The December 1937 incident that is known as the Rape of Nanking or Nanjing Massacre is, without doubt, a tragedy that will not be forgotten.
Looking back, Zhou Yufa, a survivor of the Japanese atrocities in Pukou County of Nanjing in East China’s Jiangsu Province, still feels horrified.
“It’s really terrible. Piles of corpses were lying around me,” he remembers.
The then 16-year-old Zhou and his parents managed to escape from their hometown, before the Japanese army invaded the city on December 13.
However, when he snuck back three days later, he found his house had been reduced to ashes.
“The bridge near my home was tainted with blood and dead bodies were scattered on the roads, in the ditches and in the septic tanks,” Zhou recalled.
“Judging from their clothes, most of them were civilians,” he added.
Litany of atrocities
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army invaded Nanjing, the then capital of the Kuomintang government, and committed a litany of atrocities against innocent civilians, including mass execution, rape, looting and burning.
Around 300,000 Chinese were killed and many others were abused by Japanese troops after they captured the city.
“The chronicle of humankind’s cruelty is a long and sorry tale. But if it is true that even in such horror tales there are degrees of ruthlessness, then few atrocities can compare in intensity and scale to the rape of Nanjing during World War II.”
So wrote the late Chinese-American author Iris Chang in the introduction to her 1997 book”The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.”
Besides drawing international attention to a story that has long been a bruise on China’s national psyche, Chang added immensely to the overall body of research about the Nanjing Massacre.
She uncovered the historically invaluable 2,000-page diary of German John Rabe, who saved tens of thousands of Chinese from slaughter by creating a Nanjing safety zone marshaled by the city’s then-few expatriates.
In her book, Chang wrote:”My greatest hope is that this book will inspire other authors and historians to investigate the stories of the survivors before the last of the voices from the past, dwindling in number every year, are extinguished forever.”
Li Xiuying, a survivor of the Nanjing Massacre, died of respiratory failure at the age of 86 on December 4.
Li made her name known throughout China for her courage and perseverance in standing up to battle an anti-defamation lawsuit against Matsumura Toshio, a right-wing Japanese writer, who called her a”false” witness of the war in his book”The Big Question in the Nanjing Massacre.”
She won the case in April last year.
During the days of the Rape of Nanjing, Li was pregnant and was stabbed 37 times by Japanese soldiers. Thanks to timely medical treatment from an American doctor named Robert Wilson, Li survived. But she lost her baby.
It is impossible to keep a detailed account of all of the crimes committed by Japanese troops during World War II.
However, from the scale and the nature of these crimes as documented by survivors and the diaries of Japanese militarists, the chilling evidence of this historical tragedy is indisputable.
However, the trends of Japanese government’s treatment of this dark period of history have ranged from total cover-up, denial of the extent of the Nanjing Massacre, to official distortion and rewriting of history with the most extreme being the total denial of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese government officials.
“My mother left the world with deep regret since her wishes to seek justice from the Japanese Government failed to become a reality,” said Lu Yongsen, Li’s eldest son.
“As a witness of the massacre, she had been fighting to reveal the truth of the history. Her influence will last, I believe,” Lu said.
Like Li, most of the survivors of Nanjing Massacre are in their 80s, with the youngest at 70, says a report by China Central Television(CCTV).
According to a survey conducted by volunteers in Nanjing, in 1984, the number of survivors of the massacre was about 1,700 with less than 400 living today.
“It has become an urgent task for us to find more eyewitnesses and retrieve the material evidence of the tragic history,” said Ma Ji, spokesperson of the Forced Chinese Labourers’ Association.
Great difficulties
The Nanjing Massacre is one among a number of atrocities committed by Japanese troops after invading China.
The victims were also numerous”comfort women,” forced labourers and those killed by notorious germ warfare and chemical weapons.
Ma’s father, a victim of Japanese militarism, was forcibly taken to Japan to work as a slave labourer.
A hit TV series titled”Evidence of the Memory” that is being shown on the national China Central Television(CCTV) brought out the agonizing recollections of the 82-year-old.”The story, which depicts the sufferings of a large number of Chinese after they were forced to work as slave labourers in Japan during World War II, is a reflection of my father’s painful experience,” Ma said.
About 40,000 Chinese were forced to work in coal mines, on railways and other sites in Japan during the 1937-45 period.
Since 1995, the Chinese victims of Japanese troops in World War II and their relatives have lodged lawsuits against the Japanese Government and concerned enterprises and organizations, demanding an apology and compensation for their suffering.
However, most of their appeals were rejected by Japanese courts on the grounds that the statute of limitations for seeking redress under the civil code is 20 years, although some courts acknowledged the historical facts of the period.
“The lawsuit will be lengthy and tough considering the Japanese Government’s stubborn attitude towards historical fact,” said Kang Jian, a Chinese lawyer representing forced labourers and comfort women.
Now that the number of witnesses is dwindling, she worries the lawsuit will become more difficult.
Like Kang, many Chinese lawyers and people from non-governmental organizations are helping victims seek justice, despite setbacks.
They include Wang Xuan- a lawyer representing Chinese mustard gas victims suing for compensations and an apology from the Japanese Government- and Su Xiangxiang, who began providing legal assistance in 1995 to people suffering various afflictions after being exposed to chemical weapons the Japanese army left in China.
It is noted that an increasing number of Japanese lawyers and civilians are also lending a hand to the endeavours by offering legal services or donations.
Among them are 69-year-old lawyer Toru Takasaki and 57-year-old Nakamura Yojiro as well as a retired middle-school teacher Takayama Hiromu, 63.
“We hope militarism doesn’t resurface in Japan since right-wing attitudes tend to prevail in our society nowadays,” Takasaki told China Daily when he visited China in April.
He said conservative forces in Japanese politics cover up the truth of wartime atrocities, which leaves the Japanese people with a distorted understanding of history from their textbooks.
“Most Japanese people know little about slave labourers, comfort women or the Nanjing Massacre and they don’t understand the damage that Japanese militarism wrought on Chinese, Korean and people in other Asian countries during World War II,” Takasaki said.
Besides the decreasing number of eyewitnesses of the tragedy, both Chinese and Japanese lawyers participating the lawsuits face difficulties in the lack of government support.
“Although the Chinese Government gave up its quest for State compensation from the Japanese Government in 1978 for the betterment of diplomatic relations, victims of Japanese troops in World War II have a right to civil compensation from the Japanese Government,” Kang said.
Kang flew to Japan yesterday to represent four Chinese women who were reduced to comfort women during World War II at Tokyo High Court, where the second trial of the lawsuit will be ruled today.
“I’m not optimistic about the result but I will persist in my effort to help the victims,” Kang said.