Today, I went to visit the Memorial to the Rape of Nanjing. If you have never heard about it, you can learn more by going here or by reading Iris Chang's book, The Rape of Nanking. In short, during World War II, in December 1937, the Japanese invaded Nanjing, the capital of the Republic, and in the course of six weeks, brutally killed 300,000 people. The massacre is called the Rape of Nanking because so many women of all ages were raped by Japanese soldiers during the massacre.
Perhaps some don't want to think about such terrible events. I understand. We all want to be comfortable and avoid suffering. But perhaps being able to face this fact of life can make us better people, more compassionate, more awake and alive. Maybe you want to flinch, but you try to face the brutality. Sure, you could keep watching reality shows and going to the gym and reading low-carb diet books. But perhaps this accumulated ignorance is what led to such an event.
And perhaps if we can listen to the cruel stories, see those terrible pictures, we can see how precious our freedom is, how insignificant our dramas really are.
1 comment:
The event was written in my elementary textbook, somewhere 30 years ago. And Japanese had a different edition about how the story was told.
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