Nanjing Massacre memorial

Well I've been in Nanjing, China for 4 days now, and i'll give my impressions.

First, I'm not sure if it's because of the rising modern generation, or if its specific to nanjing, but the people i've met are some of the most interesting and friendly people. When i'm on a taxi, or in a restaurant, I've been chatting with everybody and everybody is willing to chat. China has some of the coldest people, but if you have a good attitude, it also has some of the friendliest people.

I can't read the foreign news articles about Chinese sensitive news, but there's been whispers about planned terrorist attacks in beijing. I'm not sure what kind of progress these guys hope to achieve by disrupting the Olympics. Seems pretty uncivilized to me.

At a restaurant yesterday, I saw the most beautiful girl, the type where you just have to sit back and admire, without any dirty thoughts. I also watched an epic movie yesterday called "Red Cliff" which is about the Three Kingdoms warring states period in China. I actually know very little about this historical period, but watching the movie raised interest. When I have time, i'm going to go read up on this.

I also went to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial museum. There were lots of sad sites, like a live pit where 10,000 skeletons were burried. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the readings in the museum were not particularly biased, but just slightly. I think a lot of people who go to a museum like this, or a holocaust museum, walk through it and think to themselves, "this museum is very important. It is important for people to come here and learn about the truth." My feeling is that most people fail to really learn the significance of a museum like this. It doesn't matter that it happened, because what's done is done. And the lesson isn't even, "Japanese should know what they did, and learn from their mistakes." Humans by nature are very weak creatures in the mind. They are easily crazed, manipulated, and controlled. To judge the Japanese, or the Nazi's as something different and say "I would never do that" is a grave error. I feel many Chinese may criticize the Japanese for their atrocities, but fail to remember when the Chinese themselves went up in a craze and killed countless people, like what the Chinese Red Guards did. All of us have the potential to do harm like this. To me, the lesson that we should learn from these historical memories is just that all humans, no matter how good in nature, are capable of doing inhuman destruction, and that maybe if we are just a bit aware of this, we can prevent it in the future. At the end of the museum, there were paper doves and ornaments made and gifted by the Japanese School in Shanghai, which is pretty nice to see.

In any case, i think the Nanjing Massacre museum, and the Atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima are both important to visit.