Nanjing Massacre remembered by Chinese community in San Francisco

Members of the Chinese community in San Francisco held a ceremony Sunday to remember an estimated 300,000 Chinese massacred during a six-week period 79 years ago by the imperial Japanese army.

The ceremony, known as Nanjing Ji, or the Remembrance of Nanjing, has been an annual event for nearly 20 years in a row in the U.S. west coast city, where more than one-fifth of the residents share Chinese heritage, to commemorate what is known as Nanjing Massacre.

The mass killing, which started on Dec. 13, 1937, as Japanese army soldiers crushed the defense of Nanjing, then the capital city of China, was one of the worst atrocities committed by Japan against civilians in the 20th century. In the aftermath, 20,000 to 30,000 women and young girls were raped by members of the Japanese aggressor troops.

Organized by the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition, together with Global Alliance for Preserving the History of WWII in Asia and the Chinese American Association of Commerce, this year's Nanjing Ji brought representatives of other ethnic communities who shared the same or similar war-time memories inflicted by the Japanese army.

Retired judges Lillian Sing and Julie Tang of Superior Court of San Francisco were vocal at the event against the Japanese government's refusal to acknowledge a series of war crimes, including forcing about 200,000 Chinese girls and young women into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers and using the term "Comfort Women" as a euphemism to call the sexual slaves.

While the Nanjing Massacre took place in China, "comfort women" were taken by the Japanese army mostly from Korea, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, then Dutch East Indies, therefore becoming an issue rallying a number of activist groups in the United States.

Sing and Tang worked with a number of others to co-found the "Comfort Women" Justice Coalition (CWJC) and allied with San Francisco Board of Supervisors member Eric Mar to initiate a resolution, which was passed by the local legislature in September 2015, calling for establishing a memorial for "comfort women" in the city and educating the local community about stopping global human trafficking of women and girls.

An emotional Mar told the audience of about 300 people, including dozens of students from a Chinese language school, at the event that he heard about the Nanjing Massacre from his father and grand mother and believed that his late grand mother would be proud of his role to right the historical wrong.

Asked by Sing whether the supervisor, who will be termed out in January 2017, would accept an invitation to join the CWJC, Mar answered "Hell, Yes!" Endi