Lessons of Japan's atrocities

Thursday's official ceremony in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, was the focal point for remembrance of the 1937 massacre, unleashed when the Japanese Imperial Army entered what had been the Chinese capital.

For people in this city and the rest of China, the enormous psychological scars still remain.

This does not mean that we're a nation that holds a grudge. Nanjing rolled out the welcome mat for Japanese Emperor Akihito in 1992 during the first visit to China by a Japanese monarch. He issued a statement of regret for the suffering Japan caused.

That was official recognition by Japan of what it had done to the city.

Influential right-wing politicians in Japan still deny the massacre or call the number of deaths - 300,000 - a vast exaggeration.

This does not allow for healing of the wounds that are deep in Chinese people's hearts.

The Japanese army's assault on Nanjing began 75 years ago this week. History tells that for a six-week period after the Japanese soldiers captured the city, they raped and murdered civilians and committed wholesale slaughter of Chinese prisoners of war.

Even to this day, despite eyewitness testimony from journalists and Japanese soldiers that confirms the atrocities, Japanese right-wing political parties and nationalists still consider the "Rape of Nanking" nothing more than an elaborate hoax, while Takashi Kawamura, the mayor of Nagoya, called the Japanese army's mass murders and rapes in Nanjing "conventional acts of war".

Japan's Education Ministry has banned Japanese history textbooks that include the Nanjing atrocities. It claims that there is no evidence supporting the Chinese claim that 300,000 people were killed in Nanjing.

Japanese censorship of school textbooks regarding the incident panders to the Japanese right-wing politicians' most disgusting tendencies toward historical revisionism.

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party leader Shinzo Abe, odds-on to be his country's next prime minister, not only paid homage this year to the Yasukuni Shrine that worships class-A war criminals, but also wants to rewrite what Japanese conservatives see as overly apologetic accounts of Japan's wartime past.

However, Japan should understand that its image and honor shouldn't be built on lies. If it wants to be accepted by the world community as Germany is, it should make such denials of war atrocities a crime, as Germany has done, instead of trying to whitewash its countrymen's massacres and rapes.

Kai Satoru, the son of a Japanese soldier who served in China, came to Nanjing for the observation of its darkest period on Thursday. "I am here to admit the crimes. They (Japanese soldiers) competed to kill people," he said.

We see conscience and a sense of right and wrong in him but not in his country.

(China Daily 12/14/2012 page8)