2002-11-26 - 7:56 a.m.

Dear Lord, I am jetlagged all to hell. This is much worse than how I felt when I first got over to China, and what makes it even worse there is nobody here sleeping on a normal schedule since Lily is jetlagged too. Expect a lot of early morning updates for a while until things settle down.

Nanjing Memorial

Nanjing, Nov. 13

Today was our last day in Nanjing so after breakfast Lily took me to the Nanjing Memorial, which she says is the only real tourist attraction in Nanjing. However, considering what it is, I'm not sure you could call it an "attraction."

In the late 1930s Imperial Japan decided to add parts of China to its possessions. The Chinese Republic was rather weak and disorganized and couldn't marshal much resistance, although an ongoing civil war probably didn't help either. In December of 1937 the Japanese marched on Nanjing, which was the capital of China at that time. Apparently they were annoyed by the resistance they were getting while trying to conquer China, so they decided to make an example of the capital city. What followed was the infamous "Rape of Nanking." Basically the Japanese killed 300,000 people, nearly all civilians. This wasn't a case of two armies fighting, this was a case of the Japanese taking a bunch of unarmed people, marching them out of town, then machine-gunning them, a couple hundred at a time. In addition, the Japanese soldiers raped any woman they found between the ages of 4 and 90.

The Nanjing Memorial was in a pretty quiet part of town, and mainly made of concrete and gray stone. It was early on a Wednesday morning, and the place was nearly deserted. To say that the Memorial was rather somber would be to greatly understate the case - it was morbid and depressing in the extreme, but that just meant that it was doing its job. The purpose of the place could be summed up in two words: NEVER FORGET.

The point of the place was to remind visitors what happened in Nanjing in 1937-38, and more importantly to remind people who did it - nearly every plaque I read contained the words "Japanese Aggression." Curiously, every plaque in the place (and there were dozens) was in three languages: Chinese, English and Japanese. I really cannot imagine what would possess a Japanese to visit the Nanjing Memorial, but we saw a couple of them while we were there, taking pictures of each other in front of the huge sign by the entrance that simply said "300,000."

"So THAT'S what grand-daddy did in the war!"

The Memorial didn't consist of just exhibits and photos and plaques - it was built on the site of one of the mass graves that the victims were dumped into. Part of the grave had been unearthed and was on display in a glass house with a concrete roof. Over a hundred anonymous skeletons were numbered with cards telling a bit about each one. For example one card pointed to the skeleton of a young woman who had been killed by someone driving an iron nail into her head.

So, overall it was a pretty grim experience, although Lily did point out one amusing thing. Near the end of the exhibits there was a sign proclaiming that the brave Chinese resistance forced the Japanese out in 1945. I don't suppose Hiroshima, Nagasaki or all that stuff happening in the Pacific had anything to do with the Japanese leaving.

While I already knew some of the facts of the Rape of Nanking, seeing all this stuff up close and personal gave me a much greater appreciation of what the Chinese had to go through to get to where they are today. If the Chinese or their government has been excessive, it's because they don't want to be anyone's footstool, ever again. This only happened 65 years ago and there are still people alive who remember it.

It also made me less tolerant of people trying to guilt-trip me about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Imperial Japanese were brutal fuckers, and they got paid back in their own coin and probably a lot less of it, too.

Afterwards, Lily asked me the quite reasonable question: if the United States had a Holocaust Memorial, why didn't it also have a Nanjing Memorial? Well, it could be something to do with scale (300,000 in Nanjing versus 9,000,000 in the Holocaust) but many more than 300,000 than that were killed in the Japanese conquests. I think it has more to do with the fact that many more Holocaust refugees wound up in the states than folks fleeing what was happening in China. In fact, I'd hazard a guess that more Chinese fled to America as a result of the Communist takeover in 1949 than the strife of the late 1930s.

Anyone interested in learning more about the Rape of Nanking can look here or here, but I should warn you in advance that both sites contain gut-wrenching photographs, especially the second one.