Japan's dark past

In the news over here, the Japanese Foreign Minister, Taro Aso, has backtracked over a statement he made claiming that the Japanese Emperor, Akihito should visit the controversial War shrine at Yasukuni. Yakusuni is despised by the Chinese and the Koreans, as it contains the bodies of 14 war criminals (as well as 2.5 million war dead).

Current Prime Minister, Junichiro Koizumi visits this shrine every year, much to the chagrin of the Chinese, further straining relations between the two countries. Intrigued by this mutual distrust and hatred between the two most powerful countries in Asia, I came across one of the worst massacres of the 20th Century.

And it was carried out by the Japanese on Chinese soil.

At the end of 1937 and the early part of 1938, Japanese soldiers captured the Chinese city of Nanjing, and embarked on a destructive rampage of looting, rape and murder. Stories from this horrific period in Japanese history tell of unborn babies being cut from pregnant mothers and innocent civillians hacked to death.

Tillman Durdin of the New York Times reported "I was 29 and it was my first big story for the New York Times. So I drove down to the waterfront in my car. And to get to the gate I had to just climb over masses of bodies accumulated there."

"The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch... was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops."

"They were marching about in groups of about 15, machine-gunning them."

As he departed, he saw 200 men being executed in 10 minutes to the apparent enjoyment of Japanese military spectators.

He concluded that the rape of Nanjing was "one of the great atrocities of modern times".

It is strange to consider such hatred in a people I have come to consider as one of the most honourable and peaceful on the planet...

Link to Nanjing story is here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/223038.stm