Nanking Massacre Museum

We went to the Nanking Massacre Museum after a stop on Thursday at the John Rabe House, also known as the Peace museum, right next to the Nanjing University campus. The photo, above, shows us with our Chinese friends who came to the museum with us to help us with any Chinese translations. Rabe, also referred to as “the good man of Nanking” and “a living Buddha” by the survivors of the massacre that he helped save, was also a member of the Nazi party. During the height of the Nanking invasion by the Japanese in 1937, Rabe sheltered 600 people in his yard, rushing outside when Japanese soldiers tried to climb over the wall to rape women and defending Chinese people by threatening the Japanese soldiers with a swastika and claiming an alliance with Japan. The irony is astounding, and there was, even at his tiny house, a sense of great sadness.

(A sculpture outside of the massacre museum created from photographs of people fleeing Japanese soldiers.  The series of sculptures sits in flowing water outside of the museum.)

The Nanking Massacre museum itself is new. After reading Irish Chang’s controversial book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II and watching the recent documentary Nanking, both of which I recommend, I thought that there was little in the museum that would surprise me. However, it’s one of the best-done, most moving, and most terrifying museums I’ve ever seen.
According to the museum, 300,000 Chinese died in the invasion. Numbers are, of course, controversial, because many people were slaughtered and placed in mass graves, but the magnitude of the events is overwhelming. In Chang’s book, she makes the point that Germany paid restitution for its crimes during WWII, but Japan did not, and till this day, some people in Japan do not acknowledge that any war crimes took place in Nanking. After seeing the museum, it’s incredible to me that anyone could deny what occurred.
Many people might compare the Massacre museum to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. Since I haven’t visited the Holocaust Museum, I can’t make that comparison.
But the problem that both museums face is once that I frequently explore in the classes I teach. How do you convey the magnitude of a tragedy this large? What do you do when language fails? In a graduate course I teach called “Writing the Unspeakable,” we explore how people write about what is “beyond words.” In the

Nanking Museum, we directly encountered a tragedy that is beyond words and beyond comprehension. How do you account for 300,000 dead? Or even 30,000? How do you account for the viciousness of soldiers who raped old women and young girls? Who killed civilians by burning, beheading, torturing, and drowning them? Who killed women while they were nursing babies?

The Museum addresses this by telling a story about the massacre that runs fairly chronologically. Upon entering the museum you descend a staircase in almost total darkness to a recovered bomb shelter. Black and white film of the initial Japanese bombing of Nanjing plays, and sounds of dropping bombs echo around you in the dark. The next large room is almost completely dark, and in raised letters (all in Chinese) the names of the victims are inscribed on the walls of the museum in dark gray stone. Even though I can’t read the names (my Chinese vocabulary is growing but is still less than ten words), there was something about touching the names of the dead that struck me. In fact, I literally went to the walls and traced the names, touching them with my fingers. In the center of the room, a name and a photo flash every few seconds displaying another image of someone who died.
There are dozens of artifacts and videos displayed in the next part of the museum and a depiction of what the land looked like after the bombing, but what got me was the next room where twelve skeletons of those who died during the attacks lie partly unearthed. It seems to be a Chinese practice to build museums on the sites of archeological discoveries (we saw a Han dynasty excavation/museum on the way into Xi’an, and the Terra Cotta Warriors are of course in the spot where they were found). At the time, I didn’t know this, however, and seeing the twelve skeletons where they had been buried in a mass grave, still unidentified, was devastating.
The entire museum is dark, partly underground, and like walking with ghosts. I didn’t take too much in after the first twelve person mass grave. The European and American missionaries who helped save people in Nanking were all recognized, among them John Rabe, the good Nazi, and Minnie Vartrin, the farm-girl from Illinois who ran Nanling Women’s University and saved 10,000 women from rape, but who later returned to the states and committed suicide. Iris Change was memorialized as well (in 1994 after writing The Rape of Nanking she also committed suicide).
The museum is huge, and after a trek through the memorial garden, there were at least two more large partly excavated mass graves: one with two hundred and fifty skeletons in it. In contrast with the graves, the gift shops were typically Chinese aggressive, and my Western face brought out the Iris Chang book (in English) along with the usual array of Mao paraphernalia (which I generally really like, but not in this context).
Another display that really struck me was a depiction of photos of the 300,000. Every twelve seconds, a sound like water dripping echoed through the chamber, and another picture of one of the victims lit up. If you stood for a minute you saw five victim’s photos. It takes six weeks to get through all of the victims of the massacre with a new image every twelve seconds.
While the museum was painful and overwhelming, I would really like to go back some day and go through the whole thing more slowly. I’d like to hear translations of more of the surviving victim’s stories, and I would like to talk with more Chinese people about their family’s memories of Nanking and what havoc the Japanese invasion caused.
While meeting with Chinese college students at a local university in Xi’an this week, one of them asked why so many people hated the Jews. While the student’s question surprised me, it was wonderful to hear someone who spoke with such candor about race/ethnicity.  I rarely get such direct comments from students in the U.S.  After talking for a while, I understood that she had read The Merchant of Venice in her English class, and she didn’t really understand the other characters’ hatred of Shylock (although she loved Portia). The easiest cultural key I had to explain the irrational concept of hate/genocide was the Holocaust, which these students seemed mostly unfamiliar with—until I compared the Holocaust to the Rape of Nanking. Then we has a moment of cultural understanding where we all recognized the cost of hating one another based on race, religion, or ethnicity. And I knew why it was so important for us to come to China.

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