O Massacre de Nanjing: um crime que o Japao ainda tem de se fazer perdoar pelos chineses

Um novo site sobre o massacre de Nanjing (ou Nanquim, como se dizia antigamente em Português) que os chineses acabam de inaugurar com a participação de um sobrevivente desse terrível genocídio.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Website commemorates Nanjing Massacre

Source: Xinhua | Shhai Daily, July 7, 2014, Monday |  PRINT EDITION

Some of the images included in an exhibition organized by Fudan University yesterday to commemorate the 77th anniversary of the “July 7 Incident,” which marked the start of China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression. The display includes photographs, film footage and documents from the university’s archives, many of which illustrate the damage caused to the institution when it was occupied by the invading Japanese army in 1937. On July 7 of that year, Japanese troops arrived at Beijing’s Marco Polo Bridge and launched an attack on Chinese forces in the fortress town of Wanping. The incident marked the start of the war. — Yang Bo

A 90-year-old survivor of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre yesterday pressed a button to launch a new website created to commemorate the tragedy.

Li Gaoshan was just 13 when he witnessed Japanese soldiers slaughter unarmed civilians after the eastern city of Nanjing fell into the enemy’s hands.

In February, China’s top legislature announced that December 13, the date on which the massacre started, would be known as National Memorial Day.

In the past, commemorative services were mostly limited to the province of Jiangsu, of which Nanjing is the capital.

The launch of cngongji.cn is the first in a series of activities ahead of a nationwide event later in the year.

The website, whose content is provided in Chinese, Japanese and English, is sponsored by the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and Xinhua news agency.

Russian, French, German and Korean-language versions will be added before the December 13 memorial service, the site’s sponsors said.

“The site was designed and built to popularize China’s memorial activities,” said Zhu Chengshan, curator of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.

“It will help people to understand history and commemorate those killed by the Japanese invaders during World War II,” he said.

The website is also designed to be interactive, as it gives visitors the chance to “virtually” light candles, present flowers, plant trees and ring bells in memory of those who were killed by the Japanese solders.

Li is one of only about 100 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre.

They, along with the relatives and friends of the victims, were invited to the memorial hall in Nanjing yesterday to share their recollections and memories of the incident and commemorate those who died.

According to China’s official records, more than 300,000 civilians and soldiers were killed in the massacre, which began on December 13, 1937 and lasted six weeks.

Also yesterday, the first album of documents relating to the new memorial day including the legislation bill, historical data and media reports was published in Nanjing.

Today is the 77th anniversary of the July 7 Incident which marked the beginning of China’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45).

Os crimes do Japao em Nanjing, 1937 - um romance verdadeiro...

Recreating the Horrors of Nanjing

By ISABEL HILTON

Published: October 21, 2011

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Ha Jin has a talent for first lines. Consider these, from his latest novel, “Nanjing Requiem”: “Finally Ban began to talk. For a whole evening we sat in the dining room listening to the boy.”

Jerry Bauer

Ha Jin

NANJING REQUIEM

By Ha Jin

303 pp. Pantheon Books. $26.95.

We do not know who Ban is, why he should have taken so long to speak or why his story has so compelled his as yet unknown audience. As he tells that story, we plunge abruptly into the horrors of the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, then the capital of China’s Nationalist government. It is December 1937. Ban is a Chinese teenager, a boy seized while on an errand for his American employer and forced to serve as coolie to a band of Japanese soldiers who are looting, pillaging and murdering their way across the city, with Ban a terrified witness to their atrocities.

Equally abruptly, the novel then takes us back to the previous month, to the frantic preparations for an evacuation of the government to Chongqing, following the retreating forces of Chiang Kai-shek. For the civilians who will be left behind, a safety zone is hastily organized. Madame Chiang’s piano is loaded into a truck and left for safekeeping in the institution at the heart of Ha Jin’s narrative, Jinling Women’s College.

This is fiction, but fiction that draws heavily on the historical record and in which many of the characters actually lived the events described. The narrator, Anling, a middle-aged Chinese woman, may be Ha Jin’s invention, but she serves as assistant to a well-documented real-life character, Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary from Illinois who served as acting head of Jinling College. Vautrin also figures in Iris Chang’s best-­selling account, “The Rape of Nanking,” one of the inspirations for Ha Jin’s portrait of the doomed city.

When Chiang Kai-shek abandoned Nanjing to the Japanese, a few Western nationals chose to remain. The Americans who stayed were mostly missionaries, among them the formidable Minnie Vautrin. Also present was John Rabe, the German representative of Siemens in Nanjing, a member of the Nazi party who led the extraordinary effort to set up the safety zone in which Jinling College and similar institutions became refugee camps, tenuously protected by the presence and personal courage of a tiny group of foreigners. It is to them that we largely owe the documentation of the rape, pillage, arson and murder that followed.

As a novelist, Ha Jin brings a cool, spare documentary approach to this rich trove of material. His narrative centers on Jinling, an attractively landscaped campus in the heart of the city. The college itself becomes a character, the early hope of its founders that it would be a premier seat of learning as much despoiled by the war as are the lives of those who love and labor within it. The college represents humanity and civilization, repeatedly violated and nearly destroyed.

Ha Jin begins with a fast-­moving accumulation of horrors as some 10,000 refugees cram into Jinling, which was prepared to receive around 2,500. The safety it offers is fragile: Chinese citizens are dragged off and killed by marauding Japanese troops, and young women are attacked on the campus itself. The occupants of the college struggle to find enough food, fuel and shelter for everyone in need, living in constant fear that the Japanese will overrun the place.

The Nanjing Massacre remains a highly controversial topic. Some in Japan still deny or play it down, and its re-­emergence in the 1990s as a prime example of wartime barbarity has been used by the Chinese government as it constructs a highly nationalist version of its history. But Ha Jin is more interested in nuance than polemic. He shows us the Christian Japanese officer who brings supplies for the refugees; the Nazi who saves a quarter of a million Chinese; the Chinese worker who admits that, under torture, he made a false accusation of collaboration against two Americans from the Red Cross; the Chinese doctor, consumed by self-­loathing because of his association with the Japanese, who helps Vautrin rescue Chinese prisoners.

Ha Jin also shows us how the family of Anling, the narrator, is torn apart — with a son-in-law fighting in the Nationalist army, a husband who still admires the Japan in which he once studied, an only son drawn into serving in the army of occupation because of his love for a Japanese woman.

Ha Jin also reminds us that heroism carries its own heavy price. Minnie Vautrin was to die by her own hand, burdened with guilt over those she had failed to save. This emotional turmoil is personified in the character of Yulan, a young woman who goes mad after being raped by the Japanese and accuses the missionaries of collaboration. Vautrin’s struggle to rescue Yulan doubles as a struggle for her own sanity.

The novel does contain some awkward phrasing. Ha Jin writes in his second language, English, a remarkable achievement but one that demands editorial vigilance. The reader is surprised at times to find contemporary slang in the mouths of Chinese characters speaking more than 70 years ago. Early on, for example, a Chinese man seeking shelter for his family is offered a job at the college and blurts out, “For real?”

This is the sort of misstep that can provide an unfortunate distraction in the course of an otherwise fine novel, a book that renders a subtle and powerful vision of one of the 20th century’s most monstrous interludes. The closing section, “The Grief Everlasting,” underscores Ha Jin’s message. There will be no happy ending here, and precious little healing.

Isabel Hilton edits the bilingual news, environmental and analysis Web site Chinadialogue​.net. Her most recent book is “The Search for the Panchen Lama.”

A version of this review appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page BR23 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: In Harm’s Way

Iris Chang e o massacre de Nanquim: uma trajetoria no horror

Eu já tinha ouvido falar do livro de Iris Chang muito antes de ir para a China, e de visitar o memorial ao massacre japonês contra a população da antiga capital imperial de Nanquim (ou Nanjing), uma história horripilante que a jornalista americana de origem chinesa conta com uma riqueza de detalhes nunca antes igualada na literatura de língua inglesa. Infelizmente, vítima de depressão e de mau aconselhamento médico, Iris Chang se suicidou.
Sua mãe presta uma homenagem neste livro agora publicado nos EUA.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

BOOKSHELF
Hard Work, True Grit
By MARY KISSEL
The Wall Street Journal, May 25, 2011

Remembering the author of 'The Rape of Nanking.'

The Woman Who Could Not Forget
By Ying-Ying Chang
Pegasus, 426 pages, $29.95

Iris Chang, born March 28, 1968, was raised like many other children of her generation. Her parents relied on Dr. Spock for child-rearing advice, encouraged a love of reading, made sure that she spent time with her grandparents, and provided a loving home for her and her brother, Michael. One photograph shows the family on a trip to Yellowstone National Park, all grins, as a geyser blows behind them. Iris went on to marry and have a son. She became a writer and in 1997 published the book that made her famous, "The Rape of Nanking," about the atrocities committed in that city by Japanese soldiers during World War II. Then, in 2004, at the age of 36, she committed suicide with a handgun.

Iris's sudden death was the catalyst for "The Woman Who Could Not Forget," a biographical memoir written by her mother, Ying-Ying Chang, who says she had to set the record straight and "present Iris" as "only we, her family, knew her." But the book is less a tale of a renowned author's vertiginous spiral into depression than it is a mother's poignant tribute to a Chinese-American girl who achieved success through her own intelligence, hard work and grit, but also with the extraordinary support of those closest to her.

In her parents, Iris had excellent role models. Ying-Ying was born in China in 1940, and her childhood was "full of fears, worries, pains, and frights," as her parents struggled to keep her and her brother safe while the country collapsed into civil war. Her family emigrated to Taiwan, and Ying-Ying eventually made her way to America and married a fellow Harvard Ph.D. student, Shau-Jin (a tale she doesn't relate in the book). The two were doing postdoctoral work at Princeton University—Ying-Ying in biological chemistry, Shau-Jin in physics—when Iris was born.

A year after Iris's birth, the family moved to the Midwest, where Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin began teaching at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. As her mother tells it, Iris was a "sensitive" child who was "shy" in public but "very talkative and often dominated the entire conversation" at home. On trips to the local library, she would check out "at least ten books at a time." She took up piano and started winning writing competitions. "She had a tendency to obsess over the things she was interested in or working on," Ying-Ying recalls. In high school, Iris took a liking to computers, volunteered at the local hospital and started her own magazine. She was accepted to several universities, including Cornell and the University of Chicago, but her parents advised her to go to the University of Illinois instead, because "to be home might be better for her." She complied.

That decision is one of the few instances in the book where her parents seemed to have much sway over Iris, although the strong bond between mother and daughter is clear in the myriad of warm correspondences Ying-Ying cites in the book. "She always initiated things by herself," Ying-Ying writes—a trait that the family supported and even reveled in. The Changs encouraged Iris to develop marketable skills and not to rely on anyone else to support her financially, although she married her college sweetheart in her early 20s. Ying-Ying reminded her: "As my mother used to say to me, the success in one's life was dependent on 70% hard work and only 30% talent or genetic makeup."

And Iris worked. She interned at Newsweek and freelanced for the New York Times but had trouble getting a job in the run-up to college graduation. She took an internship with the Associated Press but soon left to take another one at the Chicago Tribune—and then the newspaper declined to hire her full-time. With her parents' support, Iris returned briefly to the University of Illinois before winning an assistantship in John Hopkins's writing program.

An adviser there encouraged her to get in touch with Susan Rabiner, a HarperCollins book editor, who would give Iris her first book topic, a biography of Tsien Hsue-sen, the father of China's missile and space program. But the book advance was modest, and for a while Iris delivered pizzas to make ends meet.

"The Rape of Nanking" had its genesis in the tales her parents told her of her maternal grandparents, who barely escaped the Japanese onslaught in 1937. Iris attended a 1994 conference on this "most atrocious chapter in history," Ying-Ying says, and realized that there wasn't a good English-language book on the subject. Iris holed up at the National Archives in Washington, trawled through Yale's library and traveled to China to interview survivors. She discovered an eyewitness's diary—a German Nazi, John Rabe—that added significantly to the historical record of the slaughter. All the while, Ying-Ying and Shau-Jin helped her with translations and, once Iris began writing, "gave up our nights and weekends to read her manuscript."

The book was a remarkable success for such a harrowing subject, and Iris soon got to work on another project, "The Chinese in America," which was published in 2003. The young author was in demand for television interviews, bookstore appearances and speaking engagements. It was on one of her trips that Iris had a breakdown, in a Kentucky hotel, was hospitalized and diagnosed with, as Ying-Ying describes it, "'brief reactive psychosis,' due to stress conditions such as lack of sleep and food."

Ying-Ying attributes her daughter's slide into depression to side effects from antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs and poor medical advice. A few months after her breakdown, Iris Chang was dead. Her mother devotes only a few chapters to this period of illness and despair. Perhaps that's best. "The Woman Who Could Not Forget" ultimately isn't a sad story, but rather a celebration of Iris's remarkable life.

Ms. Kissel is a member of the Journal's editorial board.