[11] On the 16th they shot footage of the foothills of Purple Mountain, the suburban recreational garden containing Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, and a nearby concert hall where dogs were wanderingly freely.

[13] The journal also notes that the camera crew filmed the construction of water supply facilities[14] and the provision of medical treatment to Chinese POWs.

[17] After Shirai arrived in Nanjing on December 14 he saw long lines of Chinese who were being taken to the banks of the Yangtze River to be shot, but he was not allowed to start his movie camera.

[2][18] Kinema-Junpo Co.'s database introduces it as a highly discussed work relevant to the debate on the Nanjing Massacre which records real-life images of the devastated city and of Japan's occupying army.

He received the impression that the movie was reporting on slivers of light in the darkness of Nanjing with the Japanese soldiers all being filmed in cheerful settings behind the front lines and with no trace of the nervousness of the Chinese people who were forced to remain silent.

[22] Film critic Jinshi Fujii has indicated that the movie's most distinctive characteristic lies in its unbalanced nature full of contradiction, which he calls "a stylized chaos".