Heedless of the de-mining crew, Samira stood in a safe zone, recalling in a tremulous voice how the “aggressors” had claimed this spot for its strategic view of the entire city. Still agitated, she went on to explain her choice of words: “Since the aggression, we intentionally use the term ‘aggressors’ rather than ‘Serbs,’ as many Sarajevan Serbs chose to stay and fight with us. We have no desire to indict all Serbs, only those who came to destroy our city, whatever their ethnic background.”
Afterwards, she slumped back in the cab, growling: “That Serbian driver stared at me the whole time. He wouldn’t even get out of his car. He hates me for what I’m saying about the war. I know it.” Between the MINE! tape and Samira’s discomposure, I felt an almost tangible anxiety as we sped down the mountain, the white Land Rover close behind. By the end of our tour, I was sure that our screening would be sparsely attended at best. The war, safely seven years past by my own yardstick, still hovered within striking distance in the hearts and minds of many Sarajevans.
The next morning, as we sipped coffee before our screening, a youthful Oslobodenje reporter approached us for an interview. When she asked how Japanese audiences had responded to Matsui’s painful film, he recalled that initial screenings were poorly attended, but eventually through word of mouth, more than ten thousand young people had thronged to see it at a modest art house in Shibuya. When she inquired about his bringing the film to Sarajevo, he answered, “I was never a participant in war. Screening this film here, I am frankly humbled, overwhelmed by an inexpressible weight.” His interview was featured in the following day’s paper.
Japanese Devils has now traveled to international film festivals in Berlin, Portugal, Munich, Toronto, New York, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Hong Kong, Seoul, Yufuin (Kyushu), and Singapore, and to special screenings in Los Angeles, Portland, and Glasgow, among other places. In some venues, it has served as a kind of “surrogate truth commission,” as it did at its sold-out screenings at the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. There, one Chinese woman tearfully recalled that her grandmother had never recovered from seeing her brother murdered by Japanese soldiers on the eve of his wedding. She had been raised on her grandmother’s hatred of the Japanese. Pausing to compose herself, she confided, “After meeting friendly Japanese in America, my hatred has become a burden in my life. This film has allowed me to see the Japanese as humans. I only wish my grandmother had lived to see it.” A young Japanese woman timidly raised her hand and said: “I knew all about what happened in Okinawa and Hiroshima, but nothing about what our soldiers did in China. Did all this really happen?”
Japanese Devils in Sarajevo
As we filed into the theatre, my heart caught in my throat. My gnawing suspicions were confirmed. There were only about forty people in the 200-seat theater. As Matsui began introducing the film, I realized this was the only time he had introduced the film from a prepared text. Shaken by his encounters with a city and its people still devastated by war, he evidently wanted to accurately contextualize his own reasons for tackling the material. In a trembling voice, he began, “Some fifty years ago, Japan, too, was an aggressor in war. This film documents, in the words of the actual perpetrators, the war crimes our fathers and grandfathers committed as Imperial soldiers on the Chinese mainland. Screening my film, here in Sarajevo, where the scars of war are still vivid in the city’s landscape and the hearts of its citizens, I am filled with a range of emotions difficult to put into words. I can only hope you will have the stamina to resist walking out.”
Putting his text aside, he continued: “My own father served as a soldier in Japan‘s Manchurian Army. Although I had seen a photograph of him in uniform, I only realized after his death that I’d never had the courage to ask him the question, ‘What did you do during the war?’ Later, when I met a returnee from the Chinese re-education camps, I vowed to make a film based on their testimony.” It was the first time I had ever heard Matsui publicly discuss his private reasons for making the film.
Part way through the screening, I went to the projection booth to correct a sound problem. The technician apologized for his gaffe, and then confessed: “Compared to this film, what happened in Sarajevo was like Disney animation.” Perhaps he was thinking of the Japanese medical doctor who graphically recounts vivisecting Chinese civilians, or the sergeant who confesses with strange gusto to his rape and murder of a Chinese woman, whom he then butchered to feed his hungry men. Perhaps these acts eclipsed the violence in Sarajevo, or perhaps the projectionist simply wanted to distance himself and his recovering city from the film.
For whatever their own reasons, half the Sarajevans in the audience had already walked out. Though those who remained were few in number, their enthusiasm during the question-and-answer period following the film resulted in an extended, intense discussion, covered by both the Japanese/Serbian crew and by the local Bosnian television station.
The questions in Sarajevo were of a different order from those at other festivals, coming, as they did, from people searching for a way out of the tension that still grips their community. The first question came from a Bosnian woman in the front row. “Was it therapeutic for these men to testify to their acts? Because you know, when it comes to war crimes, no one’s ever willing to confess. It’s always someone else who has committed them. But really, the only way to survive after committing such acts is to talk about what you’ve done.”
Recalling how uncomfortably close Sniper’s Alley had appeared from Serbian positions in the hills — even I could probably have held a slow-moving toddler or grandparent in a rifle’s scope from that vantage point — I wondered how the Serbian sharpshooters who gunned down so many civilians were living with what they had done.
The next question came from a Bosnian journalist: “Looking back, I cannot help but perceive the history of civilization as the history of war crimes. What did you hope to accomplish by making this film, breaking the taboo against discussing Japanese war crimes in postwar Japan?” (Had he chosen to, Matsui might have refuted the journalist’s claim that war crimes remain strictly taboo in Japan. Conflict between those who choose to remember and those who wish to pretend certain events never took place continues to flourish around the edges of Japanese public discourse.)
By this point in the discussion, Matsui barely had time to get a word in edgewise, as the audience responded quickly to each other’s points. He seemed deeply satisfied to observe the intense Bosnian engagement in their own pressing issues, which his film had precipitated.
A shy young woman followed with an insightful point: “Several men testified to raping Chinese women. Did they offer this information voluntarily, or only after you prodded them?” Matsui divulged that though the witnesses had spoken freely of other atrocities, they only confessed to rapes when asked pointedly. Several days before our screening, there had been a soccer match between the Yugoslavian national team and its Bosnian counterpart, the first such match since the war. After the game, the Serbian fans, a clear minority, had begun taunting the local losers. Enraged Bosnians had stormed the Serbian side of the stadium and seventeen police officers were seriously wounded as they intervened between murderous fans. The match was the talk of the town the next morning, with Bosnians reflecting that perhaps it was “too early” for such a match while Serbian land mines still lay buried in wait for the footsteps of playful children.
When are we ready to hear from perpetrators in a war? If seven years is too soon, is fifty-seven years too late? Does the span of a generation, twenty years, provide sufficient distance? Japan is hardly alone in turning a deaf ear to stories of soldiers returning from war. Who can blame civilians for wanting to put their memories behind them? Who wants to hear repeated the grim details of combat, the terrible acts wrought against civilians in the name of patriotism? As Vietnam veteran Tim O’Brien writes in The Things They Carried,
A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior.…If a war story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.[5]
Shattering that “very old and terrible lie,” speaking the plain truth of their acts, the “Japanese Devils” of Matsui’s film have frequently been accused of having been brainwashed during the period of their captivity in China. Why else would they spin such unbelievable tales? In the Dutch documentary First Kill,[6] American Vietnam veterans recall, in language nearly identical to that of the witnesses in Japanese Devils, many of the themes that underlie Matsui’s film.
Most of the veterans still refer to their Vietnamese victims as “gooks,” just as the Japanese called theirs “chinks.” Many recall how their main mission was to generate “body counts.” Pausing uncomfortably in his recollection, a former soldier recounts: “Kids, women, children, the innocent, the guilty, everyone goes in wars.…’We need body count, more body count.’” Another veteran, interviewed in a veteran’s hospital, recalls: “That first moment, your first kill…it’s strange. Because it’s something you’ve never done before. But after that, what with me, it started getting good. The killing started getting good. It was such a rush. It was like a rush better than any dope you could get on the street.…It was just a high, you couldn’t even imagine. So you keep on killing.”
Asked to describe the sensation of killing, one veteran, seated at a table strewn with prescription drugs, his hands shaking in the telling, flatly compares it to sex: “Every kill that you made, seemed like it made you feel a little better.… There was a place in your heart that it just [sigh] made you feel good.…Sex is such an enjoyable thing, you take it and you compare it to killing somebody and havin’ the same feeling and that’s where you’re at.” Another describes the “full throttle” experience of killing: “…you become highly sexed.…And adrenaline becomes a way of life and it cannot go back to normal again.…” Their words reverberate with an intimacy common to soldiers remembering their own violence against civilians.
The American veterans’ stories in First Kill are foreshadowed by antiwar Vietnam veterans’ accounts of American war crimes, featured in the recent American documentary, Unfinished Symphony.[7] Many of the antiwar Vietnam veterans portrayed in this film had participated in the Winter Soldiers investigation[8] and had marched backwards along the route of Paul Revere’s ride to protest U.S. participation in Indochina in 1972. Whether referring to their own behavior in Vietnam — “I was an animal” — or simply calling themselves “war criminals,” the men tell stories that have been corroborated by victims’ accounts from around the world and that validate Matsui’s contention that his subjects’ testimonies are not the product of brainwashing.
Philip Gourevitch’s account of genocide in Rwanda, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, offers another vital perspective on the nature of wartime violence against civilians.[9] With the benefit of hindsight provided by tentative explorations of alternative forms of postwar criminal justice, including South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Gourevitch observes,
In 1994, Rwanda was regarded in much of the rest of the world as the exemplary instance of the chaos and anarchy associated with collapsed states. In fact, the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorizing and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in history.…The specter of an absolute menace that requires absolute eradication binds leader and people in a hermetic utopian embrace, and the individual — always an annoyance to totality — ceases to exist.[10]
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