his paper is designed, according to the context of “the rise of the great nation” and “the territorial integration of East Asia”, to present three cultural symptoms of City of Life and Death, a film controversial for its Japanese perspective. Firstly, based on a study of the evolution of resistance images, the author argues that the shift of the narrative strategy is the replacement of premodern subjects with modern subjects, which is in fact a reflection of the idea of “the rise of the great nation”. Secondly, the author will track, with reference to Lu Xun’s “The Slide Event”, the psychological journey of a Japanese soldier named Kadokawa from invasion to massacre to breakdown to suicide, demonstrating the relationship between modern subjects’ self-criticism and the inborn violence of modernity. Thirdly, considering the violence of modernity befallen to the Chinese was mainly from Japan, and the wounds of Asia also the wounds of modernity, the author claims that the Japanese or Otherness perspective is, against the background of territorial integration of East Asia, an attempt to heal the trauma resulting from the Sino-Japanese wars. As such, City of Life and Death plays a twofold function in integration, internally reversing the sad strategy adopted in the 1980s while externally healing the wounds of modernity/Asia.