Playing With History

This weekend Bernardo Bertolucci’s film “The Last Emperor” is scheduled to open in Tokyo, but in a version that has been expurgated by its director. Absent from the print will be brief scenes showing in all their graphic horror some of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China when it carried out its infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937. Bertolucci and others associated with the film are said to be concerned that Japanese audiences might be offended by seeing these outrages recalled. The film’s distributor in Japan emphasizes that it had nothing to do with this decision.

Editing a film to avoid giving offense to a particular audience is not uncommon. But on what basis did Bertolucci decide that the presentation of a historical truth that has been seen by audiences elsewhere in the world ought to be withheld from screens in Japan? The implication of this action is that Japanese should still be insulated from an honest confrontation with a part of their country’s recent past. The facts, though, are there. The sacking of Nanking a half-century ago--when hundreds of thousands of Chinese were tortured, murdered and raped by a soldiery allowed to run wild--is recognized by historians as one of the most savage acts of mass terror in modern times. Much of what took place was recorded by Japanese motion-picture cameramen. “The Last Emperor” uses some of that film.

Twice in the last six years major controversies have arisen over the rewriting of Japanese textbooks in such a way as to weaken and make ambiguous what until recently had been largely straightforward accounts of World War II and its antecedents. These revisions prompted strong official protests from Japan’s Asian neighbors, for understandable reasons. The word aggression , for example, was dropped from accounts of Japan’s invasion of China. The Rape of Nanking was called a matter of “confusion,” and was attributed to Chinese provocations. Was Bertolucci thinking of this when he decided to bowdlerize his own film?

Every nation has dark and shameful episodes in its past that it would like to forget, but that for its own well-being it must remember lest forgetfulness invite repetition. Most Japanese today have no personal memory of World War II. Those who lived through the 1930s and ‘40s were limited in what they were permitted to know by official censorship. The Rape of Nanking happened. It is documented. It was spliced into “The Last Emperor” precisely in the interests of historical accuracy. It is absurd to deny Japanese audiences a glimpse of that accuracy, however disturbing it might be.