In the summer of 2025, a Chinese historical drama about the Nanjing Massacre became both a major box-office success and a renewed focus of debate over how China and Japan remember World War II.
Dead to Rights, whose Chinese title translates as Nanjing Photo Studio, follows civilians sheltering in a photography studio after Japanese forces captured Nanjing in December 1937. The film was released as China prepared to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and the victory over Japan.
Its popularity reflected something larger than interest in a wartime film. Nearly nine decades after the massacre, the events in Nanjing remain central to historical memory in China and continue to shape political and diplomatic arguments between Beijing and Tokyo.
What Happened in Nanjing?
Japanese troops entered Nanjing, then the capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In the weeks that followed, Japanese forces carried out mass killings, executions of prisoners and suspected soldiers, widespread rape, looting and other atrocities against Chinese civilians and captured troops.
The basic historical reality of the atrocities is extensively documented in wartime records, photographs, diaries and testimony. Yale University's Nanking Massacre Project, for example, preserves firsthand accounts and photographs from American missionaries and other foreigners who remained in the city.
The exact death toll remains the subject of scholarly debate because estimates depend partly on the geographic area, time period and categories of victims included. China's official commemorative figure is about 300,000 deaths. Postwar tribunals and historians have produced different estimates, with many scholarly assessments placing the number of victims in the tens or hundreds of thousands.
Japan's own government does not deny that atrocities occurred. In its official history issues guidance, Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that it "cannot be denied" that Japanese forces killed noncombatants and committed looting and other acts after entering Nanjing, while saying that the precise number of victims remains disputed.
A Film Reopens a Difficult History
Dead to Rights dramatizes the massacre through civilians caught inside occupied Nanjing. Rather than functioning as a documentary, it uses fictionalized characters and a photography studio to frame the wider historical events.
The movie quickly became one of China's most prominent releases of 2025. Chinese box-office reporting said its ticket sales exceeded 2.2 billion yuan by mid-August, illustrating the continuing public resonance of wartime memory.
Among those discussing the film online was Japanese vlogger Hayato Kato, who had built a large following in China with videos about his life there. After watching the movie, he posted a more serious video reflecting on the massacre and urging Japanese viewers to learn about the darker parts of Japan's wartime history.
His remarks attracted substantial attention on Chinese social media, where reactions ranged from appreciation for his comments to broader criticism of Japan's handling of wartime memory.
Those responses should not be treated as evidence of a single Chinese public opinion. They do, however, illustrate how discussions of Nanjing can quickly become part of a wider argument over apology, remembrance and present-day relations with Japan.
Japan's Wartime Responsibility and Its Postwar Apologies
One recurring source of tension is the perception among many people in China and South Korea that Japan has not consistently confronted its wartime conduct.
The historical record is more complicated than saying that Japan has never apologized. Successive Japanese governments have issued statements expressing remorse and apology for wartime aggression and suffering.
Japan's 1993 Kono Statement acknowledged military involvement in the wartime "comfort women" system and said that many women had been recruited against their will through coercion and other means. The statement expressed "sincere apologies and remorse" to those who suffered.
Later Japanese governments repeated expressions of remorse. Japan also helped establish the Asian Women's Fund, which provided assistance and payments to some former comfort women. At the same time, disputes have persisted over the adequacy of those measures, legal responsibility, compensation and statements by individual Japanese politicians or public figures challenging aspects of the historical record.
The question therefore is not simply whether apologies occurred. Much of the controversy concerns whether those apologies were sufficiently consistent, whether later political statements weakened them, and how Japan's wartime history is presented domestically.
Why Yasukuni Shrine Remains Controversial
Visits by Japanese political figures to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine regularly renew those disagreements. The shrine honors millions of Japan's war dead, including 14 men convicted as Class-A war criminals after World War II.
Many Japanese visitors regard the shrine primarily as a place to remember relatives and others who died in war. China and South Korea, however, have repeatedly criticized visits by senior officials because of the shrine's association with wartime leaders and Japanese militarism.
That disagreement remained active during the 80th anniversary commemorations in 2025. Japanese politicians again visited or sent offerings to the shrine, while Beijing publicly protested.
The episode demonstrates how acts intended by some Japanese participants as private or national remembrance can carry a very different meaning in countries that experienced Japanese occupation.
The Wider War in China
The Nanjing Massacre occurred during a much larger conflict between China and Japan. Full-scale war broke out in 1937 after years of Japanese expansion in China, although China's current official historical framework dates the broader resistance to Japan from the 1931 occupation of Manchuria.
Chinese Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek carried much of the conventional fighting against Japan, while Communist forces also fought Japanese troops, especially through guerrilla operations and resistance behind Japanese lines.
The conflict devastated large parts of China and caused millions of civilian and military deaths. Precise totals differ among historians because of incomplete wartime records and differing definitions of war-related deaths.
Japan itself also suffered enormous losses during the wider Pacific War, particularly during the final stages of the conflict. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and conventional bombing of Japanese cities became defining elements of Japanese postwar memory.
These experiences are not mutually exclusive. Japanese civilians suffered catastrophic destruction, while Japanese forces simultaneously inflicted enormous suffering across China, Korea and other parts of Asia. Understanding both does not erase responsibility for documented wartime atrocities.
Why Historical Memory Became Politically Important in China
The way China officially remembers the war has changed considerably since 1945.
After Japan's surrender, China returned to civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists and Mao Zedong's Communists. The Communist victory in 1949 and the Nationalist government's retreat to Taiwan produced competing narratives about who had led China's resistance to Japan.
During parts of the Mao era, wartime atrocities committed by Japan received less official emphasis than revolutionary history and the Communist Party's victory in the civil war.
From the 1980s onward, however, public commemoration of the Japanese invasion expanded. Memorials, museums, textbooks, television productions and films increasingly placed wartime suffering within China's national narrative.
That process has continued under President Xi Jinping, whose government has emphasized what it calls the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation." Beijing's wartime commemorations simultaneously honor victims and resistance while also reinforcing a state-sponsored narrative of national unity.
That does not make the underlying atrocities fictional or disputed simply because governments use history for political purposes. It is important to distinguish established historical evidence from the ways contemporary governments interpret and present that history.
The 80th Anniversary and China's 2025 Commemorations
The release of Dead to Rights formed part of a broader period of remembrance surrounding the 80th anniversary of Japan's surrender.
On September 3, 2025, China held a major military parade in Beijing commemorating victory in what Beijing calls the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War.
The parade took place after the original wave of attention surrounding the film and underscored how historical remembrance, contemporary nationalism and modern military power can intersect in official commemorations.
Other Chinese productions released or promoted around the anniversary also revisited Japanese wartime atrocities and resistance to occupation, demonstrating the continuing prominence of World War II in Chinese popular culture.
A Dispute That Extends Beyond History Books
Historical tensions sometimes spill into contemporary relations. Chinese and Japanese governments cooperate extensively in trade and regional diplomacy, but disputes over wartime memory remain capable of generating sharp diplomatic protests and public anger.
They also exist alongside current disagreements involving territorial claims, military activity in East Asia and broader strategic competition.
It is therefore misleading to treat every modern China-Japan dispute as simply a consequence of events in the 1930s and 1940s. Current security and political interests have their own dynamics. At the same time, wartime history provides an emotional and political backdrop that can intensify those disputes.
Why the Nanjing Massacre Still Matters
The continued debate surrounding Nanjing is partly a dispute over facts, but increasingly it is also a dispute over remembrance: which events are emphasized, how responsibility is described, what constitutes sufficient acknowledgment and how later generations should interpret crimes they did not personally commit.
The historical evidence establishes that Japanese forces committed grave atrocities in Nanjing after capturing the city in December 1937. Debate over the exact number of victims does not negate the underlying event, just as recognition of Japanese civilian suffering later in the war does not diminish the suffering inflicted by Japan's wartime military.
Japan's governments have issued significant apologies and acknowledgments, while revisionist statements and controversies involving some politicians have repeatedly complicated perceptions of those efforts abroad.
China, meanwhile, has made remembrance of Japanese aggression an increasingly prominent element of its national historical narrative, sometimes combining genuine commemoration of documented atrocities with contemporary political messaging.
That mixture of history, trauma, diplomacy and national identity helps explain why a film such as Dead to Rights can become far more than a box-office success. For audiences across East Asia, the events of 1937 remain connected to unresolved questions about memory, responsibility and reconciliation nearly nine decades later.
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