MOVIES - Jan. 20, 1988

Scenes in Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” depicting the Rape of Nanking, Japan’s four-day massacre in that Chinese city before World War II, will be cut from the film when it opens in Tokyo on Saturday. The Manchester Guardian reported this week that Bertolucci and others involved in the film felt that Japanese audiences might be offended by the re-enactment of the 1937 event, when an estimated 430,000 Chinese civilians were raped or murdered by the Imperial Japanese Army. A spokesman for Shochiku Fuji Co., the film’s distributor in Japan, stressed that the editing was the director’s decision; the company had not asked that the Nanking scenes be cut. Ironically, the film had its premiere--uncut--at the Tokyo Film Festival last year.