Writing the wrongs of Japan's atrocities

Author determined to tell truth of war crimes erased from country's memory

TOKYO - Tamaki Matsuoka could never forget about her first visit to Nanjing, China, in August 1988, where she saw evidences of the atrocities committed by the invading Japanese army to the city in 1937 and was deeply shocked.

She was then a history teacher for six-graders in Japan. She found history textbooks vague and ambiguous about the invasive war against China and decided to find out more about the truth.

"The textbooks only mentioned that Japan lost the war, but nothing about the invasion, they described the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but miss out the sufferings of the people victimized by Japan's invasion," she said.

"As a teacher, I taught the children about justice, but the textbooks in Japan seemed not just," she said.

When seeing photos of the heads cut down and the women raped at an exhibition in Nanjing for the first time, Matsuoka said she could not help shedding tears of pain and shame.

"I made up my mind at that time that I have to tell my students in Japan what had really happened, and what pain and sorrow were associated with the historical truth," she said.

Matsuoka spent the next 30 years interviewing hundreds of survivors and victimizers of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, and based on their testimonies, wrote books and produced documentaries to convey the historic truth.

The first testimony Matsuoka heard was from Li Xiuying who was born in 1919. She was stabbed 37 times by Japanese soldiers and lost her baby in the 1937 massacre.

To get testimonies from the victimizers was more difficult. It was not until eight years later that Matsuoka started interviewing Japanese war veterans, and Yoshiharu Matsumura was one of them.

"I visited him for more than 20 times and witnessed the change of his attitude. At first, he showed little remorse, talking about the atrocities he committed with his fellow soldiers and showing off the spoil of war he plundered from China," she said.

"But after seven or eight years, as he learned more about the tragedy the Japanese army had brought to the victims, he started to feel sorry. He asked me at his deathbed to write down his war experience and let people know what had happened," she added.

Matsuoka hopes that more Japanese could find out the truth about the history through her books and documentaries and therefore learn from the history and prevent the wars from happening again.

"Without knowing the terror of the war, they cannot understand the preciousness of the peace," she said.

But the current situation in Japan worries Matsuoka, as people's historical view was led astray by the government of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who has called for the younger generations not to be burdened by historical issues.

"We have caused tremendous suffering to the people in other countries while suffering ourselves during the war. It would be selfish to just stress our own sufferings while trying to erase the fact that people of other countries suffered," Matsuoka said.

Xinhua