09 · Gravel, Ghosts, and the False Neutrality of "Rational Objectivity"
Standing atop the bones of three hundred thousand people, every breath I take is a miracle of life my ancestors fought to "steal" for me in an age of blood and wind.
Standing on the Bones of Three Hundred Thousand
Today, when I truly walked out of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders and stood on the plaza paved with cold grey gravel, my chest felt as if it were crushed under a weight of a thousand jun.
I was born in Nanjing. The name of this city itself is branded with the deepest scar in the history of human civilization. Yet, like countless young people who grew up in peacetime, I had heard "the Nanjing Massacre" countless times since childhood, yet for a long time never truly gazed at those bloody details. When I was young, the elders in my family never spoke of it. Only today did I truly understand: that silence was not forgetting, but a "post-traumatic silence" born of pain too deep for words—and the instinct of a grandparent who lived through turmoil, out of love, trying to shield the younger generation from the pollution of humanity's darkest extremes.
When I stood inside the museum today and truly faced those documented atrocities, air-raid shelter ruins, and the tragedies behind the black-and-white photographs, a vast grief and a chill down my spine struck me completely.
As a computer science student accustomed to speaking in logic, I stood there and suddenly grasped a cold, cruel probability: during the hellish six weeks of winter 1937, the Japanese army carried out indiscriminate, systematic slaughter. If my great-grandfather and great-grandmother had taken one wrong step while evading search parties, been one second too slow while fleeing, and become one of those three hundred thousand victims, then today there would absolutely be no girl named Maggie in this world.
Every breath I take now, every line of code I type on the keyboard, every independent thought I form—all of it is a miracle of life my ancestors, in that age of blood and wind, fought with everything they had to "steal" for me.
Piercing the Refined Hypocrisy of Western "Japan-Obsessed Liberals" and Their Whataboutism
Yet when I carried this history-spanning shock and weight and looked back at the noise in today's international public discourse, I found the most nauseating bias of all.
Online and even in daily life, one constantly encounters certain Western "Japan-obsessed liberals" who style themselves "rational, objective, and neutral." Whenever someone speaks of this history and their grief, this crowd deploys a practiced Western rhetoric of "moral muddying the waters." With a face full of pity for all mankind, they say: "Every country has made mistakes in war; people often fixate on others' sins and forget their own stains. For example, British and American troops have killed children in Iraq; Australian special forces have massacred civilians in Afghanistan. Everyone forgets—why single out Japan?" Sometimes they even adopt a lofty posture and use "I'm thinking of your speech safety" as a shield, trying to end the confrontation with an air of refinement.
This is an extremely refined historical nihilism—and outright Whataboutism.
Today, after seeing those ironclad historical records, I want to land the coldest, tightest logical blow on these hypocrites: Do not try to equate isolated crimes by individual soldiers in modern wars with the state-driven, industrial-scale fascist racial extermination of Japan in World War II! Atrocities and stains in modern military conflicts can never serve as a "moral blanket" to excuse fascist war crimes. Moreover, scandals in certain Western countries are largely exposed by their domestic media and even prosecuted by military tribunals.
Japan is an exception doubly blind—in morality and in history. In the late stages of WWII, this country was mad enough to organize the "kamikaze" corps, sending young pilots to crash their planes directly into enemy ships. That systematic fascist fanaticism produced their bottomless brutality toward other peoples.
What feels most suffocating and sickening is that the Japanese government still refuses to offer a thorough, sincere apology and reflection for its crimes.
Germany, another fascist Axis power in WWII, confronted the horror of Nazism, paid a price, reflected on its guilt, and strictly educates the next generation to remember history. Japan, by contrast, chose historical amnesia, constantly revising and whitewashing history in textbooks. Even today, they still enshrine those "Class-A war criminals" convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East like deities in their national shrine.
Can you imagine today's Germany building a temple to openly worship Hitler, Goebbels, and his Nazi generals? If that is an absolute taboo in Europe that everyone condemns, why can Japan's conduct be lightly tolerated in the eyes of these Western liberals?
As for using "concern for your political safety" to tell victims to stay quiet—that is nothing but a clumsy excuse when they are cornered in logic, used to escape debate and preserve their sense of intellectual superiority. We understand the complexity of history perfectly well. We do not need any foreigner playing judge over our history from on high.
Blind Adoration and the Narrowness of an Island Nation
Before I truly understood the truth of this history today, I might still have been happy to treat Japan as a popular travel destination. But at this moment, my attitude can be summed up in four words: absolutely impossible. Unless one day they remove those blood-soaked murderers from their shrine entirely, I will not apply a single filter of interest to that country again.
Too many young people today are blindly adoring. They indulge in anime, cherry blossoms, and so-called "Japanese aesthetics," follow influencers shouting "Japan is amazing," yet turn a blind eye to the bloody history beneath that refined skin. Japan's younger generation, under the government's historical fig leaf, likewise lives numb, happy, and knowing nothing.
That is precisely what alarms me most. If history is ignored, covered up, entertainmentized, and dissolved, it will not disappear on its own—at some moment in the future it will evolve and repeat itself in equally cruel ways. Modern Japanese youth may not have personally taken part in the massacre of that era, but they enjoy the social gains accumulated by predecessors through aggression and plunder, while their country still refuses to admit error—these two facts must never be conflated.
There are so many broader, more inclusive countries and civilizations willing to reflect on themselves waiting for me to explore. Why should I waste my time, money, and passion on a narrow island nation that lacks even the moral courage to face its history?
Moving Toward a Wider World with Clarity
Walking out of the memorial, watching the sunlight outside, I know with perfect clarity where I stand.
I will no longer sink into helpless internal friction and rage. I will turn this grief into the hardest, most rational foundation of my soul. True strength is not blindly venting emotions online or competing in who is worse—it is using the tightest logic, irrefutable language, and facts as hard as iron to tear away the fig leaves of those who try to downplay or beautify fascist atrocities.
As a descendant of those who survived this city, I will carry this historical clarity to learn the languages I want to learn and walk farther in the world. We did not participate in the past, but we absolutely have the right to decide what kind of civilization and justice should shape the world of the future.
See you around.
— Maggie
Nanjing · 22 May 2026