On July 7th, 1937, The Second Sino-Japanese War began. The Imperial Japanese Army invaded China at the Marco Polo Bridge incident and easily captured Beiping, which is now Beijing, and Tianjin. Afterwards, the province my grandfather lived in, Shandong, was captured by the Japanese until 1945 when the Japanese surrendered. My grandfather was four years old when this began.
My grandfather doesn't talk about his earlier part of his life and I'm not sure he ever has revealed very much about his childhood to anyone. Once in awhile, he will mention something oddly cryptic and vague about his earlier life, like Balakian's grandmother with her stories and her dreams. There have been small incidents in my life, just like Balakian's, where my grandfather mentions something out of the blue.
I remember about three years back, I was watching a documentary on the History channel about Japan during World War II at home and my grandparents came over for dinner. When the film ended, my grandfather kept on muttering in Chinese, "inaccurate events" and "stupid historians". I must have looked at him oddly because he said to me, "The Japanese performed worse torture than what was said in the video." He then held up a bamboo chopstick and continued, "They used to hang our people by their hands and have bamboo shoots growing below. The shoots were sharp and pierced the bottom of the feet as the shoots grew. Our people bled to death." He emphasized the description by piercing the air with the chopstick. I still have goose bumps as I repeat this now in this blog. The form of torture my grandfather described reminds me of the Turkish torture, where they beat the soles of the feet until they bleed out. He also said our people to symbolize my family's ethnic connection to the people who were tortured.
Even to this day, my grandfather hates Japanese culture. It wasn't until recently he would step into a Japanese restaurant and even when he comes to dine with us, he doesn't order food. He looks at my pens that say "Made in Japan" and mutters, "China is more prosperous." Just like Balakian's grandmother, his silence speaks louder than words when it comes to the fear of the atrocities of their past because the terrors may be too devastating to say outloud.
Although the Japanese committed appalling war crimes in the Second World War, I wonder, is it considered genocide by the UN? I don't think the Japanese had the idea or the resources to exterminate the Chinese people, they just used fear and torture to keep their 'subjects' in line. It seems closer to the American Revolution than the Armenian Genocide to me, but I could be wrong.
ReplyDeleteHere are the UN's specifications of Genocide:
ReplyDelete(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
I never called the Second Sino-Japanese war a genocide, but the war crimes committed in the war is similar to the forms of torture used in the Armenian Genocide. I am not sure the Japanese intended to exterminate the Chinese race, but they did kill many civilians during the war, many of those victims were from my grandfather's village.
Just to clarify, this blog was more about my grandfather and the way he doesn't mention his past similar to Balakian and his grandmother. I added the historical note to this blog because I am not sure how many people are familiar with the Second Sino-Japanese war.
War crimes and genocide are both awful but different. I understand what your post was intended to be about and I think it was a well thought out post, it just seems as though genocide would be the attempt to systematically eliminate a people whereas the Sino-Japanese war seems more like subjugation. I didn't mean to come across as nit picky or anything.
ReplyDelete