[Global Times Comprehensive Report] Editor's Note: This year marks the 80th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Films such as "Nanjing Photo Studio" and "Dongji Island" have been released in China during the summer, and at the same time, many Japanese films with war themes have also been screened or re-screened in the country. However, these films focus on depicting Japan's "suffering" in the war, and try to show the image of Japan's "victim". However, there is little mention of its historical crime of launching a war of aggression and causing heavy losses to many countries in Asia. Japan has gradually built such a "factory of tragedy" over the years. By means of playing up the suffering of war, emphasizing personal narratives, and stealing the concepts of "anti-defeat" and anti-war, it has used films to create a one-sided historical narrative of war. This distorted narrative is closely related to Japan's generational change, escapism, diplomatic and political reality, and lack of accountability after the war.

In the past two months, at least seven war movies have been released or rereleased in Japan

At the end of July this year, at the roadshow of the movie "Nanjing Photo Studio", the director's Olympic bid told the audience that behind the smoke-filled war, there was also an invisible war-a public opinion war, a propaganda war and a cultural war. He said that to this day, this war has not ended yet and is still going on on the Internet and in the environment of public opinion. Because of this, the creative team hopes to use this film to warn the audience to distinguish between enemies and friends and recognize right from wrong in this cultural war.

When we turn our attention to Japanese cinemas this summer, we can understand the warning of the Olympic bid directors. Since July this year, at least seven Japanese war-themed films have been released or rereleased in succession. Most of them portray the "suffering" suffered by Japan as a "war victim" image, but they rarely mention Japan's historical crimes of aggression in a positive and objective manner. On August 1, the film "Nagasaki: Under the Shadow of Flash" was released in Japan. The film shows the tragedy of Nagasaki's atomic bomb incident through the eyes of three students, but downplays the fact that Nagasaki was an important military base for the Japanese army during World War II. For example, on August 15, the 80th anniversary of Japan's unconditional surrender, the film "Snow Wind" was officially released. The film portrays Japan's World War II-era destroyer, the Snow Wind, as a so-called "ship of fortune," highlighting its "legendary" experience of surviving and rescuing compatriots in fierce battles in places such as Niutu Island in the Philippines, and whitewashing the fact that the ship is a combat weapon for Japanese invaders.

An anonymous China netizen shared her thoughts on visiting the screening of "Snow Wind" recently. She told a reporter from the Global Times that the movie's cast and crew were luxurious, but the content could not make her empathic at all."The plot was dry, the whole process was forcibly sensational, and some places were even a little funny." On Japanese social platforms, a small number of criticisms of recent Japanese World War II films can also be seen, including clear thinking about this period of history. For example, some Japanese netizens commented: "The (truth about) the war should be truthfully conveyed without beautifying it. The war must never happen again."

However, some Japanese viewers lamented that "in an era when the atomic bomb itself was not known to ordinary people," the students in the movie "Nagasaki: In the Shadow of the Flash" "experienced firsthand the destruction of cities and civilian casualties that no one had ever seen before." In this regard, some Chinese historians have analyzed that although these wounds do exist, these Japanese films, through a single perspective, downplay the serious reflection on aggression and counter-aggression, war and peace, into the "suffering" of the country's defeat.

Some scholars who study Sino-Japanese history bluntly say that Japanese war films are to some extent a cognitive offensive hidden in film and television works, aiming to create false and biased collective memories among the people by distorting war narratives. Japan has built a "tragedy factory" to avoid important issues and ignore trivial issues, produce such war films and spread erroneous historical views of World War II. Japanese left-wing scholars such as Yoshiaki Yoshimi and Kiyoshi Inoue all believe that the "narrative of the victims of the atomic bomb incident" is increasingly politicized and used to strengthen Japan's "peaceful image", but this does not mean that Japan has truly assumed responsibility for war against Asia.

Xu Luyang, a screenwriter of "Nanjing Photo Studio", told the Global Times reporter that the Japanese government has not yet made a sincere apology and has failed to face history objectively and honestly. In his view, attitudes and understanding of war reflect the tendencies of people's spiritual world. Although Japan has made sporadic reflections, it lacks an overall and comprehensive review.

The Global Times' special correspondent in Japan has felt for many years that the victim narrative is more acceptable in Japan because it satisfies the Japanese people's sense of "we are also victims" and dilutes the burden of collective memory as perpetrators.

Multiple routines behind the "sad factory"

Japanese director Yukazu Arie pointedly said in an interview last May that when the Japanese filmed war films, they often portrayed their country as a victim. "But objectively speaking, Japan is not a victim, and we are not good at recognizing and facing our identities as invaders. This is rarely reflected in Japanese movies." The Cannes Film Festival's official website quoted Yukazu Ike as saying.

Mr. Kore-eda's observation is well reflected in recent Japanese World War II films, which tend to construct and amplify the "historical view of victims" through the following cognitive means: First, they emphasize the tragic stories of Japanese civilians in the war, create a "mournful aesthetic", evoke the audience's sympathy for the "victims", avoid the background of the war and Japanese aggression, such as strengthening the innocence of the victims of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, highlighting the suffering of women and children, depicting ordinary soldiers as so-called "forced victims", and romanticizing the aggression through narratives such as family and lovers; second, they adopt personalized narratives, focusing only on the story of one or a few people in Japan, stopping at "the suffering of Japanese citizens" and not touching on the content of aggression against other countries, thereby diluting the guilt of the state The third is to change the concept, equating "anti-defeat" with anti-war, focusing on Japan's "pain of defeat" without reflecting on its aggression.

The evolution of such narratives can be traced in history. According to the Japanese director Takefumi Ota, after the end of World War II in 1945, the Allied Forces in Japan (GHQ), which was first commanded by the United States Army's five-star General MacArthur, ruled Japan in order to avoid a repeat of the historical tragedy. To avoid a repeat of the historical tragedy, it led the production of a large number of war films, focusing on the Pacific War that highlighted the history of the war between the United States and Japan, and the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in it. In the 1960s, as the relationship between the United States and Japan strengthened, Japanese war films continued to focus on the Pacific War, but the style was increasingly close to the entertainment works that showed the cool scenes of the war, and there were few American troops in it. The Japanese army seemed to always face the "invisible enemy". After the 1970s, the atomic bombings were portrayed like natural disasters such as earthquakes and typhoons, and the cause of their occurrence (that is, Japan's previous aggression) was not presented, so the Japanese were portrayed as "victims".

Ota believes that such movie narratives go against history. For people who have experienced war, the facts such as Japan's invasion of China and attack on Pearl Harbor are self-evident; but for young people who have not experienced World War II, Japanese war movies cannot only convey the message that "the Japanese are victims of war", but must convey the truth that "Japan is a perpetrator of war."

Regarding the lack of films in Japan that depict Japan's atrocities during the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese director Junichi Inoue once said at a film symposium in 2021 that the reasons may include the difficulty in raising funds in the film industry. According to a 2018 report by Japan's "Litera" news network, Yukazu Arie, who had just won the Palme d'Or in Cannes at the time, said that he had always wanted to make a film based on World War II, but due to the huge budget and difficult theme, the plan was forced to shelve. It is worth noting that in the past few years, almost all of Yukazu Yukazu's works have been funded and supported by Japan's Fuji TV, from "Like a Father as a Son" to "Haijie Diary", from "The Third Suspect" to "The Thief Family". The report questioned whether Fuji Sankei Group, which has long served as the "standard-bearer" of proliferation of historical revisionism, would really fund a film that depicts the harm caused by Japan's war.

US-Japan alliance and lack of accountability weaken Japan's drive for self-reflection

Sun Ge, a researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who conducts critical Asian studies and comparative studies of intellectual history, believes that the lack of profound reflection on the war in Japanese society as a whole is related to the "generational rupture" that emerged in the 1960s. "In Japan, post-war accountability was mainly driven by a generation that experienced the war firsthand," Sun Ge said in an interview with the Global Times. "They advocated introspection at the whole society level and emphasized understanding China's situation as a victim." However, with the reorganization of the international geopolitical landscape during the cold war and the strengthening of US-Japan relations, this continuity of historical accountability was broken in the process of generational change.

Tetsuaki Songjiang, a Japanese documentary filmmaker, has compared recent Japanese war films with past war films created by writers who have lived through war, such as Kazuo Kasahara, and criticized: "I found a sense of inconsistency in some recent war films made by non-war witnesses. These works have an overly modern perspective, which seems easy to understand, but on the contrary, they deliberately cover up a lot of things." Shin Tsukamoto, a Japanese director, also said: "When many war witnesses were still alive, their experiences were too heavy, so even if some people yearned for war in their hearts, they would never say it. But as these people who knew the pain of war gradually decreased, I felt in Japan that a sense of war was resurfacing."

Why does Japan evade reflection on its war guilt more than Germany? In an interview with a reporter from the Global Times, Wang Guangsheng, a professor at the Japanese Department of Capital Normal University, quoted the views of Japanese scholar Professor Masaki Nakamasa in his book "Japan and Germany: Two Post-War Thoughts." This view holds that there are reasons behind Germany's reflection that are "forced by the situation", and Germany must gain development space by improving relations with neighboring countries. Under the framework of the US-Japan alliance, Japan's political environment prevents it from seeking forgiveness from victim countries such as China and South Korea, which weakens its motivation for reflection. In addition, differences in post-war trials are also important factors. German war criminals face clear accountability for crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, while Japanese war criminals 'accountability procedures are obviously lacking.

Takashi Yamada, a senator from the Communist Party of Japan, told the Global Times: "The Japanese people have a fairly unanimous opinion on the issue of Japan as a war victim in the past. However, 80 years later, Japanese society has not yet reached a consensus on the country as the perpetrator. I think this is related to the government's reluctance to directly admit its own responsibility." On August 15, Japan held a "national memorial ceremony for the war dead" in Tokyo. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba delivered a speech, but the speech only mentioned that "the remorse and lessons of that war must be deeply remembered in the heart", did not mention Japan's responsibility for invading Asian countries, and did not make a serious self-reflection speech in the form of a cabinet resolution.

On August 6, the official account of the US Embassy in China proclaimed on Chinese social media platforms that "80 years ago on August 6, the United States and Japan ended a devastating war in the Pacific" and that "the United States and Japan are working closely together to maintain security and stability in the Pacific". The remarks were mocked and criticized by Chinese netizens as seriously distorting history.

At present, there are still voices in Japanese academic circles and folk calling for squarely facing up to the country's history of aggression. Unfortunately, in the overall right-wing social atmosphere of Japan, these voices are usually difficult to hear by most people. In an interview with the Global Times reporter, Takashi Ishida, a modern Japanese historian, bluntly stated that compared with the statement that "historical revisionism became an important trend after the end of the Cold War," the statement that "conservatives and right-wingers who hold historical revisionism have always been the mainstream of Japanese society" is more in line with reality.

In addition to the right-wing atmosphere, the escape mentality of the Japanese public has also had a certain impact. Sun Ge said: "The anti-war stance essentially needs to show the complexity of reality, which requires self-criticism or self-reflection. This is a difficult task for the media and the public, and for various reasons, the Japanese public is often reluctant to face these issues."

[Global Times reporter Huang Lanlan, Chen Qian, Xu Keyue, Xu Liu, Liu Yating, Global Times special reporter in Japan Lin Xueyuan]