I'd like to build off the theme of 'the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves' I touched on when talking about television, and talk about the Nanjing Massacre Memorial. Professor Paul Scott at Kansai Gaidai taught all of his classes how to 'read' museums – how to interpret what political message a museum tries to tell. When we hear people describe historical and politically sensitive events we often take things with a grain of salt, allowing for personal bias. For the most part we do not practice this with museums. Part of what made me interested in visiting the memorial was a chance to 'read' this museum. In Japan, I visited several World War II museums including the museum on the grounds of Yasakuni Shrine in Tokyo. Yasakuni's museum denies that the Japanese army engaged in any kind of aggressive attacks anywhere in China. My hobby is to try and collect these stories told about World War II in Asia as well as I can understand them being told to the people who live there.
There were two indoor museum areas. The smaller of the two is built around the archeological site where a mass grave was discovered. The team, comprised of Chinese scientists but in cooperation with Japanese groups, were able to identify bodies as being executed, and then attempts to destroy the evidence. The exhibit was coldly descriptive, which made it all the more horrifying. Bone fractures and pieces of metal were noted as causing death by driving nails into people. Wounds were counted. But the actual words were emotionless, written as though the writer was trying to avoid accusations of bias. At the end, a pile of paper cranes lay on an eye-level shelf. Each string of cranes came with a small banner declaring it from a school from Japan and a message in Chinese or Japanese promoting peace.
The much larger building, the more popular building, I believe was arranged and organized by different people. The larger building used photographs and artifacts to create a time-sequence narrative. The nature and tone were very different. There were clear villains. One villain who caught my attention was an officer who made a bet with a fellow soldier as to who could cut off the most heads.* It was specifically noted that he was sentenced to death during the International War Crimes Tribunals. The Guomindang were grossly ineffective at protecting the city. The details of the slaughter were described in detail, but not as much detail as the feelings of loss and fear coming from survivors who wrote about the experience. One pair of pictures that stands out in my memory is toward the end of the museum, where there are two quotations on China and Nanjing and their roles in World War II as a whole. One quote is from Mao Zedong, the other from Chiang Kai-shek. The content is almost identical. Each quote is accompanied by a picture of the man who said it. The picture of Chiang shows him standing stiffly for a formal picture facing the camera straight-on. He appears old and uncomfortable and inanimate. The picture of Mao shows him at an angle with his arm outstretched while giving a speech. He appears young, hansom, and comfortable.
I can't say that the larger museum lied. They didn't lie. To use just the example of the photographs, those were both real photographs of real people. But it created a forceful narrative for how an event is to be remembered.
I have two other thoughts that are related to the location, and to the theme of memory. The memorial entrance has a series of statues based off of photographs of people fleeing the city while it was under attack. Beneath each statue is a piece of poetry about the massacre. Above them on the wall in large metal letters is the name, 'The Memorial Hall for Compatriots killed in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Forces of Aggression', written in half a dozen languages. Beneath the name, in large metal letters is inscribed 'AAAAA.' Tourist attractions nearly all have a rating. I'm not sure if these ratings are how culturally important somebody thinks the location is, or how highly recommended the location is. The ratings are between one and five A's. The Nanjing Memorial is a bit less discrete in displaying it than other places, but not by much. It is a stark contrast to see.
The second thought is where the title for this essay comes from. Though most of our time in Nanjing William and I explored on our own, we both decided to go to the Nanjing Memorial on the same day. It had struck me as strangely ironic that the area were were in seemed to be nothing but malls, with a space carved out for an out-of-place memorial. The creates an odd, but emotional reaction in me. So many people felt so intensely at the same time so much pain. And now, fifty years latter, nearly everywhere outside of that small island, all of that had disappeared. While we waited in line to go into the larger building I wondered aloud about how that could happen. William disagreed. He felt the memorial and the attachment to its history were more artificial than the malls surrounding it. The natural tendency is to move on and live normally, especially after so much time after an event. So what is the nature of remembering, and what is its value? I had thought given time I would be able to come up with a satisfactory short term answer that could conclude this vignette, but unfortunately I cannot.
*Do you remember in 'The Two Towers', Legolas and Gimli have a bet as to how many orcs they can kill at Helms Deep? Remember how that was comic relief? I wonder why I have a harder time getting into classic fantasy stories than I did when I was a kid.
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