Survivor of 1937 massacre by Japanese found in NZ

[Administrator]

original post by member Helen under a different thread

Survivor of 1937 massacre by Japanese found in NZ

08.07.05


Chinese officials marking the 68th anniversary of the Second Sino-Japanese war say they have found in New Zealand the first overseas survivor of the massacre that started the war.

Japanese troops used a pretext to clash with the Chinese at a bridge near Beijing on July 7, 1937, and used that as an excuse for a full-scale invasion of China.

Li Daokui, 73, now living in Auckland, wrote to a Chinese historian last month recalling the experience his family endured during the Japanese incursion, the Jiangsu-based Modern Express newspaper reports.

"It's the first time we have found survivors outside China," said the historian, Zhu Chengshan.

He has since found another survivor outside China: Lu Anli, 85, who is living in Spain.

The historian said it was likely there were at least 400 survivors of the Japanese attack still alive, but most of them were in China.

Li Daokui, then aged five, said his grandmother was killed by Japanese soldiers, his aunt raped, and his mother suffered mental trauma.

"Their memories are the best evidence for the Japanese invaders' brutality," said Mr Zhu.

By December 1937, the Japanese army had taken the city of Nanjing, and a six-week massacre followed. About 300,000 people, mostly civilians, were slaughtered.

Lu Anli, then 17, escaped to a refugee camp set up by foreigners in the city, but witnessed Japanese troops engaged in systematic killing, burning and raping.

- NZPA

[David Wong]

Editorial - New York Times

Japan's Offensive Foreign Minister

( Published: February 13, 2006 )

People everywhere wish they could be proud of every bit of their countries' histories. But honest people understand that's impossible, and wise people appreciate the positive value of acknowledging and learning from painful truths about past misdeeds. Then there is Japan's new foreign minister, Taro Aso, who has been neither honest nor wise in the inflammatory statements he has been making about Japan's disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World War.

Besides offending neighboring countries that Japan needs as allies and trading partners, he is disserving the people he has been pandering to.

World War II ended before most of today's Japanese were born. Yet public discourse in Japan and modern history lessons in its schools have never properly come to terms with the country's responsibility for such terrible events as the mass kidnapping and sexual enslavement of Korean young women, the biological warfare experiments carried out on Chinese cities and helpless prisoners of war, and the sadistic slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians in the city of Nanjing.

That is why so many Asians have been angered by a string of appalling remarks Mr. Aso has made since being named foreign minister last fall. Two of the most recent were his suggestion that Japan's emperor ought to visit the militaristic Yasukuni Shrine, where 14 Japanese war criminals are among those honored, and his claim that Taiwan owes its high educational standards to enlightened Japanese policies during the 50-year occupation that began when Tokyo grabbed the island as war booty from China in 1895. Mr. Aso's later lame efforts to clarify his words left their effect unchanged.

Mr. Aso has also been going out of his way to inflame Japan's already difficult relations with Beijing by characterizing China's long-term military buildup as a "considerable threat" to Japan. China has no recent record of threatening Japan. As the rest of the world knows, it was the other way around. Mr. Aso's sense of diplomacy is as odd as his sense of history.

New York Times