasaki, combined with their lingering scars and illness, branded them as outsiders in a Japan obsessed with prosperity and eager to put the war behind it. In the eyes of the hibakusha, I recognized the emotions of the American schoolgirl who had nowhere to hide in her fourth grade classroom.
Already as a fourth grader in a Japanese school, I had absorbed the message that Japan was a victim in World War II. My later work with the hibakusha testimonies led me to revisit twentieth-century Japanese history, focusing on the legacy of Japan‘s World War II aggression in Asia and its tortured postwar relations with the United States. In Japanese Devils, I finally heard individual Japanese willing to personally corroborate the accusations of wartime brutality that have cast such long shadows over Japan’s postwar international relations.
Struck by the profound significance of Japanese Devils, I offered to provide English subtitles for the film. (The producers had undertaken the entire project at their own expense.) As I translated the perpetrators’ words, I realized that the “devils” and the hibakusha share a similarly awkward position in contemporary Japan. Like the hibakusha, whose aging scars and repeated stories summon the horrors of atomic catastrophe, these former war criminals (a rare minority among returning veterans who for decades have insisted on recounting their crimes in public) were prickly obstacles in Japan’s headlong rush to purify its past by forgetting or suppressing it. The hibakusha stories and these veterans’ confessions remain stubborn legacies of war, linked by their narrators’ shared insistence on bearing witness: in the case of the hibakusha, about what was done to them as civilians, in the case of the veterans, about what they did to civilians.
Sarajevo
Director Matsui Minoru, his wife, Masako, and I arrived at Sarajevo‘s pristine new airport in mid-August 2002. Driving into town I was struck by the many buildings that are still pockmarked or had been reduced to rubble. Prominent among them is one left that has been deliberately unrestored, the crippled tower that housed Oslobodenje, still Sarajevo‘s principal daily newspaper. The crumpled hulk of the building has been preserved as a memorial to the local journalists who risked their lives to report on the savage siege of the city. During our week in Sarajevo, still a dim shadow of its former self, I came to realize the fragility of “postwar peace.”
On our first day, we joined a festival-sponsored tour of Mostar, a medieval city that lost its majestic fifteenth-century limestone bridge to relentless Serbian artillery pounding. Our tour guide was Samira, an irrepressibly good-natured Bosnian Muslim in her mid twenties. We traveled to Mostar in a large bus, not unlike those that carried thousands of Bosnian Muslims to their fates in concentration camps. As I gazed out at the scarred farmhouses lining the road, I wondered if our vehicle had once ferried such human cargo. Catching sight of a farmer resting from chopping firewood for the enormous wood piles every farmhouse seemed to boast, I had to wonder what else his ax might have split cleanly in two during the war. I was unprepared for the effect the unreconstructed surroundings had on the most commonplace objects of daily life.
We returned to Sarajevo in the late afternoon heat for an interview with Mitrovich Predrag, a Serbian journalist who had stayed on through the siege. He chain-smoked as he told of his reaction to Japanese Devils. He had experienced it as two parallel films. As the mostly impassive Japanese Imperial army veterans testified to their atrocities in China, his own mind replayed memories of the Sarajevan siege.
I asked Predrag about the local population’s response to the screening of No Man’s Land, the acerbic tragicomedy that ruthlessly exposes the heart of the Balkan disaster, which had opened the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2001.[2] He said that many residents, still devastated by the war and anxious to put it behind them, could not bring themselves to attend. When I asked how Sarajevans, in general, regard the ongoing trial of Milosevich in The Hague, he shrugged off the question with a nervous chortle that suggested its overall irrelevance to a people still hungry for a sense of normalcy:
Remember, here we had seven armies, none uniformed. It was neighbor pitted against neighbor. What comfort can the televised Milosevich trial provide, when rapists have comfortably settled back into their homes and jobs, even as their Bosnian victims cower next door? People will remain tense and anxious until the individual rapists and petty war criminals have been apprehended and tried.
Suddenly, the towering hulks flanking Sniper’s Alley loomed as incarnations of the battered souls who scurry across crosswalks, dodging the careening motor traffic so characteristic of Sarajevo. Predrag longed for the city’s return to laughter and spontaneity, and mourned the loss of his favorite pastime, long roving walks in the hills that surround the city. “You see the hills are still rife with land mines,” he explained. “We can no longer ramble to our favorite vistas of this magnificent city.” With Japanese Devils fresh in mind, I wondered whether the Sarajevan survivors of an all-too-recent grisly war might yet have any appetite for the testimony of perpetrators from another time, another place.
War and Ethnic Cleansing
I had prepared for my trip to Sarajevo by reading Peter Maass’s book, Love Thy Neighbor, a rumination by an American journalist who had actively covered the war and ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.[3] Maass concludes that Bosnia’s Muslims “thought that being a minority group no longer mattered in civilized Europe, and they thought the wild beast had been tamed.…[But] [t]he wild beast is out there, and the ground no longer feels so steady under my feet,” Maass concluded[4]
Love Thy Neighbor was especially instructive in its revelation of how little methods of violence against civilians have changed in the fifty years since the Japanese military targeted Chinese peasants. In Bosnia and in China humans were crammed into warehouses to suffocate; prisoners were forced to beat each other and to have sex; women were raped. Beheadings. Beatings. Torture. Part of what is so disturbing in these interchangeable accounts is the intimacy of the violence. A single shot kills instantly, but the slow torment of unspeakable pain and endless humiliation are apparently the irresistible alternative when the targets are civilians. The goal of such behavior can only be to render its victims inhuman. We like to believe that technological progress has refined the weapons of war sufficiently to convey the impression that our own soldiers’ hands are clean. But when civilians become explicit targets in war, as they did for Japan in China, for Serbs in Bosnia, and for Americans in Vietnam and recently in Afghanistan and Iraq, apparently, “the wild beast” is never far away.
Maass’s book examines our capacity to absorb stories of inhuman behavior. What is the appropriate balance between remembering and forgetting atrocities against civilians? This, of course, is the daunting challenge for Japanese Devils. Some critics have said the film comes far too late, six decades after the war; right-wing challengers have declared its testimony false, even slanderous. Why should we expose ourselves to harrowing testimony from aggressors in a war now so distant that many young people have no idea it ever took place?
The day before the Sarajevo screening, the Matsuis and I scheduled a private tour of the siege front lines with Samira, the Muslim guide who had taken us to Mostar. That morning, as we prepared to depart, a Belgrade-based, Japanese television correspondent, accompanied by a Serbian crew, asked if he could cover our private expedition. We readily agreed, not considering the effect the crew might have on Samira. As soon as we started off by taxi, with the Japanese correspondent and the Serbs following in a Land Rover, Samira slumped deep in her seat. “They’re Serbs,” she said. “I’m not changing anything I say on the tour. I don’t care who they are!” The Serbs’ presence had reduced the effervescent Samira to the angry, tense teenager she must have been during the siege.
As we drove among the city’s forested hills, again and again we encountered yellow warning tape emblazoned with a single word: MINE! The word turned my stomach. The road to our first destination was blocked with this tape, and a large crew was sweeping the area for mines. A step into the bucolic forest only several feet from where we stood might have rendered us another statistic in the worldwide campaign to clear and ban land mines. I was ill prepared to find stubborn legacies of war so close to my own body.
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