The massacre that lit the flame of resistance

Fan Yuexiang, 85, the only living survivor of the Meihua massacre, recalls events during the four days of slaughter in 1937. Picture Provided to China Daily

Emotional returns

In June 1985, Lyu Zhengcao, then 81, returned to Meihua and spoke with survivors of the massacre. The occasion was informal, "not an inspection as a leader, but a visit to families," according to the general, a Liaoning province native and a vice-chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, the country's top political advisory body.

Fan, the only living survivor, said: "He thought his departure with his troops had left the town exposed to the brutal Japanese troops, and asked if we hated him.

"But I said we didn't hate him because it wasn't his fault, and we appreciated his efforts against the Japanese in the days before the massacre," she said, adding that many other survivors had expressed the same opinion.

Meihua also received another important guest. Shiro Azuma, a former Japanese soldier who had been in China as part of the occupying force, visited the town in April 2000 to apologize for the crimes committed by the Imperial Army during the war.

Although he wasn't involved in the slaughter at Meihua, Azuma, who died in 2006, admitted he had participated in the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, in which 300,000 Chinese were murdered.

After his initial confession, Azuma visited China seven times to apologize for the brutal behavior of the Japanese soldiers. When he visited Meihua, the then-88-year-old bowed to the survivors and residents in front of the massacre memorial hall and made a long, heartfelt apology, saying the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers in China had weighed heavily on his mind for many decades.

During a conversation with survivors later that day, Fan described to Azuma how the Japanese had killed her father and left her with deep scars that would never heal.

The elderly Japanese veteran understood that the majority of Chinese people would never forgive him, and that a large number of his compatriots would be upset by his actions, but he said it would not be possible for China and Japan to forge a new friendship based on trust and mutual respect until the crimes were confessed and his country acknowledged its dark wartime history.

Zhang Yu contributed to this story.