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Across China: Museums in northeast China tell Japanese wartime atrocities

Xinhua, August 15, 2015 Adjust font size:

Two museums about Japan's wartime atrocities opened in northeast China on Saturday, the 70th anniversary of the victory of China's anti-Japanese war.

The Museum of Evidence of War Crimes by Japanese Army Unit 731 is on the site of former headquarters of Japanese army unit 731 in Harbin, capital of Heilongjiang province. Unit 731 was a biological and chemical warfare research base established in 1935.

The 6,300-square-meter building is home to 13 exhibition rooms, a gallery and an exhibition hall.

At least 3,000 people died at the base between 1939 and 1945, mostly in experiments for the development of biological weapons. Biological weapons killed at least 300,000 people in China.

One of the victims was Zhang Huizhong, who was sent to there in 1941. His son Zhang Kewei learned about the death of his father in 1949.

Living in Jinzhou of Liaoning province, Zhang Kewei visited the museum Saturday, and found his father's name on one of the documents on show.

Another visitor was a Japanese Mori Masataka, who spent 30 years studying Unit 731. He donated some video clips to Harbin in 2008, which he saw in the museum.

"I will bring my friends to the museum," he said. "As a Japanese, I feel sorry for the Chinese victims and their relatives...Hopefully the museum will remind people of the history and make them value peace more."

In Fuxin, Liaoning province, a new memorial hall for dead miners also opened on Saturday, with more than 2,000 people attending.

The four exhibition rooms showed 220 pictures and 200 items on the suffering of miners who were forced to work for the Japanese.

A mining company opened on Oct. 1, 1936 in Fuxin by the Japanese, which took about 25.3 million tonnes of coal and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of miners. More than 70,000 remains were found in mass graves.

Together with three provincial officials, 83-year-old Gao Duoxian unveiled a statue for the memorial hall. The statue showed a cart loaded with miners' helmets.

Gao's father was a miner, and he could still recall the scene when his father was taken away forcibly by Japanese.

"The mourning today is a consolation for the relatives of those persecuted by the Japanese," he said. "Let us remember that part of history forever." Endi