The Rape Of Nanjing: Can China Ever Forgive?

NANJING, China - In this former Chinese capital, where Japanese troops committed atrocities during World War II, the first imperial visit to China is stirring horrific memories and a drive for reparations that place the country's leaders in a delicate bind.

Nanjing is not on Emperor Akihito's itinerary. "If the Japanese emperor came here, I feel like I would try to kill him with my own hands," says a retired chemical worker, Zhao Fenxi, 70. "Everyone in my generation still hates the Japanese for what they did here."

What the Japanese did here 55 years ago is generally referred to as "The Rape of Nanjing" - seven weeks of terror, aerial bombing, mass executions, random killings, sexual assaults and arson that devastated the largely undefended city.

This brutal attack is given short shrift in most Western histories of China, and it remains ignored in virtually all Japanese accounts of the war. But according to Chinese documentation, the death toll from just Dec. 13, 1937, through January 1938, came to more than 300,000 soldiers and civilians.

Japan has never apologized to China for this atrocity, nor for the 21 million Chinese who China says were killed or injured during Japan's invasion and occupation of large parts of China before and during World War II.

During the emperor's visit, the Chinese government will not pressure him to offer more than vague regrets over the war - consistent with the limited statements offered elsewhere in Asia by his father, the late Emperor Hirohito, for whose glory Japanese troops fought.

In resuming ties with Japan in 1972, China gave up any claim for compensation from Japan for its losses in the war. But earlier this year, Chinese leaders unilaterally softened that stance, allowing Chinese citizens for the first time to independently lobby for reparations.

The leader of one of the most active citizens groups - Tong Zeng, who works at Beijing's China Research Center on Aging - claims 20 committees across China have registered 300,000 Chinese seeking compensation from Japan. He says $180 billion might be enough.

Conversations with elderly survivors of the massacre are punctuated by gruesome memories of unimaginable misery: of the banks of the nearby Yangtze River covered with the bodies of those who failed to escape, of large ponds clogged with piles of mowed-down corpses, of women repeatedly raped and then stuffed alive into ovens.

"At my age, I should be kindly to everyone, but I still thoroughly hate the Japanese," says Wu Shaoyu, 74, a retired utility worker, who now passes his days playing Chinese chess in a Nanjing park. "It seems that the Japanese are quite senseless, and I still fear them."