Japan's war guilt gets yet another airing in the Japanese-made film "Riben Guizi (Japanese Devils)" (reviewed on Dec. 5). The film provides on-camera interviews with 14 former Japanese soldiers who committed atrocities during the 1937-45 war with China. Its two hours of horror have an honesty that, like most evil, borders on the banal.
Some rightwing critics say that since the Japanese interviewees had all been in Chinese re-education camps after the war, they may have been brainwashed. That is nonsense. It was the hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers and others who served in China and who refused to admit to atrocities that were brainwashed. They could not free themselves from the shackles of a tightly groupist ethic that says the nation-tribe can admit no wrong.
The Chinese camps provided a debrainwashing process. They helped the prisoners recover their sense of conscience and humanity.