In some textbooks revealed by right-leaning publishing homes, there isn’t any point out of the outrageous atrocities dedicated by the invading Japanese military in China, similar to mass killings, looting and rapes.
TOKYO, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) — This 12 months marks the eightieth anniversary of the victory within the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, in addition to the 88th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre, one of the barbaric episodes of World War II.
The bloodbath following the Japanese troops’ seize of Nanjing, the then Chinese capital, on Dec. 13, 1937, left greater than 300,000 Chinese civilians and unarmed troopers lifeless. However, the Japanese public at this time appears unaware of or unconcerned with the heinous crimes, revealing a troubling historic amnesia.
As Dead To Rights, a Chinese historic movie in regards to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, is seeing a large worldwide launch, Xinhua reporters visited Memorial Museum for Soldiers, Detainees in Siberia, and Postwar Repatriates in Tokyo, Japan, and requested guests who had simply left the exhibition corridor the query, “Do you know about the Nanjing Massacre?” The following was their responses:
“I seem to have heard of this term, but I have no idea about what it means,” mentioned a lady in her 40s.
“We’ve heard of it, but we’re not quite sure about the details,” a number of feminine center college college students informed Xinhua. “It seems like bombs were planted on the railway?” “It seems to be something like abusing the workers or forcing them to work, right?”
Only one aged individual, about 60 years previous, mentioned: “The specific details are not clear, but I did see some very cruel scenes. I remember seeing visual images where Japanese soldiers were slaughtering Chinese people.”
What has led to Japan’s selective amnesia in regards to the Nanjing Massacre? Zhang Sheng, professor on the School of History, Nanjing University, hit the nail on the pinnacle when he mentioned, “In Japan, forgetting the Nanjing Massacre is an intentional and systematic act.”
“Since the 1950s and 1960s, people like Nobusuke Kishi, who rose from being a war criminal to become the prime minister of Japan, carried out systematic efforts to revise the history. By the 1970s and 1980s, the Japanese society and even many ministers within the government began to deliberately use the tactic of ‘making a mistake in speech’ to confuse the public. For instance, they would ‘accidentally’ say ‘entering China’ instead of ‘invading China,'” Zhang mentioned.
“After the 1990s, and especially after Shinzo Abe returned to power for the second time in 2012, Japanese elementary and middle school textbooks underwent extensive revisions. At the same time, various forms such as picture books, comics, and films began to be used to instill the idea that ‘the Nanjing Massacre did not occur’ or was questionable among the Japanese public. As a result, after over 80 years, fewer and fewer Japanese people maintain a correct historical understanding of the Nanjing Massacre,” Zhang added.
Current Japanese textbooks describe the Nanjing Massacre and its historic background as follows: After the top of World War II, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East concluded that the Japanese military had massacred over 200,000 civilians throughout its occupation of Nanjing (the Nanjing Incident). However, there isn’t any consensus amongst Japanese teachers on the variety of individuals killed, with some suggesting between 100,000 and 200,000, others 40,000 to 50,000, and others round 10,000. There are additionally claims that 20,000 prisoners and others had been killed, or that a number of thousand civilians had been killed. The authorities of the People’s Republic of China maintains that over 300,000 individuals had been massacred.
In some textbooks revealed by right-leaning publishing homes, there isn’t any point out of the outrageous atrocities dedicated by the invading Japanese military in China, similar to mass killings, looting and rapes. Instead, they blindly query the rulings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, and even utterly erase any references to the Nanjing Massacre.
Friday marks the eightieth anniversary of Japan’s unconditional give up in World War II, and it has been over 70 years for the reason that rulings had been made by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Yet, Japanese textbooks proceed to query the rulings and repeatedly use the variety of victims as a problem. Why is that this so?
“This is because Japan realized that under the circumstances at the time, it was impossible for the Chinese authorities to count the bodies one by one in Nanjing. In this way, the Japanese invaders actually set an impossible task for China and then used this as a basis to deny the Nanjing Massacre, deny the rulings, and deny Japan’s history of aggression against China,” mentioned Zhang.
History can’t be tampered with, and info can’t be denied. Photographs of Chinese civilians killed by the Japanese invaders, battlefield logs recorded by the Japanese troops themselves, stories by overseas journalists, information by worldwide buddies who had been in Nanjing on the time inform of the immense brutality of the Japanese invaders in Nanjing.
Japanese monk Satoshi Daito, a temple abbot in Japan, has been gathering proof of wartime brutalities dedicated by Japanese troops in China throughout World War II for 20 years. As of August, Daito collected and donated about 4,000 items of historic supplies to Nanjing.
“This year, I will donate to Nanjing six photo albums of Lieutenant-General Heisuke Yanagawa, a Japanese army general who attacked Nanjing. Many of the photos in these albums have never been made public and are worth studying carefully one by one,” Daito mentioned.
Since 2004, Nanjing-born Chinese-American Lu Zhaoning has donated over 2,100 items of historic supplies to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. In the memorial corridor, Lu pointed to a photograph of a head positioned on an iron fence and informed Xinhua that he first noticed this picture within the American journal “Life.” Later, he discovered the identical picture with a caption that was collected by a United Nations workplace, after which donated it to the memorial corridor.
This picture appeared within the movie Dead To Rights.
“Today, anyone who wants to learn the truth about the Nanjing Massacre can find relevant historical materials in many countries and languages. Chinese scholars are also doing their utmost to collect relevant archives, historical reports and documents about the massacre from all over the world and are working hard to tell China’s own research findings to the world in multiple languages,” Zhang mentioned.
“Attacks by Japanese right-wing forces are not scary. At least it shows that I am still engaged in a debate with them regarding the history of aggression,” Daito mentioned, including, “However, for the Japanese who are indifferent to history, there is no communication at all between us. In this sense, ‘indifference’ is actually a more terrifying thing.”