I will keep telling truth, says Japan researcher
A JAPANESE scholar has vowed to never stop conveying the historical truth about the Nanjing Massacre.
Tamaki Matsuoka, a former primary school teacher in Japan, has spent the past 30 years recording and passing on the memories of the 1937 massacre.
Matsuoka had earlier taught history in a primary school in Osaka. She found textbooks vague and ambiguous about the invasive war against China and decided to visit Nanjing in August 1988 to find out more.
When seeing evidence at an exhibition of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army, including photos of people’s heads cut off and women raped, Matsuoka could not help shedding tears of pain and shame. “I made up my mind at that time that I have to tell my students in Japan what had really happened, and what pain and sorrow were associated with the historical truth,” she said.
In the following 30 years, Matsuoka interviewed hundreds of survivors and World War II veterans, and based on their testimonies, wrote books and produced documentaries to convey the historic truth.
Since the war ended, Japan has been trying to deny and whitewash the war history, and some historical revisionists even claimed that the Nanjing Massacre never happened, said Matsuoka.
“We have to convey the historical truth about the Nanjing Massacre to our people and our future generations so as to let people understand the preciousness of the hard-earned peace and prevent war tragedies from happening again,” she said.
But as survivors and witnesses of the war are passing away, Matsuoka felt that she was now racing against time.
An effective way of preserving the historical memories is to record the testimonies of the victims and victimizers and turn them into books and films, she said.
Matsuoka and a civil group called Meishinkai founded by her, have also been cooperating with other civil groups in Japan to hold testimony meetings and seminars to convey the truth about the war.
“More than 70 years have passed since the war ended, and Japanese society is still reluctant to acknowledge the historical truth about the war,” said Matsuoka.
“Only by fully recognizing and reflecting upon the history, could Japan regain respect from its neighbors and the people who have been victimized by Japan’s invasion.”