Nanjing Massacre――A Fact with Ironclad Proof

It is a painful history!

It is unbearably painful to read stories of such a great number of people got killed.

On December 13, 1937, after capturing the city of Nanjing, within only about 40 days, the Japanese aggressive troops slaughtered more than 300,000 innocent civilians and disarmed Chinese soldiers, and raped more than 20,000 women while one third of the city was ruined by arson. The Nanjing Massacre, which shocked the whole world, is one of the three bloodiest massacres in the World War II history. The killing of 300,000 people by the Japanese troops has been indisputably proved. Yet, faced with such ironclad facts, on April 5, 2005, the Japanese authorities examined and approved the new textbooks which wantonly declared that the Japanese aggression against China was reasonable, and openly denied the Nanjing Massacre, doing their utmost to whitewash Japanese militarism and aggression. This is a provocation to human conscience and justice. It hurts the feelings of people of all the victim countries and poisons the minds of the Japanese younger generation.

In October 1946, the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal was trying Lieutenant General Hisao Tani of the former Japanese Army, the chief culprit of the massacre, who was aware of his grave crimes, flatly denied the Nanjing Massacre. However, a young man named Wu Xuan presented to the War Crimes Tribunal an album which he had preserved at risks. It immediately made the Japanese turn pale and reluctantly admitted his guilt. The album was full of pictures showing Japanese soldiers killing, shooting, stabbing, burying people alive and raping, all of which were taken by the Japanese themselves. It happened that a Japanese officer went to a Chinese photo studio to have the films printed, and the shop assistant secretly printed a second set which after passing through many hands were brought to Wu Xuan. The aggressor finally got what he deserved. On the execution of Hisao Tani, the whole city turned out. The testimonial pictures provided by Wu Xuan were hung on both sides of the prisoner’s van carrying the criminal through the streets.

Today, these pictures are magnified and exhibited in the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massecre by Japanese Invaders, telling the people what really happened in December 1937.

The Nanjing Massacre is a great tragedy of genocide, irrefutable evidence of barbarity and cruelty, strangling humanity and civilization and portrait of men descending to beasts. The pictures and objects displayed in the memorial hall are proofs of the aggressors’ crimes. In a picture once published by Asahi Shimbum (Tokyo, Japan), three monstrous killers are wiping off the blood stains on their sabers and talking about how many people they have killed. One of them, Takeshi Noda says, “Hey, I’ve killed 105 people. How about you?” “106!” answers Toshiaki Mukai. The two burst into laughter. “Before we knew it, each of us has killed over 100. How amusing!” Toshiaki Mukai remarks. This is not imagined or fabricated, but confessed by the killers themselves. Another Tokyo newspaper published a picture of a Japanese officer, Gunkichi Tanaka holding his saber to kill a person. The extremely vicious officer, Gunkichi Tanaka, killed 300 unarmed non-militant people with his “Sukehiro” saber. All these horrifying atrocities are shocking. In December 1947, the three monstrous killers were executed in Nanjing. When the killers were indulging themselves in slaughter, they might not have realized that the newspapers while celebrating their “military feats” and “martial arts” also provided evidence of their atrocities that finally sent them to hell.

On the early morning of April 5, 2005, She Ziqing, 73, came to the Memorial Hall, bringing with him some fresh flowers. 67 years ago, his mother was brutally killed by the Japanese troops. The old man who has survived from the sabers of the Japanese soldiers comes to mourn for the victims from his family on this day every year. He stood in front of the “cry wall” in the memorial hall on which the names of the victims are engraved, and the painful memory was alive again.

“Fortunately, I survived the blood and flames of the Nanjing Massacre. Yet even today I can still remember clearly the dead bodies and the flames everywhere in the city.” says the old man, “I was born at Fuzimiao, Nanjing. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese troops entered the city from the Zhonghua Gate. They killed anyone they could find, men and women, old and young. Many people fled to the bank of the Yangtze River where the pursuing Japanese soldiers strafed the crowd with machine guns. The river soon became red. Fortunately my father reached the other side of the river and escaped, but my mother who stayed at home was cruelly killed by the Japanese invaders. We little children fled to the American Embassy, and afterwards, we saw the Japanese soldiers killing people everyday. During those days, the streets were strewn with heaps of dead bodies, men and women, old and young, which were an unbearable sight. One day, I was caught by a group of Japanese soldiers who stuck me hard with their pistols. Blood streamed down all over my face, and I would have been killed instantly if the people from the embassy had not saved me.”

Same as She Ziqing, every year on this day, other survivors of the massacre, including Luo Zhongyang, Li Boqin, Tang Shunshan and Xia Shuqin, come to the memorial hall to mourn for their family members. Xia Shuqin, aged 76, recalled, “When the Japanese troops captured the city, I was living in a courtyard house shared by two families of 13 people. One was a Hui (Muslim) family surnamed Ha, and it had 4 members. My family had 9. The Japanese entered the yard, within about ten minutes they killed 11 people of the two families. Except my younger sister and me, seven of my family members were killed. I was 7 then, and was stabbed once in the back and twice in my arm. The scars of the wounds are still on my body. ”

The atrocities committed by the Japanese invaders left a lasting pain in the hearts of the survivors. Chang Zhiqiang can not forget his mother who struggled to breast-feed his younger brother at her last breath when shot by a Japanese soldier. Jiang Genfu can not forget the sight of his sister being cut from head to toe when she resisted rape by a Japanese. Wang Xiuying still remembers the scene in which the invaders blocked the river outside the Hanzhong Gate with corpses and let automobiles drive across it.

As witnesses of the horrifying history, the survivors of the massacre not only gave witnesses at law courts during the trials of war criminals, but also for as long as half a century have persistently fought against those who deny the massacre. Li Xiuying, who passed away around the end of 2004, suffered 37 stabs in her desperate struggle against the Japanese who attempted to rape her. Faced with attacks and defamation by rightwing Japanese, she traveled to Japan to participate in peace rallies, condemning the Japanese troops’ atrocities. In 1999, she resolutely filed a lawsuit of defamation against a rightwing Japanese, Toshio Matsumura, at the Tokyo local court. The proceedings went on for five years. She finally won.

The atrocities committed by the Japanese invaders are indisputable. Only a handful of war maniacs are still raving as if in dreams denying the bloody massacre, while most of the Japanese people can face the facts.They make self-examinations, repent and apologize for the crimes. They appeal to the people to “learn from the past and make it a guide for future”, and pledge “no more war between China and Japan”. Many of them come to the Memorial Hall in Nanjing to mourn for the victims. At one corner of the hall, there stands a “Bell for Comforting the Souls” engraved with the words “no more war between China and Japan”, which was presented by Mr. Ichikaula, the president of Japan-China Exchange Association, who came from Japan to attend the unveiling ceremony of the Memorial Hall on August 15, 1985. There are also paper cranes, wreaths and other souvenirs from Japan at the corner.

On the evening of March 25, 2005, Ms. Matsuoka Tamaki, head of the Japanese “Memory of the Heart Association” delegation to China, donated a lot of important materials to the Memorial Hall during her visit to the city. The materials including invading soldiers’ diaries, military maps, wartime photos, letters, etc. are evidence and historical data she gathered in recent years when she interviewed veterans who were involved in the Nanjing Massacre. The next day, accompanied by a photographer, she went to Pukou Old-aged House, Qixia Temple and many other places to interview victims of the massacre, to record their stories and had the interviews filmed.

Matsuoka Tamaki is an ordinary primary school teacher in Osaka. Since 1997, she has invited Chinese survivors and historians to hearings and symposiums held in Japan in December every year. She visited 200 plus survivors in Nanjing during her vacations, collecting their testimonies, and compiled them into a book entitled The Battle of Nanjing: Heartbroken Voice of the Victims and had it published. Besides, she has also spent four years visiting over 250 Japanese veterans who were involved in the massacre, and published another book entitled The Battle of Nanjing: In Search of Hidden Memories―102 Japanese Veterans’ Testimonies. Because of her persistent pursuit of the evidence of history and truth, she has been repeatedly attacked and threatened by the rightwing forces in Japan. Calm as she has always been, Matsuoka Tamaki says, “I do things as an upright and sensible Japanese upholding justice. They attack me because they feel diffident themselves.”

The crimes of the war of aggression make more and more Japanese people like Matsuoka Tamaki realize that to avoid tragedy from happening again, they must face the history. On the morning of March 30, Shinichiro Shiranishi, the president of Japan-China Society, led to Nanjing a “delegation of mourners for planting trees in commemoration of the victims murdered in Nanjing Massacre”, which is their thirtieth visit to “atone for the crimes by green action”. He said, “By planting trees, we want to show our repentance for and apologize to the victims of the massacre. The Japanese people should not forget the harm they have brought to the people of Nanjing, and we hope Nanjing will become a city of peace.”

Note:

This article is based on the information found in Xinhua Daily (April 5, 2005, page C) and Jiangnan Times, and the materials collected during the author’s visit to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.