The flagrance of war

The new Zhang Yimou (Home Alone, Hero) movie The Flowers of War in English, 13 Women of Nanjing in Chinese, had limited release late December in select theaters in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

I ask students to sing English songs, repeat dialogues, radio and TV broadcasts, read out loud billboard signs and ad slogans, view English movies, so it was that two of my students over the holidays informed me they “were going to watch an English movie as advised, and would I care to join them.”

Yimou’s movie is set in Nanjing after the Battle of Shanghai, where about two sets of ladies—convent girls and red light district Chinese geishas—sought refuge in a cathedral with a large red cross sign on the church lawn to signify protection. Safety was illusory, the movie established early. The resident priest had already been shot and an American mortician came to prepare the body for burial. He was shown a huge crater, a strategic bomb got to the Father before he could. His blessedness had already been sent up to glory in small pieces, hit while lying outdoors in an un-stately manner coz’ the cook could not countenance the Padre’s decaying fumes.

Zhang Yimou is not known for cutting corners on laughter and tears so the movie hammered realism with a vengeance—brutality, pathos, and anxiety all coming through in luxuriant sounds and sights.

The story is set in what is referred to as the “Rape of Nanjing,” a media title more than a historical one. Not unlike Pearl Harbor’s infamy, the “rape” is under intense review. The Nanjing occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War is a more accurate description, indicating a first one, and that Sino-Japanese relations was never cozy.

The latter Qing dynasty ceded Formosa (aka Taiwan) to Japan, and dissident Sun Yatsen found refuge under the Sakura blossoms even after the Xinhai (1911) Revolution. When the Republic was finally declared, feudal lords warred and the European powers nibbled toward Chang Jiang’s core. Japan marched as Asia’s savior and acted in the same way as France, Italy, England, the Germans, and the Dutch did in Africa—be colonial. Manchuria was not technically part of China so Japan started immigrating.

The word “wo kou,” a brigand, pirate, or a burglar, is used to refer to the Japanese, even to today’s businessman and visitor. Before Nanjing, the Battle of Shanghai ’37 was vicious, and Tokyo noted that its troops’ morale was low and stress high. Chinese troops used scorch earth tactics on Nanjing to deny resources to invaders and by the time Japan arrived, the city and the surrounding forests had been deliberately torched. The “massacre” of Nanjing, an occupation of a tired but triumphant army over left behind civilians, ensued. That’s the setting of Yimou’s movie.

Critics’ response zeroes in on the alleged failure of Yimou to strongly and unequivocally condemn the Japanese “rape” of what was then China’s capital city. That, and the observation that the movie was fuller on the glitz and schmaltz than on the real and authentic. The movie is judged severely on what the movie fails to portray. After a strong dose of Manichean dualism, we shouted, “humbug.” Critics are not out to critique what they see in the movie, but to impose today’s moralism on a condemned past event.

PolySci students know that GovJapan is silent on claims about its soldiers’ behavior during WWII other than concede that they behaved the same way other combatants behave in the flagrance of war. Comparison to Hitler’s Holocaust policy is misplaced. The historical evidence that Japan earlier refused to deport fleeing Jews in Japan, Korea, and China from Russia is clear, and it left the League of Nations on record for the body’s refusal to declare equality of races. Asian anti-colonial forces sided with Japan. Still, not unlike their imperial cousins, the samurai behaved atrociously under duress.

The matter of comfort women, despicable as that appears to contemporary eyes, as raised these days by Korea, the Philippines, and China to claim war reparations, recalls the traditions of the geisha in Nippon, Kisaeng in Hankook, Yi Ji in Zhongguo, and Manila’s taxi dancers, as being established and accepted. The movie’s depiction of ladies of the night who take the place of convent girls when the latter were commanded to appear at an anniversary celebration where their fate among the soldiers was unmistakable, is perhaps the critics’ bone of contention. It makes the Yi Ji of Nanjing look too much like the GI version of Susie Wong of Wan Chai. Or our convivial R&R’ing star-and-stripes tars’ muscle kneaders of Saipan!

The atrocities of war of any kind inflicted on others are indefensible, more so on those we inflict on ourselves, as our own veterans from Afghanistan and Iraq are finding out, and we ignored in Indochina. Actually, we found the movie to be heavily moralistic on a misplaced sharp dichotomy between the young maidens and the ladies of the night. Yimou did not mince a frame to show the physical brutality of combat in slow motion and vivid colors, but he was just as heavy handed in his stereotypical dualism of the flighty and fancy girls of the saloons from the crisp and classy linen’d choristers from the convent.

It wasn’t the cold that drew our tears. It was the depiction of the conduct of war, its irrationality and the yin-yang ambiguity of people’s choices that was too realistic for comfort. If we have any complaints, it was that Yimou took to much time, for while we did not mind the tear ducts flowing, we could not hold the bladder that long, before going!