NANJING, Oct. 21 (Xinhua) -- A group of young Japanese people visited the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre Saturday, mourning those killed in the massacre.
Fourteen young people from Japan, who won a national writing competition, came to the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders and laid wreaths on Saturday morning in Nanjing, capital city of east China's Jiangsu Province.
They visited the memorial hall and learnt the history of the Nanjing Massacre, in which more than 300,000 Chinese were brutally murdered by Japanese invaders when they occupied Nanjing on Dec. 13, 1937 and began six weeks of destruction, pillage, rape and slaughter in Nanjing.
"It's incredible that such a tragedy occurred 80 years ago. It's another world for me. I used to think of the Japanese as victims of the war, however, now I understand that we were also perpetrators. All Japanese people should come to see this place," said Sasaki Mariko, a undergraduate student of Tokyo Gakugei University.
Onishi Kanna, a high school student, said she was shocked by visiting a mass grave. "There are a lot of parts missing from our historical education."
Japanese have many prejudices about China, but after visiting China by herself and meeting Chinese people, she had begun to think again about the future China-Japan relations, she said.
Zhang Jianjun, director of the Memorial Hall said, this year is the 45th anniversary of the normalization of relations between China and Japan, and this kind of activity can help Japanese youth know about the history between the two countries, so that they can make contributions to the development of China-Japan relations.
