Local teacher visits Asia to learn about war victims

Posted 2 months ago

Vermilion will hold its Remembrance Day ceremonies on November 11 at 11 a.m. at the Vermilion Regional Centre. Anyone wishing to attend should arrive at 10:40 a.m. It will be a traditional Remembrance Day Ceremony with the last post and Reville. The ceremony will run until noon at which point there will be a social at the Vermilion Legion Hall. Pictured above is veteran John Karwandy laying a wreath at the Vermilion war memorial.Photo by Murray Crawford

Murray Crawford

Vermilion Standard

Allan MacMillan, a vice principal at St. Jerome's Separate School, was given an opportunity to learn about the forgotten victims of war.

MacMillan went on a trip with Toronto ALPHA, the Association for Learning and Preserving the History of World War Two in Asia, to China and Korea to see sites and learn some Second World War history. MacMillan said what it was a great experience that has affected him as a teacher.

"It has changed some of my lesson plans. I try to incorporate what I've learned in my classroom, as much as the curriculum allows," said MacMillan.

"In the Alberta curriculum an atrocity (the Nanking Massacre) that claimed 300,000 or more lives is covered in two or three paragraphs. To understand the causes, events and consequences is impossible to do in that length of time, so it's up to people like me."

The trip MacMillan went on visited Shanghai, Nanking, Harbin and Beijing, China as well as Seoul, South Korea. At each stop the group learned about different elements of the Japanese occupation of both Korea and China, which included the comfort women system, the Nanking Massacre, Unit-731 and forced slave labour.

Shanghai was the first stop of the trip, which focused on the comfort women system, which MacMillan said, was a system established by the Japanese Imperial government to create brothels. Chinese and Korean women were forced into sexual servitude to service Japanese soldiers.

"The official Japanese line was these were created in order to diminish the amount of attacks on women," said MacMillan.

"Initially the idea was to use Japanese prostitutes, which was legal at the time in Japan, but in reality there weren't enough Japanese women. So what would happen was the women were lured to a different city under the premise of employment as a nanny or a caregiver. When they arrived they were forced into sexual slavery."

He added the vast majority of the comfort women were Korean, because Korea was a Japanese colony at the time, but a number also came from China as well as other Japanese occupied territories, including the Philippines and even Dutch women who lived in Dutch colonies in South East Asia.

During their visit to Shanghai the group met up with Chinese comfort women survivors and visited former comfort stations.

"It was slavery. These women were confined to a house and they were forced to service 10 to 20 to 30 men a day," said MacMillan.

"In pictures you see lineups of men. There's one quotation I remember quite vividly 'it was (like) grocery shopping where you go in, do your business and walk out."

Within the cultural norms of the region, added MacMillan, this was an incredibly shameful act for a woman to do.

The group then went on to Nanking to learn about the Nanking Massacre. Nanking was the former capital of China. The Japanese captured it in December of 1937 and an estimate 300,000 Chinese people were killed, said MacMillan, both military and civilian.

"There are newspaper accounts from Japanese newspapers saying Japanese officers had competitions on how many Chinese people they could kill," said MacMillan.

"Who could get to 100 first, that was the goal. It was random and in the streets. It's also called the Rape of Nanking because it is also estimated 60-80,000 women were raped."

While the group MacMillan was with visited Nanking they went to the John Rabe Museum. MacMillan said Rabe was a Nazi working in China; he worked with Americans and Europeans to establish a safe zone in Nanking for Chinese people to be safe from the occupying Japanese forces.

"They created a 10 square kilometer section of the city which was run by John Rabe," said MacMillan.

"He was a Nazi industrialist living in China. So Rabe and a number of American missionaries created this a refugee zone. Because Rabe was a Nazi the Japanese had respect for the swastika. All they had to protect the Chinese refugees was the Nazi armband on Rabe's arm."

The group also laid a wreath at the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall and paid their respects to the victims.

Their next stop was in Harbin, China where they learned about Unit-731, a biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army.

"There were live tests, people would be tied to stakes and chemicals were dropped in and the results were studied," said MacMillan.

"They tested on live subjects including vivisection where they would carve subjects up while they were still living."

One of the things that brought the message home for MacMillan was the chance to meet survivors. Before going he had nine hours of classes and two books to read, Factories of Death by Sheldon Harris and The Rape of Nanking by Irish Chang

"Each place we went to we were able to meet survivors," said MacMillan.

He said they also visited a mass grave in Nanking which had a reported 10,000 bodies buried in it.

"In Harbin we met a middle aged man. What happened was, as the Japanese began to lose the war and began to retreat they dumped the chemical and biological materials where they hoped in wouldn't be found," said MacMillan.

"This man and a friend were working on a ship in the 1970s that was dredging the bottom of the river and they found three shells filled with mustard gas."

On top of incorporating this experience into his lesson plan MacMillan said it gives him a new appreciation for what the allies accomplished.

"Sixty-five years later, when you see the legacies of what these people went through and you realize it was through the sacrifices of veterans of the allied forces that these atrocities ended. It gives you a far greater respect of what the men and women of our Canadian Armed Forces did. There's a reason they're called the greatest generation," said MacMillan.