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Documentary revisits Japan's WWII atrocities

WORLD BRIEFINGS
By Takehiko Kambayashi
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
August 18, 2006

    While painstakingly looking for evidence, Mr. Okumura also had to face his past and atrocities committed by the Imperial Army. Like other recruits, he was forced to stab an innocent Chinese with a bayonet during training because superior officers wanted "to test his courage." In the film, he revisited the site of his first killing, in Ningwu County, and prayed for the dead.
    "We were turned into so-called killing machines," he recalled. "I want to reveal how the military deprived us of our rational nature." He also said that he acted as a lookout while fellow soldiers committed rape.
    Asked in the film whether he, too, had raped Chinese women, he responded in the negative. But he emphasized that the issue was not "who did or who didn't, but a problem of the whole military." In a compelling scene, a Chinese woman tells Mr. Okumura how she was kidnapped, confined and gang-raped by seven Japanese soldiers and later by a Chinese officer when she was 16. But she offered forgiveness to Mr. Okumura for killing innocent Chinese.
    Toward the end, the film suggests U.S. complicity in the issue. Mr. Okumura said he discovered a letter in China from Gen. Sumita telling Gen. Yan that he would return to Japan under an assumed name to meet with Gen. Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the Allied forces. Gen. Sumita, whose son Satoshi later became governor of the Bank of Japan, went unpunished.
    The film showed that "the Allied powers were accomplices," said Asaho Mizushima, a law professor at Waseda University in Tokyo. "The Japanese soldiers fought the communists so the United States didn't have to send its own troops."
    "They were the victims of multiple countries and also victims of the Cold War," Mr. Mizushima said. "That war against China was the first Japan fought after World War II. As many as 550 soldiers were the first victims. ... The [Japanese] government, however, cannot admit it."
    "If they did, they would have to implement a fundamental review of the national government in the postwar era. At stake is not only Japan's breach of the Potsdam Declaration but a question of war-renouncing Article 9. Japan was not disarmed after all, and the U.S. knew it. Mr. Okumura is a living witness to that."
    "The Ants" won the Humanitarian Award for Outstanding Documentary at the Hong Kong International Film Festival in April and may be entered at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
    "The film tenaciously pursued what war is all about. Our generation failed to do that, as we stopped discussing it at a certain level and put economic growth first. Everybody thinks so, I believe," said Kenichi Hanzawa, a supporter of the film who retired after working for major financial companies. "This is probably the last resistance from the war generations."
    Today, critics say, more people dwell on changing Japan's pacifist postwar constitution and defend the visits of political leaders to Yasukuni.
    They talk about such issues "without discussing what the Imperial Japanese Army was all about in the war," said Mr. Ikeya, the director of "The Ants." The film tells you that "the war is not over yet. Once you go to battle, the war won't let you go until you die."
    

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