Fuddland

Every now and then I get to hold an open “Culture” class in which I choose some aspect of foreign culture around which to shape discussion activities. Since yesterday’s class fell on the eleventh of the eleventh, I took the opportunity to introduce the students to the idea of a Remembrance Day.

I’ve always found it quite surprising that China does not have an official day with the same notion of remembering those who have sacrificed themselves for their country—the closest they come is the festival of Qingming Jie, but that’s primarily to remember ancestors, and not specifically about fallen soldiers—so after giving them a run-down of the ceremonies and traditions of our version, I asked them to come up with their own: when it should be, and what events should take place. Here are the suggestions of appropriate dates:

• April 6: the day after Qingming Jie, in order to get two days off work in a row

• September 18: the date of the Mukden Incident, when a railroad in Japanese-occupied modern-day Shenyang was dynamited, allegedly by Japanese militarists as a pretext to full-blown war

• July 7: the official date of the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937

• December 13: the anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre in 1937, during which tens of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war were murdered [estimates range from 100,000 to 300,000 people] at the hands of Japanese soldiers

As for the events, as well as the universal idea of a period of silence [suggestions ranged from one to three minutes], floral wreaths, monuments and so forth, and even though I am aware of the general feelings towards the Land of the Rising Sun, I was slightly taken aback by this idea from one softly-spoken, generally-amiable student:

We should invite the Prime Minister of Japan, tell him to kneel down and cut open his own stomach.

This pretty much sums up the feelings that many Chinese still have towards the Japanese today; the above student wasn’t at all shy about his desires, nor were his classmates in the least bit shocked—in fact, surveys indicate that the current generation harbours much stronger feelings than those that actually witnessed the atrocities. It’s widely known that schools teach children from an early age about the “humiliations” China has suffered at the hands of the Japanese over the centuries, although some of the other students were more open and suggested they could invite “some friendly Japanese people”. I tried to get them to focus more on the commemorating-the-fallen aspect, but some feelings are more deeply ingrained than a single hour-long class can placate.

#1

Thane | 2008 / 11 / 21 – 14:04

Q: What do history and money have in common?

A: Both cause loss of rationality in humans.

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