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As they have every year for decades, ceremonies held across the United States last week paid tribute to the victims of the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that officially launched the United States into World War II. This week, on December 13, another fateful and horrific event associated with World War II is being memorialized across China. Remembrances will be particularly poignant in the city of Nanjing, where the Massacre Memorial Museum displays the viciousness and speed with which Japanese troops killed an estimated 300,000 Chinese men, women and children during a six-week slaughter after seizing the former capital on December 13, 1937. The event has become known as the Rape of Nanjing (or Nanking, as the city was widely known in western countries at the time), or Nanjing Massacre. Japanese conservatives insist that the mass murders and rapes did not take place. Earlier this year, China asked the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to include the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in its prestigious Memory of the World Program, which was launched in 1992 to preserve and share humanity's documentary heritage. For China, the Memorial Museum enshrines their unforgivable sadness and frustrated rage, while honoring victims who perished in Nanjing during the war between the two countries. China's museum documents "have been received by the organization [UNESCO]," said Neil Ford, UNESCO's director of the Division of Public Information Sector for External Relations. A final decision on whether or not to include the memorial will be announced in "the middle of 2015," the Paris-based Ford said in an e-mail statement. UNESCO will consider the nomination and look for "authenticity, world significance and uniqueness or rarity," said Paris-based Dr. Boyan Radoykov, UNESCO's chief of section for Universal Access and Preservation, Knowledge Societies Division, Communication and Information. "Actually, the decisive element is 'world significance' and this depends on whether the disappearance or deterioration of an item 'would constitute a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of humanity' and furthermore, whether it has had 'great influence -- whether positive or negative -- on the course of history'," Radoykov said in an e-mail interview with CNN. Anyone can make a nomination. The 98 nominations received this year will be assessed by 14 international advisors. "The Director-General of UNESCO ultimately decides on the nominations that will be accepted in the International Register based on the recommendations," Dr. Radoykov said. There's no physical register for people to visit, but it's available online and currently contains 301 items from 102 countries, four international organizations and one private foundation. Memorial built on a former slaughter site
No one single event can be said to have started World War II. For many Europeans, the war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939. (Though some historians make the case that World War II was simply a continuation of the First World War, in which hostilities ended in 1918.) For most Americans, World War II began with that Pearl Harbor attack. For the Chinese, however, all-out war with Japan began in the summer of 1937 when the Japanese army, occupying Manchuria since 1931, launched determined offensives against important Chinese cities, including Nanjing. The Massacre Memorial Museum was built in Nanjing at one of the execution and group burial sites used by Japanese soldiers, which became known as The Mass Grave of 10,000 Corpses. Visitors to the museum are advised to arrive early, because the memorial is large and elaborate. Some visitors suggest that the museum isn't recommended for young children, because they may perceive it as a house of horrors and have nightmares. The memorial's solemnity ensnares visitors as they walk through open courtyards to the main building. Much of the war museum's starkly modern exterior was built from black and white granite, to intentionally present a gloomy, bleak appearance. The main exhibition hall is half-buried in the earth, creating an image of a tomb simultaneously emerging and descending in a cemetery. Inside the museum, emotionally dreary music haunts visitors, to evoke more misery and suffering. Graphic records
The museum's indoor chambers are officially known as The Memorial Hall of Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. They contain large photos displayed in a timeline, plus films, newspapers, maps, objects, paintings, documents and other items, indicating the vastness of the killing spree against Nanjing's population. Black-and-white pictures by Japanese photographers reveal sadistic slaughters, including soldiers using bayonets to stab tied-up Chinese, while other troops crowd around to watch. Photos also show Chinese slowly being buried alive in pits, witnessed by troops standing in the churned dirt. Some pictures show beheadings -- before and after. Among the paintings, Li Zijian's "Nanjing Massacre" is gorgeously medieval yet terrible to see. Most of Nanjing's dead were civilians. Others who perished included Chinese soldiers defending the capital, and prisoners of war despite having surrendered. The military attack is also known as the Rape of Nanjing because Japanese raped an estimated 20,000 females. Many were gang-raped. Many were also later killed. "Surviving Japanese veterans claim that the army had officially outlawed the rape of enemy women," wrote Iris Chang, author of book "The Rape of Nanking." "The military policy forbidding rape only encouraged soldiers to kill their victims afterward," she wrote. Gruesome displays
One of the most powerful exhibits is an angular, coffin-shaped hall displaying human bones excavated from mass graves at the museum site.
Forensic teams identified and labeled which skeletons are of men, women and children. Many of the skeletons appear in crumpled positions where people collapsed from their fatal wounds or were tossed into pits. Their bones are presented in an archeological style, allowing visitors to see the skeletons resting undisturbed in rough dirt. Thick iron nails were hammered into some of the skulls by Japanese torturers, and a six-year-old child's skeleton shows bayonet scars. Outdoors, a courtyard includes sculptures, statues, prayer-filled tablets and a long Wailing Wall of the Nanjing Massacre etched with thousands of names, in Chinese characters, of people who died. Big statues of people writhing from pain and loss, or struggling to flee, are set among other roughly hewn mournful displays and large pine trees. A path enables visitors to walk amid big stones that symbolize various neighborhoods in Nanjing, to give a geographical idea of where people died. Those neighborhoods exist today, modernized with shopping areas and other recent construction, so the stones also show how the has city evolved at each of those killing zones during the past 77 years. Message of hope
New York Times foreign correspondent F. Tillman Durdin, who witnessed 200 Chinese men shot dead by a Japanese firing squad in 10 minutes, described the city's suffering under the headline: "Butchery Marked Capture Of Nanking." "Wholesale looting, the violation of women, the murder of civilians, the eviction of Chinese from their homes, mass executions of war prisoners and the impressing of able-bodied men, turned Nanking into a city of terror," Durdin reported. The museum also describes similar atrocities committed by Japanese troops in other Chinese cities. Nanjing's witnesses and survivors helped create some of the museum's exhibits. Foreigners who lived in Nanjing's International Safety Zone are also praised in the museum for helping some Chinese stay alive. Japanese soldiers who later regretted their actions also express their shame and torment in accounts exhibited in the museum. To give departing visitors some relief and hope, the memorial presents a spacious Peace Park plus messages about the need to end all wars. Narrative signage throughout the museum, in Chinese, Japanese and English, is impressively detailed. Some florid language does appear, such as Japanese troops being described as "devils" among other stilted text that China frequently uses to denounce its foreign and domestic opponents. |
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The museum has been closed for renovation since November. It will open on December 13, in time for the annual memorial assembly.
This dim passage is the entry to the museums's indoor chambers, officially known as The Memorial Hall of Victims of the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.
Mass Grave of 10,000 Corpses
The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall has received more than 40 million visitors since opening in 1985. Around the complex, walls are inscribed with the names of massacre victims.In 1937, Nanjing was the Republic of China's capital before falling to the Imperial Japanese Army, one month after Japan captured Shanghai.
