NANJING, CHINA — As a siren wailed across the city in remembrance of the dead, the revamped Nanjing museum opened with thousands enduring waits of up to two hours in the cold. Once inside, there was little time for reflection, however, as guards chided visitors to keep moving.
This month, this former Chinese capital observed the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing massacre, when tens of thousands of civilians and fleeing soldiers were killed by Japanese soldiers.
History is a sensitive subject in north Asia, and this is ground zero in China's bid to counter the small number of Japanese right-wingers who downplay or deny that the rampage took place.
The anniversary gave China an opportunity to revamp its rather dowdy Nanjing massacre museum, placing it more on a par with Japan's Hiroshima and Nagasaki memorials and the many Holocaust remembrance centers around the world.
With growing wealth and power comes a push to better showcase its pain and, by extension, to lay a stronger claim to history.
The refurbished museum is leaps ahead of its predecessor, which was poorly organized and largely devoid of the personal stories that help bring history alive. The $33-million upgrade includes multimedia exhibits, survivor accounts, dioramas of bombed-out buildings and a glass bridge over a partially unearthed mass grave -- not pretty viewing, but powerful.
In places, less would have been more. On the approach to the building along a sloping wall reminiscent of Washington's Vietnam memorial, statues of victims rise from a reflecting pool to evoke the horror, but the captions -- such as "Flee, flee, flee" and "Run, the devils are coming, run" -- arguably weaken the effect. The museum also loses focus a bit when it broadens its gaze beyond Nanjing to perceived Japanese aggression extending back into the 1800s.
The crowd of mostly younger Chinese on opening day was interspersed with a few survivors, including Lin Guofu, 74, dressed in a stained brown Mao suit and cotton shoes. As a small circle of onlookers crowded around, Lin recounted how his grandparents raised him after Japanese soldiers killed both of his parents. "I was too young to understand how they were killed," he said slowly through his few remaining teeth, "but I remember all the bombs falling."
Japan's reluctance to apologize for or fully acknowledge past atrocities, and high-profile official visits by a former Japanese prime minister to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, where 12 top war criminals are memorialized, have rankled many Chinese.
