Forgive or Forget?

As we watched the heated progress of the three-week long street protests in the major cities of China over the blatant attempt by the Japanese government to downplay their past acts of war brutalities through their approval of a falsified nationalist textbook, I was reminded unwittingly of a conversation that I had when I first arrived in Oz.

I was then idealistic but baffled and dismayed by the unexplained hostilities of the locals during my course of work. The explanation by one of the consultants over a casual dinner turned out to be rather surprising and poignant.

"A lot of the elderly folks here had been through World War II and fought the Japanese. Naturally they do hate them to a certain extent. And they may be guarded against you because to them, you may look Japanese, even if you are not."

Such was the impact of the war on those individuals and perhaps even their descendents.

I myself had heard of countless wartime stories from my living grandmother since I was a child, as she recounted in detail how my smart-aleck grandpa who was a school principal then had to disguise himself as a hawker as the Japanese judiciously seived out and murdered the educationists.

She would describe the intensed fear and palpitations when she accidentally bumped into two Japanese soldiers along the corridors, who eventually chose to walk away instead of raping and torturing her.

Our exposures to those unbelievably horrible aspects of the Japanese Occupations included the history lessons we had in school, my numerous visits to China and significantly Nanking which bore the most horrific annihilations, and the movies galore that featured the graphic details of such atrocities. The direct accounts of survivors and their procreations through books and novels provided further evidences that would be hard to erase.

I am not surprised at all by the pent-up anger and frustrations of the tens of thousands of demonstrators in China, though personally I am not an advocate of violence. But I fully understand their feelings and purpose, and my heart reaches out to all the past victims and their families. Emotionally we would have been on common grounds.

What I feel truly ironical was the attempted bid by the Japanese government to obtain a permanent seat at the UN Security Council and its supposed support by the major world powers other than China. Who could have forgotten the devastasting and humiliating defeat of the famous Pearl Harbour in United States that led to its retaliation and eventual surrender of the predators?

The vindictive visits by the ministers to the controversial war shrines only fuelled more contempt and disgust to the whole saga, crushing any chance of forgiveness of their sins.

It is indeed time for them to face up to the past.