On Monday, we watch this BBC documentary about the incursion of China by the Japanese forces during World War Two. What is so striking about this programme is that interviews are conducted with former Japanese soldiers who had been there – men from the former Imperial Japanese Army, Navy and the Military Police. They show photos of their younger selves, followed by an interview with the same person half a century later: harmless-looking old men without the tinge of snarling ferocity the Japanese troops possessed as they went on their rampage through Asia.

The question that the documentary asks is: what caused the Japanese to become so brutal beyond any other barbaric descriptions during the war? They were a civilised and disciplined people. After the Great War, they had brought prisoners-of-war (POWs) from captured German territory in China back to the home islands (Japan was on the side of the Allies during World War One), and they treated the Germans with utmost hospitality and respect that some of these POWs, when eventually released, chose to remain in Japan.

The answer is: the brutal training regiment for Japanese conscripts. The recruits were mostly peasants from the countryside, mobilised for the Japanese war effort. In order to instil discipline into such a large force, the officers decided to impart it there and then. No mistakes were tolerated. Any slight error would be met with a hard blow onto the body, or some other physical torture. Even the interviewees themselves admitted that. One of them even just wanted to die even before he was sent out to fight the war proper because it was so painful to the point of the unbearable, that he hoped to end his suffering there and then. Another interviewee said that, when the instructors were tired, the recruits were told to slap each other. Yes, slap your comrade, your buddy!

They were also mentally prepared for their metamorphosis into killing machines. They were told to think of their captives as ‘not humans’ but ‘animals’, unlike the ‘superiority of the Japanese race’. Hence they used human targets for bayonet practice without any remorse. Their anger boiled easily – they inflicted the rape and massacre of Nanjing and all the other atrocities such as the Sook Ching in Singapore and Malaya because they were angry that the Chinese KMT forces were one to be reckoned with, and brought about many losses within the Japanese ranks. Asked by the interviewer if they had any remorse over their actions, many of the interviewees said, in the present moment, they were, but back then, they did not feel remorseful. We probably cannot blame them, because of the system at home that they were exposed to. They had no choice but to swallow it, or there would be repercussions from the other members in their social group. My lecturer calls Japan the ‘mass cult’: in the name of the Emperor and country anything is sanctioned.

As the video turns to show pictures of massacre and rape victims in Nanjing, and then back to the interview with the retired soldier who once raped and killed these people, I cannot help but feel that sense of overpowering disgust and creepiness: gosh, I am looking at this guy who was a serial rapist and killer. And now he’s old, he looks harmless. If you didn’t tell me he was a soldier then I wouldn’t believe he’d done so.

Later in the evening we watch the first forty-five minutes or so of Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. The movie is just creepy, disturbing. The chaos and unexpected behaviour of the Shanghainese folk as the limousine carrying the British family of three in their outrageous costumes going for a party – suddenly a carcass from the butcher’s swings and strikes the glass of the car without any warning, while the stone-faced head of the family in the pirate’s costume continues to gaze ahead. Chinese policeman clinging onto the limousines: beating Chinese people who happen to get too close to the cars because the street is just damn crowded. A well-to-do Chinese at a party for the expatriates, dressed stately like them, conversing with them in their tongue, eating the same food as they do. See the rifts in Chinese society then?

And then the Japanese troops march into Shanghai. The family tries to flee for the port. Their limousine is trapped in the tidal wave of Chinese trying to flee the oncoming Japanese soldiers. Too slow. They get out. Swept along with the tide. They are separated, as tides do. Water knows no directions. The boy gets into the middle of a parade of Japanese troops marching in. Surprisingly they ignore him – I half-expect something to happen to him for disturbing their formation.

The boy returns to his house. The maid slaps him for impudence, and leaves. The boy remains in the house for months, eating whatever food that is left. Watching the water level in the swimming pool slowly dip until he can retrieve the golf balls that his father has teed into. When he first returns home, he sees that the house has come under the ‘property of the Imperial Army’. We half-expect him to run into a Japanese soldier, or that Japanese troops would come into the house and arrest him. No, that doesn’t happen. But it does later in the movie, after the boy returns home a second time after wandering into the city on his bicycle, after he tries to cycle after a truck carrying expatriate families away.

I am still utterly disturbed by it. I cannot do any work for the rest of the evening.