04/28/2010

Why does Japan STILL refuse to face up to the atrocity its army revelled in? Two new films have reopened old wounds about the Nanking Massacre

The competition was reported in a Tokyo newspaper, and it was clear that two soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army were partaking with extraordinary enthusiasm. 

‘Incredible record in the contest to behead 100 people!’ screamed the headline with gruesome relish. ‘Mukai 106 - 105 Noda - Both 2nd Lieutenants go into extra innings.’

According to the report, two junior officers had a wager to see who could decapitate 100 Chinese soldiers first.

Kill patient
Brutal history: A scene from the new film City Of Life And Death

Ten years later, the story came to the attention of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal.

Second Lieutenants Mukai and Noda were extradited from Japan and executed.

Hitler and Stalin may have killed millions more by gassing or starving, but the sheer velocity of the Nanking massacre is what takes the breath away.

In just six weeks, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers and civilians were slaughtered by the Imperial Army in and around Nanking.

Quite how many hundreds of thousands has never been agreed.

China claims 300,000. The official tribunal put the death toll at 200,000.

Read more at The Daily Mail Online

Apr 28, 2010 5:22:39 PM | Crime, Current Affairs, Film, History

The comments to this entry are closed.

NEXT POST
China tops France as tourism spender China overtook France to occupy the fourth place last year in the ranking of the world's top international tourism spenders, the United Nations World Tourism Organisation said on Wednesday. Chinese tourists splurged $US43.7 billion ($A47.74 billion) on their travels abroad in 2009 despite the economic downturn, propping up other economies by eating out, occupying hotel rooms and visiting attractions, it said in its latest bulletin. That compares to $US36.2 million ($A39.55 million) in the previous year when China was the world's fifth biggest source of tourism spending. Read more at The Sydney Morning Herald
PREVIOUS POST
Red Alert If U.S. security is defined in the most narrow way possible--the protection of the U.S. homeland--then indeed China's conventional military capabilities do not yet pose a threat, as Drew Thompson suggests ("Think Again: China's Military," March/April 2010). But successive presidents have defined U.S. security far more broadly, in ways that clash with the purposes of China's military modernization program. Since the end of World War II, the United States' Asian security strategy has had four key objectives: first, to provide security to East Asian allies, which has allowed them to focus on economic growth and political development; second, to contain...