By Guo Dan
TOKYO, Dec. 13-- "Three or four thousand Chinese, with their arms tied behind them, were driven in four columns to the coal port in the north of Nanjing, where they were shot by two heavy machine guns," Kenrou Kajitani , a then sergeant assigned to the Second Anchorage headquarters of the Japanese military, wrote in his diary. It was about what was happening on December 17, 1937, during the Nanjing Massacre, which Kajitani had participated in.
December 13 marks the 84th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre and the eighth National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims . On December 11, a testimony meeting in commemoration of Nanjing Massacre was held in Tokyo. Nearly 100 Japanese people attended the gathering. All of them listened with full attention, seriously and earnestly, to the testimonies. "Only by facing the facts could we truly move on from the tragedy and think about the future," said the moderator of the gathering.
Lin Boyao, an overseas Chinese in Japan who has been engaged in historical studies related to Nanjing Massacre, presented a hand-drawn map of the Nanjing Massacre painted by Kajitani , and gave a lecture on the history of the Massacre at the YMCA Asian Youth Center in Tokyo, on Saturday.
Apart from Kajitani's diary, those of senior military commanders Kesago Nakajima and Toichi Sasaki were also presented. "We broke through the enemy's position before dawn and fired 15,000 rounds at the remaining soldiers and the people who gathered on the riverbank," Sasaki wrote. The line of cruel words confirmed the facts of the massacre by the Japanese invaders in Nanjing.
Videos taken with Chen Degui and Pan Kaiming, two survivors of the massacre in the coal port describing the massacre, were also played at the gathering. The number of the people taken to the riverbank, the scene that they were tied up, and the location of the shooting, all the information corresponds with the diaries of Kenrou Kajitani and Toichi Sasaki .
