|
Japanese filmmaker plans mock Nanjing tribunal
2008-01-26
A Japanese filmmaker who says the Nanjing Massacre never happened said Friday he planned to hold a mock tribunal this summer to prove his view. "We want to launch the Nanjing international court this summer," director Satoru Mizushima told a press conference where he unveiled his film, "The Truth of Nanking." "If we can discuss our position fairly, we will never lose," he said, sitting before a huge Japanese rising-sun flag next to nearly 40 supporters. Mizushima, who runs a satellite television station, said he would invite people who disagree with him, including directors of films that came out last year for the 70th anniversary of the massacre. "Nanking," a Chinese production with Hollywood backing, hit cinemas last year in Asia and the West. It was inspired by late US writer Iris Chang's book "The Rape of Nanking" documenting the horrors. Japanese troops stormed the city, then China's capital and known as Nanking, in 1937. China, which has likened the bloodshed to the Holocaust perpetrated by Germany, says about 300,000 civilians were massacred. While Japan has apologised for wartime atrocities in Nanjing and elsewhere, it has never officially put a figure on the number of dead. Mizushima said his film was a "drama-documentary" and the first in a three-part series disputing the Nanjing massacre. Mizushima said he will invite to the mock trial former Japanese soldiers and others who spoke in other films about the Nanjing atrocities, although he doubted they would come. "I bet you those who give irresponsible testimony will never step forward to be verified," he said. Surveys show a majority of Japanese concede their country committed wrongs during the war, but some Japanese nationalists, who have been wielding growing influence since the late 1990s, insist the massacre is Chinese propaganda. Mizushima was backed at his press conference by conservative figures including Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of Japan's wartime premier Hideki Tojo. "We have to prevail in this ideological war that has been instigated," Shingo Nishimura, a lower house lawmaker known for his outspoken conservative views, said as he praised the film. "If we lose in this ideological war, the soul of our ethnic identity will be annihilated," he said.
| 
