Don't get me started, beemerb...
Movies like this have been coming out about once every two years. I don't watch them, or even rent them from the local video shop. Others include "Pride," a movie which portrays Tojo as a war victim suffering "Victor's Justice," Minami Jujisei ("The Southern Cross"), which glosses over the Japanese mass-murder of 5,000 Chinese for "supporting" British colonialism, and from all reports, the worst, Dai Nippon Teikoku("The Great Japanese Empire") which has American soldiers playing football with human skulls while the Japanese Army is full of warmth and compassion for the locals.
Our Filipino RKBA brethren would disagree. When evacuating Manila, the Japanese went on a rampage, and were ordered to kill their Filipino wives, girlfriends, and children.
In contrast to these movies there is Nanking, which is the story of a Japanese doctor, his wife, and their adopted Chinese children trying to administer aid before running for their lives from the Japanese Army, which rounded up everyone and machine-gunned them in a large ravine, like at Babi Yar, in the Ukraine. This movie started riots when it opened over here.
They're all part of the perennial "poor, put-upon Japan" sentiment, which in Japanese comes out higaisha ishiki, literally, "victim conciousness."
There is a constant popular awareness, though, of Japanese atrocities. When a skeleton pit was discovered during an excavation in Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police first reported it as a mass suicide site, until some old folks started to make noises about how Unit 731 had their headquarters on that very spot. It was the place where Chinese and other Allied POWs were experimented upon with anthrax, bubonic plague, vivisection without anesthetic, deep-freeze experiments, and often, macabre scientific questions like "Do Americans require more bayonet thrusts than British to kill them?"
These old Japanese folks cashed in their life savings and organized a 731 seminar, which toured the country, featuring old nurses, medical staff, and Kempeitai (Japanese military police) personnel, who often began public addresses with "I am a war criminal...," described their actions, and then cursed and damned the Japanese government for everything from not paying compensation to deliberately falsifying school history textbooks.
It's true that the Japanese were welcomed into Indonesia at the beginning of hostilities, but their welcome was rather shortlived.
Japan's wartime goals included something called the "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere," which would rid Asia forever of Western Imperialism. It required the development of the Japanese economy first, to secure Asia from Western predation, so that "Asia for the Asians" could be made reality. It was much like Soviet "Fortress of Socialism" economics. All satellite countries were stripped bare
Theoretically, East Asian countries had enough resources to support the Japanese economy, but not enough to support both Japan's and their own economies. Thus, the GEAC became a nightmare beyond the imagination beyond anyone reading this, unless they were held captive by the Japanese during the war. Japan coerced production out of her satellites while at the same time depriving them of the resources necessary for production. Millions starved and were slaughtered. "You can't have your cake and eat it too" is a lesson that is only now understood in theory by Japanese, and dismissed as Western indolence by Japanede bosses today who routinely require of themselves and their employees 60 and 72 hour work weeks.
Despite this, there are some countries, contemporary Burma, Malaysia, and large elements of Indonesia, who regard the West as The Enemy, the unknowable other.
It is probably a good thing that I do not rent these videos.
