Nanjing Massacre -- Chinese Forgave Japanese, But Doesn't Mean It Didn't Happen

On Dec. 31, The Seattle Times published a letter from Kazuyuki Murata who claimed that the Nanjing massacre never happened ("Sixty years have passed, isn't it time to find, tell the truth?" Letters).

The Chinese population during the Japanese invasion and occupation was about 450 million people, or roughly twice the population of the United States today.

Nanjing was the capital of China at the time. To say that the Chinese capital of a country of 450 million had only 150,000 to 250,000 people is quite far-fetched.

Chinese reports of the time pegged the population of Nanjing as over 500,000. Besides being the administrative center of a large and populous country, Nanjing was a city of great historical importance. The two cities which had most frequently been capital cities of China were Beijing and Nanjing - literally the "northern capital" and the "southern capital," respectively.

On a recent program reported by Ted Koppel, a German Nazi engineer for Siemans, A. G., who lived in the "foreign concessions" territory in Nanjing, said he protected tens of thousands of Chinese refugees from rape and murder by the Japanese soldiers.

He witnessed and recorded in his diary that the Japanese were massacring people day after day without a let-up in Nanjing. Because Nanjing had resisted the invasion, the Japanese strategy was to kill for revenge and to warn the rest of the country not to resist them.

The missionaries did not report the massacre because most of them lived in the foreign concession territory. The Japanese soldiers did not want to kill inhabitants before the eyes of the missionaries, so that they could report it and most foreigners were in hiding.

Both Communist China and Chiang Kai-chek's Nationalist government had magnanimously forgiven the Japanese imperialists. However, forgiveness does not mean that the incident never happened and Murata's letter does not help the healing process between China and Japan.

Instead, it reminds people that one still has to worry about some of the Japanese imperialists, even today.

Many people in the Japanese government still want to re-write history. Their version of World War II is that they were peacefully extending their economic sphere in Southeast Asia when suddenly the United States of America exploded two atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A recent Seattle Times' article reported that the Japanese Supreme Court ruled in favor of a Japanese teacher and textbook author who refused to succumb to the pressure of the Japanese Educational Ministry to rewrite history.

Murata has about as much chance of persuading the Chinese that the Japanese didn't kill anyone in China as the Nazis have of telling the Jews that the sufferings of Auschwitz never took place. David Chan Seattle