Akira says, textbook revisions exist,
"Japan's aggression against Northern China" replaced
with "Japan's advance into Northern China,"
"Japan's invasion of Southeast Asia"
replaced with "Japan's advance into Southeast Asia."
Please discuss.
[RINGS BELL]
Mukai scores 106 and Noda 105.
The newspaper article, a fabrication,
a complete fiction, Mukai's attorney
said before the war crimes tribunal, propaganda
that made for an enticing story for the two
instantly famous lieutenants seeking out new brides.
And when the Japanese police showed up at Mukai's door
in the spring of 1947, Mukai said,
I did nothing wrong, telling his wife that the killing
contest was all made up.
Oh, then you lied to me, his wife reportedly said.
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Baskets of gold, baskets of jade,
how can we trust the testimony of survivors
not to be exaggerated?
Baskets of gold, baskets of jade,
all of it left behind, my mother said,
when the Japanese marched toward the gates of Nanjing.
My mother born in 1936, according to the lunar
calendar, she said, never quite sure
which state to officially use on her California driver's
license.
My mother's family who went from everything
to nothing, baskets of gold, baskets of jade
hauled off by the soldiers overnight.
But something's not quite right, my father says,
about the time and the place.
She was born in Xi'An, not Nanjing.
She wasn't even there when the soldier scaled the walls
after dropping ordnance sunup to sundown for weeks on end.
Something must be wrong with her medication.
Though it's true, my father says, her family
ran from the Japs.
We all did, just not in 1937.
You know how she gets everything confused.
Baskets of jade, baskets of gold,
my mother in and out of psych wards for the last decades
of her life, dead at the age of 62,
half a globe and more than half a century away.
No way to verify exactly what she
meant when she pulled a long, gold hair from her own scalp
and said, you know, you must be at least an eighth German,
but your father--
so many things he still doesn't know.
[RINGS BELL]
Canceling class, I stay home from school,
order three DVDs off Amazon, and surf the web all day
for atrocities.
Bullet, horse urine injected into human kidneys;
bullet, animal blood ejected into veins;
bullet, seawater injected into veins;
bullet, air injected into veins; bullet, bubonic plague injected
into veins; bullet, limbs amputated then reattached
to opposite sides of the body; bullet, flamethrower practice;
bullet, vivisection without anesthesia;
bullet, limbs frozen off till only a torso and head
remain, still breathing, eyes open.
[RINGS BELL]
When my brother brought his girlfriend home
for the first time, he thought her being Asian
and a member of the college speech team would be enough,
but when my parents heard her last name had
a few syllables too many--
Horiuchi, Yamaguchi, whatever it was--
what could they do but frown and whisper to one another,
she's Japanese, so vicious?
My family no longer knowing which country each of us
were living in.
[RINGS BELL]
Canceling class, I stay home from school
trying to square the accounts of just how many were massacred.
300,000, 200,000, 50,000, 50?
[RINGS BELL]
Very little remains of the first grade,
only Sherri on a jungle gym at recess chanting,
millimated monkey meat, roasty toasty parakeet,
wormy vomit flowing down the avenue,
and now it's time for lunch.
I forgot my spoon.
That, and one other--
Chinese, Japanese, Hercules, look at these,
as Sherri rocked back and forth, bodacious knees
churning inside an oversized T. Never asked her
why she pulled the outer corner of her eyes up for Chinese
and down for Japanese.
Quite sure now even she didn't know
how such pieces of rote performance art
were handed down at recess, the source
of their origins unknown, at least to us, in 1971.
[RINGS BELL]
And before they knew it, they found themselves
beyond what they thought they were capable of,
bayoneted survivors who felt they had no choice but to bring
their trophies home, Japanese heads
impaled on long bamboo poles.
[RINGS BELL]
Little else remains from my sophomore year in college
but a course in abnormal psych, and little remains
of that except for a lecture the professor gave
about a serial killer who used to roam the Timpanogos
Mountains on the very trails we were likely to hike
as soon as school got out.
Said the thing the killer liked to do most after binding
his victim's wrists and ankles with duct tape
was to turn on a portable cassette recorder
while he chose one of many possible blades
from a Swiss army knife his mother
had given him, curious how the wounds he inflicted
would each produce a different sound as the blade went in,
then out, he who'd make an archive of his research,
documenting the difference between puncturing
a kidney versus a liver, an eyelid instead of a spleen,
and the relish our professor took imitating some
of the screams he'd heard began to trump the facts
themselves, our professor,
who had become the very thing he knew so much
about and in so doing made the lesson all the more memorable,
indelible.
[RINGS BELL]
Inscription on the tombstone of the homeless spirits--
in October of 1938, I, Gao Guanwu,
was instructed by the government to go to Nanjing.
It was a year after the Nanjing incident.
Remains, however, still could be found on the mountains,
at the city walls, in the thick growth of grass,
and along the rivers.
I, myself, collected 2,600 remains in the city
and buried them.
Two months later, the villagers related to me
that there were more abandoned remains at Mao Shan, Ma Qun,
Ma'An, and Linggu Monastery.
The villagers pleaded for burial of those remains.
Therefore, I conveyed this matter
to the public health bureau.
As a result, more than 3,000 bodies
were collected and buried at the Linggu Monastery.
This monument was erected to guard against wild beasts
and to memorialize those homeless spirits.
This text is from a rubbing.
The stone is now lost.
[RINGS BELL]