Nanjing Massacre Conference Report
Report by H.F. Ito a Japanese born close to Hiroshima In 1942, now living in France, on a conference held in December 2007 in Nanjing to commemorate the massacre of Chinese citizens by Japanese troops in December 1937.
Since moving to the United States from Japan in 1975, I have invested 32 years in sharing Shintaido - a martial art of love and peace that develops each individual’s hidden potential. My “selling points” included my own experience of growing up in Hiroshima immediately after Japan’s defeat in the Second World War, and surviving the poverty, suffering and physical and social destruction of the postwar years.
Before the trip to the conference at Nanjing, I studied the atrocities by the Japanese Imperial armed forces in China during the Second World War, and the suffering of the Chinese people (both the survivors and their descendents). I thought I had a pretty good understanding of just how terrible it had been. And, knowing what Japanese people had done there in the past, I expected that the Japanese participants at the Nanjing Conference might have a cold reception. (But actually we were welcomed warmly by the Chinese participants.)
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