China marked 70 years since Japan’s infamous Nanjing massacre on Thursday, invoking memories of the atrocity to remind Tokyo that the wartime past remains a bitter backdrop to an improving relationship.
Sirens sounded, calling citizens to silence, a bell tolled, and around 100,000 people, including frail survivors, gathered for the re-opening of a newly expanded massacre memorial in the former capital in eastern China.
The six-week wave of killing by invading Japanese troops over-running Nanjing was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan’s invasion of China, taking 300,000 lives according to official Chinese accounts.
For China, how Japan remembers the “Rape of Nanking” – as the city was then called in English – has become a defining test of how contrite its neighbour is about its brutal occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.
Ageing survivors have been brought forward to remind the world of the massacre.
“The horrible chapter left me physically deformed. But I feel more emotional pain on days marking the invasion,” one survivor, 87-year old Zhou Shaohua, told the China Daily.
But Beijing and Tokyo have been moving to ease long-running tensions over history, territory and energy.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is due to visit China soon, over a year after his predecessor Shinzo Abe broke the ice with a visit. And central Chinese leaders stayed away from the memorial activities in Nanjing.
But the potency of wartime memories was clear in Thursday’s ceremonies, widely reported by Chinese state media. Tearful survivors, officials and young people struck a “peace bell” that rang out over the crowd.
While China insists that Japanese troops killed 300,000 men, women and children in the weeks that followed the city’s fall, raping, torturing and mutilating many victims, some Japanese historians say the number was much lower and some apologists for the Tokyo’s military past deny the massacre even happened.
An Allied war tribunal put the Nanjing death toll at about 142,000.
Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, told Xinhua news agency that there was no doubting that 300,000 were killed.
Xinhua accused Japanese doubters of “selective amnesia”.
“Curing this disease is not hard and sufferers often fully recover,” it said. “But when it strikes a country or a nation, treating it is not easy”.
1 comment:
China remembers Nanjing dead 70 years on
Reuters in Nanjing
12:45pm, Dec 13, 2007
China marked 70 years since Japan’s infamous Nanjing massacre on Thursday, invoking memories of the atrocity to remind Tokyo that the wartime past remains a bitter backdrop to an improving relationship.
Sirens sounded, calling citizens to silence, a bell tolled, and around 100,000 people, including frail survivors, gathered for the re-opening of a newly expanded massacre memorial in the former capital in eastern China.
The six-week wave of killing by invading Japanese troops over-running Nanjing was among the bloodiest episodes of Japan’s invasion of China, taking 300,000 lives according to official Chinese accounts.
For China, how Japan remembers the “Rape of Nanking” – as the city was then called in English – has become a defining test of how contrite its neighbour is about its brutal occupation of much of the country from the 1930s up to 1945.
Ageing survivors have been brought forward to remind the world of the massacre.
“The horrible chapter left me physically deformed. But I feel more emotional pain on days marking the invasion,” one survivor, 87-year old Zhou Shaohua, told the China Daily.
But Beijing and Tokyo have been moving to ease long-running tensions over history, territory and energy.
Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda is due to visit China soon, over a year after his predecessor Shinzo Abe broke the ice with a visit. And central Chinese leaders stayed away from the memorial activities in Nanjing.
But the potency of wartime memories was clear in Thursday’s ceremonies, widely reported by Chinese state media. Tearful survivors, officials and young people struck a “peace bell” that rang out over the crowd.
While China insists that Japanese troops killed 300,000 men, women and children in the weeks that followed the city’s fall, raping, torturing and mutilating many victims, some Japanese historians say the number was much lower and some apologists for the Tokyo’s military past deny the massacre even happened.
An Allied war tribunal put the Nanjing death toll at about 142,000.
Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial, told Xinhua news agency that there was no doubting that 300,000 were killed.
Xinhua accused Japanese doubters of “selective amnesia”.
“Curing this disease is not hard and sufferers often fully recover,” it said. “But when it strikes a country or a nation, treating it is not easy”.
Post a Comment