What Kurosawa so skillfully does in this film is problematize narrative. Chang, however, completely misunderstands Kurosawa s intent. Perhaps this is what made her misunderstanding of Kurosawa and obviously political presentation of the whole situation that much more annoying. If she had made no claims to objectivity, I would have no gripe. Kurosawa was right, Chang is wrong.
History needs to be problematized.
In Chang s case, her own biases are fortunately so obvious as to pose little problem. I would have been pleasantly surprised to find that this bias was not as prominently displayed in Chang s presentation of the events in Nanking, but I was at least thankful that she let us know of them up front in the Introduction. I need to pause here and say that I am not an apologist for Japan. The acts of those soldiers and their commanding officers are hideous beyond explanation. But I am not an apologist for America either, and I fear Chang is.