Today we enjoyed a rare morning of free time where we explored around the city a little and ate at a restaurant close to our hotel. We all met after lunch to go to the Nanjing Massacre Museum. This museum was designed to commemorate the hundreds of thousands of Chinese who died during Rape of Nanjing (also known as the Nanjing Massacre) in 1937. The Nanjing Massacre was a period of 6 weeks of Japanese occupation of Nanjing where the Japanese army mass murdered and raped Chinese civilians and soldiers alike. I was particularly looking forward to this experience because my grandparents lived through the Rape of Nanjing.
When we got into the museum, it was clear that this was more of a patriotic monument rather than a memorial for the victims. The first thing we saw when we walked into the museum was the number 300,000, representing the 300,000 victims of the Rape of Nanjing. The actual number of victims is somewhat controversial and ranges from as low as 20,000 to 300,000. It is not surprising that most Chinese insist the number of victims is closer to 300,000. The museum itself was very well set up, taking you through the history of the Nanjing Massacre through the war tribunals of the Japanese commanders. The experience was quite a somber one and some of the pictures are so jarring that I will never forget them. One picture that stood out to me the most was a picture of the severed head of a Chinese man with half a cigarette still in his mouth placed on a Japanese roadblock "just for entertainment" as the caption stated.
I found it interesting at the number of young children who were at the museum. It seemed, to me at least, that this is a subject matter for the more mature, but after observing the museum a little bit more it was clear that this was just as much about promoting Chinese patriotism as it was about remembering those killed in the Nanjing Massacre.
After the museum we went to a nearby shopping mall and had a delicious dinner at a dumpling restaurant and made our way to the controversial film director, Hu Jie's house. As many of Mr. Hu's films are about sensitive historical events in China and most of them are banned here, he is monitored by the police so we had to take some precautions when arriving at his house. His walls were covered with his own paintings; the most prominent were of the subject of much of his work, Lin Zhao. His artwork was stunning and contained a lot of symbolism and was really beautifully done. Listening to him speak about both his paintings and his films, his passion for what he does is very apparent. For me, meeting him was very inspirational. Although he grew up in a country with the same censorship and propaganda as everyone else, he thinks differently. He wants China to remember its past and to learn from it. For me, it was incredible to see that in a country where the concept that everyone is the same is heavily promoted, he could still have the courage to go against the grain and, although slowly, believes that what he is doing will slowly bring about change in China.
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