【明報專訊】Exactly seventy-six years ago, on 13th December 1941, the British defence force retreated from Kowloon to Hong Kong island to continue to fight a hopeless battle against the ferocious Imperial Army of Japan, before they surrendered on Christmas. Exactly eighty years previously, the same blood-thirsty troops broke through the walls of China's capital to kick off the Rape of Nanjing that lasted for six weeks. In both cities, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers and citizens were killed, tens of thousands of women raped, and thousands captured and enslaved as "comfort women". In Horror in the East (2001), Laurence Rees is less interested in reopening the wounds than in answering two questions: Why were Japanese soldiers capable of committing such atrocities? What factors were culpable for turning them into perverts?