SHANGHAI/NANJING, May 29 (Xinhua) -- The wall stands in silence, but it does not let history go unheard.
On the public memorial square of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders, located in Nanjing of east China, a wall bears the number 300,000 in multiple languages, a stark inscription serving as a reminder of the victims of the 1937 massacre of Chinese citizens in the city by Japanese invaders.
A group of visitors moved slowly across the gravel path at this venue on Friday, their footsteps the only sound in the square.
"The sense of space and emptiness in the square, that profound sense of absence, represents something that's gone," said Neil Boister, a professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. "This way of remembering is very powerful."
Boister was among a group of scholars from China and abroad who traveled to Nanjing in Jiangsu Province after attending the International Symposium Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the Commencement of the Tokyo Trial, held in Shanghai on Thursday.
The Tokyo Trial, formally known as the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, opened in 1946 and lasted about two years and a half. It held 818 sessions, heard 419 witnesses in person and produced over 48,000 pages of trial transcripts, along with a lengthy judgment running more than 1,200 pages.
For many of the scholars gathered in Shanghai, those numbers were not merely archival facts. They gave legal weight to a trial that helped lay the foundations of the postwar order.
"This is no ordinary trial," the tribunal's chief prosecutor, Joseph Keenan, declared in his opening statement in 1946, calling it part of a battle to save civilization from destruction brought not by forces of nature, but by the deliberate, planned efforts of individuals who seemed "willing to bring the world to a premature end in their mad ambition for domination."
Eight decades later, speakers at the symposium made a similar point in legal and historical terms. Alongside the Nuremberg trials, they said, the Tokyo Trial became a cornerstone of the postwar international order, confirming that Japan's war in Asia was a war of aggression and that wartime atrocities were not merely "inevitable tragedies of war," but crimes for which political and military leaders could be held personally accountable.
Cheng Zhaoqi, director of the Center for the Tokyo Trial Studies of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, said the tribunal's legal foundation should not be maligned. Characterizations of the trial as "victors' justice" or "ex post facto law," he said, were not valid grounds for questioning its legitimacy, but excuses used by right-wing forces in Japan to obscure the country's history of aggression and deny wartime responsibility.
Masataka Mori, a former professor of irenology at Shizuoka University, said the Tokyo Trial was grounded in vast and irrefutable evidence. It condemned Japanese militarism and the crimes of those who carried it out, and represented an effort to bring the world back from destruction to civilization, and from aggression and violence to peace and cooperation, he said.
At the Nanjing memorial, that evidence was not abstract. In the exhibition hall, survivors' testimonies, yellowed photographs and rusted blades told of the events which unfolded in the winter of 1937.
In another section, the memorial displayed recently donated archival items. Mori leaned close to the glass case, his gaze fixed on the documents. Afterward, he said he was heavy-hearted. As a Japanese citizen, he said, he wanted to mourn the victims sincerely and to acknowledge the Nanjing Massacre as an exceptionally brutal chapter of human history and an undeniable historical fact.
Scholars said the Tokyo Trial did something larger than recording wartime suffering, noting that it had confirmed, under international law, the illegality of Japan's colonial aggression during World War II and brought the trauma of many Asian peoples into a legal frame.
Dato' Abdul Majid Ahmad Khan, president of the Malaysia-China Friendship Association and a former Malaysian ambassador to China, said that by recognizing that political and military leaders could be held individually accountable for actions committed under state authority, the tribunal helped establish the principle that "might does not make right" as a foundation of the postwar order.
Still, scholars also noted the limits of the tribunal's legacy. Hwang Woo-yea, former deputy prime minister for social affairs of the Republic of Korea, pointed to what he called the trial's judicial incompleteness and structural limitations, citing issues including the Nanjing Massacre, "comfort women," forced mobilization and the crimes of Unit 731. Such gaps help explain why historical wounds in Asia remain unhealed, and why disputes over the region's wartime past continue to run so deep, he said.
Jin Ying, a researcher at the Institute of Japanese Studies, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the visit mattered because influential forces in Japan were still trying to overturn the Tokyo Trial's findings on the Nanjing Massacre. "Remembering was not only an act of mourning, but also a way to draw evidence and courage in the struggle against historical revisionism," she said.
For Takakage Fujita, secretary-general of the Association for Inheriting and Propagating the Murayama Statement, the visit was his third to the memorial. Facing the eternal flame at the memorial square, he wept.
Each visit, Fujita said, reminded him of the unforgivable crimes committed by Japan's military in China and left him with deep shame and guilt. Japan, he said, has no choice but to acknowledge the killings, reflect on them, apologize and offer compensation.
The Tokyo Trial looked back at war, but scholars said its meaning has always pointed toward peace. As International Nuremberg Principles Academy Deputy Director Viviane Dittrich put it, the anniversary was a moment to renew trust in multilateralism and the rules-based international order, and to insist that "the force of law" prevails over "the law of force" -- a legacy that, for future generations, remains unfinished and still forming. ■
