Riben guizi

This is a MUST SEE. Japanese director Minoru Matsui should be praised for releasing a 'confessions of ex-WW2 Japanese soldiers'. This is a very sensitive issue in Japan today due to their many living in denial of their crimes. These ex-soldiers confessed of their indiscriminate murders, rapes, plunders, tortures and so on. Basically the most horrific of crimes against humanity unimaginable. You have to see this to believe it. The average Japanese soldier would make Joseph Mengele look like Mother Theresa. The average Japanese soldier would make any Nazi T4 personnel look like pussycats. These soldiers have contributed to the most sickenning part of mankind's history.

This documentary should be made compulsory viewing for all students of modern history and warfare. In the way it was presented, I can guarantee that there is no "off-putting" part as suggested by another reviewer in his "perceived bias of the victim nation's propaganda". HELLO... it was made by Japanese!!! Duh. There's simply no excuse for what these men did.

We should all view this so history will never repeat itself.

Lest we forget the past for our future's sake.

This documentary, still seen by few, will hopefully be more widely distributed as years go by. The usual war dynamics are here; men brutalized by a brutal military machine lose their humanity.

Listening to these old men tell the stories; however, puts it in an powerful context. Recommended, nine out of ten.

The atrocities described are horrific, but they are told by only 14 soldiers who spent 11 years in Soviet and Chinese prison camps before "confessing" to their war crimes. I know that people behave atrociously during war, but I was skeptical of these particular accounts from the beginning of the film.

There are only 14 men, who can't possibly be representative of the entire Japanese army. And even though they seem to believe their own stories, the stories are too well rehearsed.

These 14 men all confessed after spending 11 years in prison camps. Go to The Innocence Project and read about false confessions. They happen more often and more easily than we'd like to think. Also, there are no accounts of soldiers who DID NOT spend any time in Chinese prison camps. These soldiers were singing Internationale when they got off the boat from prison camp.

The footage and description of the Chinese prison camp SCREAMED propaganda. The civil-warring Chinese were brutal even with each other, so it's totally incredible that they would have been saints to the Japanese prisoners.

It's unfortunate because I know that war is evil and that soldiers do commit atrocities. I think the world needs to see and acknowledge the evil. I desperately want that message to get out. But truth should always be paramount to propaganda, especially in a "documentary."

Various Japanese who served as enlisted men or low ranking officers in the Imperial Army in China and Manchuria and were later put in forced labor camps in the Soviet Union and then in Red China discuss the atrocities against civilians that they participated in.

At least some of the men have already published their experiences in Japan. They are usually calm and straightforward in their presentations.

The main interest is that this is seeming the only time that this sort of material has been filmed.

A compelling, moving and frightening documentary, consisting of interviews with elderly Japanese veterans about their experiences in China (and Manchuria) during the war. Included in this group are former members of the infamous unit 731, known for its biological warfare tested on the Japanese.

The movie clearly spells out the atrocities committed by the Japanese upon Chinese civilians, and their recollections of their feelings and motivations at the time. While such films that deal with Nazi atrocities are not uncommon, there are few other Japanese-produced documentaries of this type. The only off-putting note is when the soldiers describe their capture by the Chinese at the end of the war, and how well they were treated during their captivity -- often with more than one soldier using the exact words to describe it, and accompanied by propaganda-looking footage from the time. But this can hardly detract from the power of the testimony of these soldiers and their descriptions of the atrocities they committed.