Cinematic justice: Unit 731’s crimes won’t stay buried

Editor's note: Min Rui is a culture journalist and a special commentator for CGTN. The following commentary reflects her personal views.

On September 18, a date already carved deep into China's memory, the film "731," or internationally titled "Evil Unbound," opens in theaters worldwide. China, Australia and New Zealand see it first, followed by the United States and Canada a day later.

The timing is pointed. September 18 marks the 1931 Mukden Incident, the spark that set off Japan's full-scale invasion of China and 14 years of aggression. To choose this date for release is to insist that history cannot be erased simply.

Chinese audiences seem to agree. By September 16, two days before the film's premiere, presales in China had exceeded 94 million yuan (around $13 million). Over 4.5 million people had registered interest, and more than 20,000 left messages online, many describing both anticipation and respect for the history behind the story. Clearly, the hunger for remembrance outweighs the pressure to forget.

The English title "Evil Unbound" feels almost understated. The film revisits the final years of World War II, when Japan's military, desperate to reverse defeat, turned Harbin into a human laboratory. Captives were no longer people but "maruta" (a Japanese term for wood logs) to be dissected, frozen, infected and discarded. It was cruelty, yes, but cruelty made more chilling by its bureaucratic precision and scientific pretense.

When an army calls human beings "logs," it is not just losing a war, it is surrendering its humanity. Unit 731's doctors and officers justified vivisections, frostbite trials and plague injections as research, dutifully recording suffering as if it were data. Even now, the very idea forces a shiver, then anger, at the scale of dehumanization.

These crimes are not revelations. The atrocities of Unit 731 have been depicted on the big screen before. Hong Kong's "Men Behind the Sun" shocked audiences back in 1988, and countless documentaries have revisited the horrors. But "Evil Unbound" is not about reopening wounds, despite what Tokyo's defenders claim. It is about polishing the gravestone of memory before dust can conceal the inscription. History, left untended, fades.

Japan's politicians, however, seem eager to help it fade. Every time a film like this emerges, accusations of "anti-Japanese propaganda" surface. The louder the objection, the deeper the anxiety it betrays. If Japan truly "loved peace" as often declared, why the pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine that honors war criminals? Why honor war criminals like Hideki Tojo? Why the allergic reaction whenever a camera dares to tell the truth?

Chinese anger, then, is not manufactured nationalism. It is the natural response to denial. For most families, the war is not abstract history but lived trauma: a grandfather taken as forced labor, a grandmother's village burned. "731" is not a number in a textbook but a wound carried across generations.

This September also marks the 80th anniversary of victory in the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and World War II. China's September 3 commemorations were more than parades and weapon displays; they were a declaration that peace requires memory, not amnesia.

In the same spirit, films like "Evil Unbound," "Dead to Rights," "Mountains and Rivers Bearing Witness" and "Dongji Rescue" are less entertainment than testimony, reminders of a painful past projected on the largest possible screens in 2D, IMAX, INITY, Dolby Cinema and CGS formats.

What do Chinese people expect from Japan? Not poetic apologies that expire with each cabinet reshuffle, but honesty. Acknowledge that "maruta" were human beings. Admit that Unit 731 committed crimes against humanity. Recognize that fourteen years of aggression left wounds measured in millions of lives.

Until then, forgiveness is premature and "peace" rings hollow. "Evil Unbound" insists that some histories cannot be sanitized, some crimes cannot be whitewashed and some truths must be repeated, precisely because silence would serve only the guilty.

And in the end, what some Japanese politicians fear most is not the film itself, but the prospect that a new generation will remember the truth it dares to show.