MEMORIAL HALL OF THE NANJING MASSACRE

The taxi driver required no prodding to take us to the Memorial Hall. He knew the place. Everybody in Nanjing knows the place. And probably everybody in China knows of the place, or, at the very least, of the war crime that happened here.

In December of 1937, the Japanese Army attacked Nanjing, then the capital city of China. A great number of soldiers defending the city and civilians trapped inside were killed in the Japanese attack. After the attack, the soldiers of the fascist Japanese government, which was allied to Hitler and Mussolini, massacred a further 300,000 civilian members of Nanjing's population in cold blood and in the most barbaric manner. It is generally considered to be the largest single atrocity committed during World War II.

Visiting the Memorial Hall must be something akin to visiting Aushwitz-Birkenau (which I have not done yet), in that it is an ugly testament to the horrors of fascism. Neither Siobhan nor I were eager to go, so we kept putting it off to our last day in Nanjing.

Arriving in front of the building, you are struck by how different it is from other governmental buildings. First, there are no steps. You join right in at ground level as you get out of the car. A long obsidian-like (black and faceted), dagger-shaped wing of the building points down the street. In front of it are bronze statues of a live child crying over its dead mother, old people helping each other along to escape the Japanese, a parent carrying a dead child, and many other troubling scenes, complete with actual quotes from real victims.

There is no cost of admission to the hall.

When you enter the museum grounds, all you see are low black glass and steel buildings and a big empty gravel square, where not even one single blade of grass is growing. On a far wall, the number "300,000" is repeated again and again, along with the 1937 date, and writing in many languages.

Entering the museum proper, you go from extreme brightnes to semi-darkness, down a flight of stairs to a very loud, video over-projection of a recreation of the devastated city gate to Nanjing. In this exhibit, you are pitched back seventy years to the Japanese assualt on the old Ming Walls and gates of the city, as it is happening.

The theme of the next two rooms is the unprovoked war of aggression by Japan launched by Japan against China, starting with the Japanese occupation of Machuria (in Northern China) in 1931. Here, the Japanese put the last Qing emperor, Pu Yi (not sure of the spelling), on the throne to head up their puppet state of Manchuoku.

Unsatisfied with having seized Manchuria, the Japanese manufactured a pretext to attack and to try to occupy southern China as well. This attack more or less coincided with the attacks of their Axis partners on Spain, Libya, and Ethiopia.

(Did you know that it was the Canadian delegate to the League of Nations who got up to condemn these aggressive wars and to call for collective action under the L of N charter? Unfortunately, Prime Minister Mackenzie King over-ruled him and the League of Nations collapsed shortly afterwards.)

I think the point of the first two rooms of the museum, then, is to make the point, elucidated in the Judgment of the War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg, that the main war crime is the crime against the peace; that is to say, that the principal war crime is to start a war of aggression. All the other war crimes, such as the killing of civilians, torture of prisoners, rape, destruction of civilian infrastructure and property, attacks on medical facilities, all flow from the original crime of aggression.

Most of the descriptions of the items on exhibit are translated into English but sparsely, so it's sometimes hard to tell what is trying to be conveyed. On screens scattered throughout the two rooms are video clips of the testimony (in Chinese) of surviving witnesses and victims of the brutality that were filmed at the war crimes tribunal convened after the war to examine this tragic incident in human history.

Then, you get to the main focus of the whole museum in the next room. It turns out that the whole museum is built over one of the killing sites in what then was a field west of the city. The Japanese marched captured soldiers and civilians out of the city to this very spot and mowed them down with machine guns, men, women, and children. No mercy whatsoever.

Today, the earth has been peeled back to reveal the skeletons below.

Above the grisly site, is a huge mural painted in vivd colours depicting the machine-gunning of those people.

But that wasn't the only method the Japanese used to kill the people of Nanjing. They drowned people, burned people, decapitated people, bayonneted, and buried people alive. They also gang-raped over 20,000 Chinese women. And they looted everything they could get their hands on as they went house to house shooting families in their own homes. All the details are laid out graphically in the next two or three rooms. The Japanese spent several weeks committing the crimes and then several more weeks trying to erase the evidence by burying and burning bodies. The event has come to be known in the history books as "The Rape of Nanjing."

You may ask why human beings would do such cruel things to other human beings. The answer in this case, as in contemporary Europe, was fascist ideology. Fascism has been described as the ugly face of capitalism with the veneer of democracy stripped off. The Nazis, the Italian fascists, and the fascist Japanese all had one thing in common: they were going to conquer other people's lands, seize their resources, and kill or enslave the inhabitants, because those inhabitants of the conquered lands were less human than the master races of Germans, Italians, and Japanese.

It took eight years of bloody fighting before the Japanese were defeated and driven out of China in 1945. Scenes from the wartime victories on the part of Chinese forces are shown in the museum, as well of the liberation of Nanjing.

Part of the terms of the unconditional Japanese surrender in 1945 was to turn over suspected war criminals to the Tribunal. Thousands of witnesses testfied against a tiny handful of the worst perpetrators of the carnage in Nanjing. These included the Japanese commanding officers down to two Japaenese soldiers who made up a game among the Japanese troops to see who could kill the most Chinese civilians.

Many of the accused were executed, some imprisonned. One of the former Japanese commanding officers fainted when they let him out of the car that brought him to the site of his crimes. Like every bully, he was a coward at heart. He was executed before a large crowd.

However, the vast majority of the officers and soldiers who committed the crimes as well as the fascist politicans who ran the Japanese government, which oversaw the invasion of China, never faced the court. Emperor Hirohito, who called for the war, was allowed to continue to sit on the throne until he died decades later. The Japanese government was never made to apologize for its crimes against the Chinese or, for that matter, for its ill-treatment of Allied prisoners of war, including many Canadian soldiers who were starved, beaten, and worked to death in Japanese prison camps. Unlike the postwar German government, which made some amends for wartime crimes, the Japanese government has never apologized for anything (to my knowledge) or paid one cent of compensation to anyone.

Just a few years ago, the Harper Government Of Canada sponsored a visit by the current imperial family of Japan to Canada. I guess Harper has amnesia in regards to the thousands of Canadian soldiers who died in Japanese prison camps, victims of the Japanese wartime government, led by the father of the present Emperor of Japan.

Just before the last room of the museum is an exhibit showing photos of some of the several hundred former Japanese soldiers who consented (many years later?) to be interviewed for the benefit of the building of the museum. Some of the older Chinese people who pass this particular exhibit make a point of spitting on the carpeted floor at this point.

You come out of the semi-darkness in the last room of the museum which is also the biggest. It's about three stories tall and contains an enormous wall of records of the evidence and testimony of the War Crimes Tribunal, an archive of literally millions of pages of original documents in sealed boxes, three deep, about ten metres tall. There are many thoughtful quotations by famous people about the value of learning from history scattered about the other walls (which hopefully you can read when we are finally able to upload our photos and)

which mostly go unheeded by some of the world leaders of today as they go about bombing Libya, occupying Afghanistan, using drones over Pakistan, and overturning governments in Haiti.

And then you're out into the blinding sunshine on the arid gravel square of the museum.