Understanding and Choice (1988)

Plot Summary

A documentary produced to disseminate historical truth about the 1937 Nanjing Massacre to international audiences. It records the Shorinji Kempo Organization of Japan’s 40th-anniversary visit to China, but rather than serving as a simple travelogue, it uses the 299 participants’ journey—beginning in Nanjing—as a confrontation with the facts of Japan’s wartime aggression and the choices demanded in the present. Through Chinese filmmakers’ perspectives, testimony, archival images, and narration addressing the Nanjing Massacre, nuclear war, militarization, and historical responsibility, the film asks viewers to reject indifference, self-justification, and the concealment of inconvenient history. It argues that peace cannot remain an abstract ideal or be left to governments and power-seekers; each person must begin from the shared human right to survival, face history honestly, and choose concrete action toward mutual understanding and peace.

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