BYR Achieve · 镜像论坛

After watching the BBC documantery, Horror in the East, i wrote down a summery of that. i really recommand that film to all of you. it makes us rethink and reexamine the World War II. The Summery of Horror in the East Sixty years after the World War II, the impressive BBC documentary, Horror in the East, with two parts---one is turning against the west and the other is death before surrender, using rarely seen archive footage and interviews with former Japanese soldiers, Kamikaze pilots, Allied POWs, victims of the notorious cruelty, and Japanese and British consultants, gives us an opportunity to know the atrocities and depredations committed by Imperial Japanese military forces, from 1931 to 1945. It not only offers a view of how Japan spread the war fire to all the Asia but also reveals both the unimaginable inhumanity-including cannibalism and crucifixion –and the complex truth behind the kamikazes and the mass suicides. How did the Japanese earn their wartime reputation or inhumane cruelty and self-barbarism? In World War I, Japan was noted for its civic treatment of German POWs, yet just 20 years later they were displaying horrific brutality against the Chinese and merciless treatment of POWs in Singapore, Burma and Malaya. The beliefs of racial superiority that motivated Kamikaze pilots brought mass civilian suicides and the thousands of Japanese soldiers to choose to die rather than surrender. What led to the assault on Nanjing? Why did the Kamikaze soldiers commit suicide so bravely? Why did about 800 people in a village in Japan kill themselves instead of surrender? Those reflected the cultural attitudes that lay behind Japanese atrocities during World War II. The Japanese soldiers committed barbaric crimes such as raping, massacring, and robbing with no reasons in the south east of Asia. They didn’t feel guilty. The first reason was that they just did what the Japanese emperor Hirohito wanted them to do. The emperor was the living God and the supreme commander of forces so everyone should be subjected to him unconditionally. The second reason was that the Japanese considered the Chinese utterly inferior. As for the suicides, in fact, not all the members of Kamikaze were willing to commit suicides by hitting the enemy fleet with planes, just as former Kamikaze pilot Kenichiro Ooonuki said, “Everybody had the same expression in their eyes. Like a deep sea fish looking up into the blue sky. I’ve never seen sadder expressions in the eyes since then. You know that only when you see them. Those young people around 20, in the prime of their youth. ” But they had to do that because if they didn’t obey the orders, what they would wait for was still being killed, in a more dread way. Some pilots volunteered to do that because they believed that after death, their souls would dwell in the emperor's own shrine and that those who survived in the war would bring about shame. The soldiers were proud of scarifying their lives for the emperor. To be a POW was a shame. That message was sent to every person in Japan even the children. And it was that spiritual faith led the villagers numbered 800 to kill themselves. The value of this documentary is that it not only documents horror on a much larger scale but also examines the political, economic and cultural factors, as well as the mindset of those involved, which makes the audience fall into deep thought.

[原创] suggest a documantery of BBC