I want to firstly talk about a piece of news I saw a few days ago. It bothered me so much, I put a note on my desk because I knew this would be lost in the upheaval of our political situation. Last week a Japanese minister came out and said that the “Rape of Nanking” that killed 300 000 people and the rape of 80 000 women and girls in 1937, at the beginning of the Japanese Occupation of China never happened.
It’s like saying the Holocaust never happened either, and it disturbs me people in power (although he was kicked out of the Japanese Parliament a few years ago), continue to propagate such bullshit.
Luckily he’s in his 70s so maybe people like that will die off soon and the Japanese Government can officially apologize for their actions. So far Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi made a “private” apology at his visit to China a few years ago. It’s not really good enough, and I am bringing it up because I promised my grandmother that I won’t forget what the Japanese did to China and what she and my granddad went through. And now she’s gone, even though I personally hold no grudges, for people like her, we should keep expecting it.
For more info: http://www.tribo.org/nanking/
And I do want to say that a lot of the atrocities were committed in Hong Kong also. Although we have some oral history about what happened, it’s not very well documented. On my desk right now are some photographs taken by an Australian Soldier during the time, which included cutting a woman’s breasts off on the streets here.
I have it because I chanced upon it on ebay, while actually buying Wiseman documentaries, and I got into a bidding war with a Neo-Nazi because I didn’t think he should get them. The man who sold them to me, reduced the price by a third because he felt I shouldn’t pay so much for them (Thanks Mark Hansen). As I was going to donate them to the Hong Kong Museum of History under the name of Yiu Siu Hing (my paternal grandmother). I haven’t done it yet. This reminds me to.
Yan Sham-Shackleton Online 