Alex Goes To China

In 1937 Japan invaded China. In Nanjing over the period of 6 weeks an estimated 300,000 people were brutally murdered by the invading army. Thousands more were maimed, raped and had their lives turned upside down.

Today, Jo and I went to The Memorial for the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. This was an important thing for me to do politically. When I lived in Tokyo in 2005 the “Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi … shrugged off Beijing’s complaints about his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which honours Class A war criminal[s]…”[1]. At this time there were also claims made by families of victims who experienced the war crimes for compensation, which were denied by Japanese courts. For me this expressed the blatant war crimes denial and historical revisionism rife in contemporary Japan. To be able to witness the other side of the story in Nanjing today gave me some sense of resolution, although I think this feeling will be better served with cultural and political development in Japan.

Having said that, there were some interesting historical revisionist notions put forward by the Chinese governments influence on the exhibition. For example the claim to Taiwan being a province of China was made strongly (ignoring the past 20 years of democratic autonomy). Also the implication that China defeated Japan during WWII; omitting the atomic bombings by the USA. I guess every culture has its own version of history, and somewhere in between is what really happened.

Perhaps one day China will have a memorial for the millions killed by Mao Zedong and the PRC, or the west officially remembering the hundreds of thousands killed by the USA and its allies (including Australia) in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past 7 years. Or we can imagine a world where Japan builds its own museum educating its people about the Nanjing Massacre.