Asia's version of Holocaust Films to document Sino-Japanese war Chinese want the world to know of Japanese atrocities BY KEN MCLAUGHLIN - Mercury News Staff Writer It's being called the Forgotten Holocaust, the Asian version of what occurred in Nazi Germany. Little more than a historical footnote in much of the West, the event that began with Japanese march into Manchuria in 1931 is one of unbelievable bar barism: Germ warfare. Slave labor camps. Mass rapes. Decapitation contests. Dissection of live bodies. Now, with a sense of urgency as survivors reach old age, Silicon Valley's sizable Chinese immigrant community is in the forefront of the first major campaign to make the world aware of what happened during Japan's 14-year occupation of China. As the t anniversary of the end of World War II approaches, the immigrants say, it's a part of history that Japan has never truly acknowledged. While many in the United States may be familiar with the Rape of Nanjing, where an estimated 300,000 people died, Chinese-American activists say few are aware of the scope of the overall slaughter. Some scholars say 15 million Chinese died as the direct result of Japan's invasion, but activists say the figure could be twice that. The valley's Chinese-Americans are at the heart of the campaign to spread the word because they are politically organized and, in many cases, financially successful. Two South Bay fund raisers recently brought in $62,000 for a pair of film projects on the atrocities. "The cause is taking off like wildfire,'' said Eugene Wei of San Jose, a board member of the year old, Cupertino based Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino of Japanese War. "The Chinese are really waking up." Formal apology sought Along with other Chinese American groups, the alliance wants Japan to apologize formally for its conduct and provide reparations as West Germany did for the Jews, We said. Japanese government officials say they have already acknowledged the "sufferings" inflicted during the Sino-Japanese War, but Chinese immigrants contend that Japan remains in denial. San Francisco film producers David Kaplan and David Bolt are proposing a four-part Public Broadcasting System series on the Sino-Japanese war called "The Forgotten Holocaust," saying the documentary will counter notion that World War II was primarily a European conflict -- with mostly European victims. At a recent fund-raiser at the Cupertino home of David and Cathy Tsang, four film makers -- Kaplan, Bolt and Chinese-Americans Nancy Tong and Christine Choy--emphasized the need to get their projects done now. "The witnesses are dying," said Kaplan, 37, "We have to get this on the historical record." A Jewish-American who lost relatives in the Nazi Holocaust, Kaplan said he has been touched by the passion and generosity of the Chinese immigrant community, a community that lacks a strong philanthropic tradition. "Yes, we're a couple of white film makers," Kaplan said. "But Chinese-Americans see us as an effective vehicle to finally get their story told." Like the others involved, Tong, a New York producer, emphasized that "we're not joining the Japan bashers.... This is about recognizing history and making sure we don't repeat that history." Tong and other Chinese-Americans express admiration for the Jewish people for not letting their children--and the world--forget about the Nazi Holocaust. The alliance wants to raise enough money eventually to open a museum on the Sino-Japanese war, or the perhaps establish a permanent exhibit in the United States Holocaust Museum, which opened in April in the heart of Washington. Horrors of Nanjing No doubt any exhibit on the war would highlight the horrors at Nanjing, which began on Dec. 13, 1937, when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded the Chinese capital. When the siege was over six weeks later, some 300,000 Chinese--mostly innocent civilians--had been bayoneted, machine-gunned or burned alive. Japanese officers and soldiers raped tens of thousands of women and girls. But Chinese-American activists say the holocaust actually began six years earlier when Japan invaded the northeastern provinces of China (Manchuria) and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. Several months later, the Japanese set up their first germ warfare center outside Harbin. Bombs containing germs aimed at causing diseases such as typhoid and the bubonic plague were later dropped on numerous Chinese cities, according to the diaries of captured Japanese soldiers. The centers were also the places where thousands of Chinese prisoners--and later a handful of Russian and American prisoners -- were subjected to gruesome medical experimentation, according to the diaries. Many prisoners were dissected live without anesthesia before being slaughtered and cremated. "The Japanese did not have programs like the Germans to kill people," said Bolt, 38, a military historian. "But from the early years in Manchuria, the Japanese began to treat Chinese civilians as completely expendable." Evidence is found in the diaries. "Today we again beat the innocent Chinese half-dead, then pushed them to the ditch, and had their hairs lighted so as to see them lingering to die," one Japanese soldier wrote. "For the sake of passing away time, everybody does the same to amuse him self." One of the war's most heinous stories was of a decapitation contest between two officers of the Japanese 16th Division at the Purple Gold Mountain outside Nanjing. After one lieutenant killed 106 Chinese and another killed 105, both realized that neither had kept track who got to l00--the contest's first goal. At that point, they decided to keep going until one had reached 150, the Toyko newspaper Nichi-nichi proudly reported in December 1937. At the end of the war, Chines and Allied troops made scores of grisly discoveries. In Datong in Shanxi Province, in the basement of the Pingwang Hospital, the Chinese army found between 600 and 700 well-developed fetuses preserved in jars. The unborn babies had been cut out of pregnant women for research. Most Japanese school text books and encyclopedias downplay Japan's aggression in China. The Nanjing massacre is often referred to as the Nanjing Incident. Casualty figures are rarely cited. Indicative of Japanese denial, Chinese immigrants say, was a comment made in l990 by Shintaro Ishihara, a popular Japanese writer and influential politician. "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there (Nanjing), but that is not true," Ishihara told Playboy magazine. "It is a story made up by the Chinese." Eiichi Suzuki, a Japanese consulate official in San Francisco, pointed to a speech made by Japanese Emperor Akihito during a visit to China in October to mark the 20th anniversary of diplomatic ties between the two countries. Said the emperor: "In the long history of relationship between our two countries, there was an unfortunate period in which my country inflicted great sufferings on the people of China. I deeply deplore this." Chinese-American activists, however, say that's inadequate. "It's pretty far away from making a full apology and admitting what they have done," Wei said. Japan-bashing feared Some members of the alliance had been concerned that their campaign would anger Japanese-Americans. But the Chinese immigrants say they have gotten nothing but support once they understood that the alliance was trying to fight revisionist history. "The truth should be told," said San Jose attorney Richard Konda, a Japanese-American who was active in the fight to win reparations from the United States government for interning Japanese-Americans during World War II. That crusade in the 1980s, Konda noted, also intended to shine a light on a little-known piece of history. Although most Western historians say the 30 million figure cited by activists appears inflated, the historians acknowledge that an authoritative figure would be impossible to determine because China was an impoverished country racked by civil war, famine and natural disasters. "One thing the Chinese don't like to talk about is the number of Chinese killed by Chinese," said John Stephan, a history professor at the University of Hawaii. In June 1938, for instance, Nationalist forces blew up the Yellow River dikes and killed 6,000 advancing Japanese soldiers. But the action also killed an estimated 160,000 Chinese in 4,000 villages, Stephan said. Both documentaries will try to answer the same question: Why? As Choy put it, "What is embedded in the mind of a 17-year-old Japanese soldier who in one night rapes 20 women and kills 30 children and feels fine?" Mikiso Hane, a Japanese-American historian who was born in Hollister, thinks he has part of the answer. Hane was sent to school in Japan in 1933 when he was 11 years old, two years after Japan invaded Manchuria. He stayed in Japan until 1940. Throughout his schooling, "there were no lessons about acting humanely toward other people," said Hade, now a professor emeritus at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Hane remembers playing child hood war games-- a Japanese version of cowboys and Indians --in which the Chinese children were always the weaklings. Stephan, an expert in Japanese history, said the Japanese people have a "cultural tradition not to confront ugliness. It's not talked about, not shown." But Tong and others argue that Japan owes it to the world to confront its past. "After the European war, the German people were able to separate themselves from Nazi Germany," Tong said. "That never happened in Japan." "This kind of denial has to stop," she said. "Look at Bosnia. We human beings are making the same mistake over and over and over again."