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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
Japanese Devils, a documentary of personal confessions of war crimes by Japanese Imperial soldiers in China during World War II, was invited to the Sarajevo Film Festival in August 2002. Accompanying the film and its director to Sarajevo, the author, an American, sensitive to the postwar Japanese experience, discovered a people and city still deeply traumatized by war. The visit prompted a series of questions about the origins of genocide, the consequences of targeting civilians in war, and our collective responsibility to question and listen to the stories of perpetrators, as civilians increasingly become explicit targets in hostilities.
1. Tomatsu Shomei, Nagasaki 11:02 (Tokyo: Shaken, 1968). This book of photographs and survivor accounts resulted from Tomatsu's extensive documentation, during the 1960s, of Nagasaki's Catholic hibakusha community, which was largely ghettoized after the war.
2. Danis Tanovic, writer, director, No Man's Land (97 minutes, 2001)-winner of the Best Foreign Picture Oscar in 2002.
3. Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (New York: Vintage Books, 1996).
4. Ibid., 227
5. Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried (New York: Broadway Books, 1999), 68-69.
6. Coco Shrijber, director, First Kill (52 minutes, 2001). Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films (New York).
7. Bestor Cram and Mike Majoros, directors, Unfinished Symphony (59 minutes, 2001). An emotional, poetic, and lyrical reflection on the Vietnam War, this audience favorite at the Sundance Film Festival employs archival footage of “Operation POW” in 1971, when U.S. soldiers home from combat pointedly retraced Paul Revere's “freedom ride” between Concord, Massachusetts, and Bunker Hill–resulting in 410 arrests on charges of civil disobedience. In lieu of conventional voice-over narration, the directors use Henryk Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs as both a structuring principle and a mournful expression of unspeakable loss. (from City Pages documentary film festival website)
8. Winterfilm, Inc., Winter Soldier (95 minutes, 1972).
9. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda (New York: Picador, 1998).
10. Ibid., 95.
11. Istvan Deak, “The Crime of the Century,” New York Review of Books 49, no. 14 (26 September 2002): 48-51.
12. Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), 466.
13. Matsui did not ask survivors to recount their treatment in the reeducation camps, describing their treatment in voice-over narration as: “Following Chou En-Lai's motto ‘Even war criminals are human, Respect their Humanity, 1 the newly created People's Republic gave these war criminals humane treatment. Staff at both facilities overcame their personal enmity. Any corporal punishment or verbal abuse was forbidden, and prisoners were treated with extraordinary warmth and humanity in every way, from food, medical care and exercise, to education and culture. The war criminals, who had expected severe punishment, were both profoundly moved and remorseful. Their treatment eventually awakened their own consciences. They acknowledged their crimes during the occupation and apologized to the Chinese people.”
14. Tomatsu Shomei, Nagasaki <11:02> August 9, 1945, Linda Hoaglund, trans. (Tokyo, Shinchosha, 1995), 128.
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