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| Memorial Museum: A man viewed a sculpture as the museum reopened Thursday. Japan and China have long sparred over what occurred
after Japanese took the city on Dec. 13, 1937. Oded Balilty/AP |
China commemorates Nanjing Massacre with quiet nod
A memorial reopened in Nanjing Thursday, on the 70th anniversary of the Japanese invasion of the city. Chinese officials have played down tensions with Japan over war history.
By Peter Ford | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 14, 2007 edition
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Nanjing, China - Seventy years after Japanese troops killed tens of thousands – probably hundreds of thousands – of Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in a six-week orgy of violence here, Thursday's commemoration of their deaths illustrated how deeply woven the massacre still is into the fabric of Sino-Japanese relations.
Anxious to improve ties with Tokyo, the Chinese government sent only junior officials to a ceremony unveiling a refurbished museum documenting the event. None addressed the crowd of invited students, soldiers, and construction workers.
"There isn't nearly the attention seen in previous years" in the state-run press, says Russell Leigh Moses, an analyst in Beijing. "There seems to have been a deliberate effort to downplay" the anniversary "tied into the state of Sino-Japanese relations and hopes for their future."
But as leaders on both sides of the Yellow Sea seek rapprochement, conflicting memories of Imperial Japan's eight-year occupation of China are proving "the key problem in our relations," says Bu Ping, a historian who leads a team of Chinese and Japanese scholars seeking common ground.
"Historical events should not normally impact bilateral relations like this," adds Huang Dahui, the head of Asian Studies at Beijing's Renmin University. "But they do indeed have an influence."
The horrors of the occupation are laid out in ghastly detail at the Nanjing Massacre Compatriot Victims Memorial Museum, a granite building on the site of a mass grave, parts of which have been left, strewn with skeletons, as it was found.
Reopened Thursday after two years of renovation, the museum uses photographs – many taken by Japanese soldiers – archive film, and contemporary artifacts to detail the slaughter that the Chinese authorities say left 300,000 dead and 20,000 women raped.
Though arguments continue over the death toll, "how many died is not important; the nature of the massacre is the main point," says Zhang Xianwen, a history professor at Nanjing University who recently edited an eight-volume collection of the details of 13,000 victims.
Doubts persist in Chinese minds, Professor Zhang adds, that the Japanese authorities fully acknowledge that what Tokyo refers to as the "Nanjing Incident" was in fact "a large-scale massacre in which Japanese troops killed a lot of peaceful citizens and unarmed soldiers."
Some right-wing Japanese nationalists deny the Nanjing Massacre ever occurred. The Japanese government, meanwhile, has never formally taken responsibility for what the Chinese side says occurred.
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