Ten Japanese educators called for improvement of the Sino-Japanese relationship after their visit to the germ warfare-plagued Yiwu City in east China's Zhejiang Province from Saturday to Sunday.

 

Genki Nakamura, executive Chairman of the Education Labor Union of Fukuoka, was shocked by a picture in the Wang's ancestral temple, in which an old man tucked up his trousers to show the yellowish scars left by anthrax over 60 years ago.

 

"I knew something about the Japanese invasion in China, " said the 59-year-old educator, "but it is only until now that do I realize how much had Chinese people suffered from the germ warfare. I feel ashamed of what Japanese troops did then."

 

The Wang's ancestral temple in the Chongshan Village of Yiwu was made an exhibition hall by 75-year-old Wang Peigen, who was in the 34th generation according to the family tree.

 

In August, Japanese historian Makoto Ueda found from the 47 books of family tree that 1,161 people in Yiwu including 404 villagers in Chongshan, or one third of the village's population then, were killed by the plague in 1942. Wang Peigen managed a narrow escape.

 

"That part of history should be remembered by all our descendants without distortion," said the old man. The temple now has 293 pictures of the war with long captions written in Chinese, English and Japanese.

 

Genki Nakamura visited the temple a month ago, and this time he brought his colleagues from eight counties in Kyushu, namely Nagasaki, Fukuoka, Kagoshima, Saga, Kumamoto, Oita, Okinawa and Miyazaki.

 

"The Japanese leader should face up and reflect on the history of the aggression," said Yoshinari Akashi, head of the Kyushu Education Labor Union Delegation for Cultural Exchange.

 

Akashi noted that in Japan, many people even some experts still have vague idea of the aggression. He planned to give lectures to the over 60,000 teachers about the trip and suggest adding to the Japanese history textbooks the part of germ warfare in China, which victimized over 270,000 Chinese people between 1931 and 1945.

 

Meanwhile, Nakamura expressed his confidence in the Sino-Japanese friendship in the eve of Japanese Prime Minister-in-waiting Shinzo Abe's taking office, although, he noted, Junichiro Koizumi has repeatedly hurt Chinese people's feelings with his visit to the Yasukuni Shrine.

 

"In the history, the two countries got along quite well with each other in most of the time," he said, "I believe that we shall maintain this friendship after properly settling historical problems."

 

(Xinhua News Agency September 25, 2006)