The city of Nanjing is not as well-known outside of China as it perhaps deserves to be: a city of 10 million people and a former capital, it falls into the sizable ranks of the second-tier largely unknown cities. This tour of the Gulou district was given by a Scottish postgraduate student of Chinese art who lives in the area.
On a generously warm Monday morning in April, four of us assembled outside of Xuanwumen metro station and made our way from point to point. The locations we stopped at were generally buildings of historical importance. Surrounding these sites, however, was the usual clutter of Chinese city streets: advertising, infrastructure from a bygone age and the ubiquitous shared bikes. These historical buildings are not necessarily well preserved, indeed some are run down and slowly crumbling. We passed an old man peeing against the side of the the former foreign ministry.
The tour was focussed on early 20th century history and more specifically on the brief period of time between 1928 and 1937 when Nanjing was once again the capital of China. This could have been a real political can of worms but we were more flirting with the subject than giving a pointed critical perspective upon it.
And this was probably a wise choice since the vast majority of English speaking visitors simply require a Nanjing 101 introduction. Still, knowing what I do, I would have enjoyed a particular take upon the material rather than the presentation of the most consensual aspects of it.
One of our group turned out to be a historian and long term resident of Nanjing. He was gracious enough not to turn this into a tour with two competing guides, something I witnessed in East London a few years ago. This was one of the many moments we were handed out cards with pictures of republican era politicians.
When we stepped away from the important sites and looked at this wall, which sports pictures of the neighborhood's architecture, the tour took a different direction. This was the one moment we talked about how contemporary politics had a role to play in shaping an indifference bordering on neglect of the area's history. We were touring the former institutions of state of the KMT, the rivals to the communists, and this was a history that was not politically expedient. Indeed Nanjing remains the, in name only, capital of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and so this tour would never be given in this sort of form in Chinese. As small-scale tourism for foreigners it could be tolerated but if it were given in Chinese there would be too much political investment in its contents to allow it much freedom to deviate from the party line.
In the local tourism centre, basically a lonely room with a scale model of the neighborhood, it was possible to gaze over the district once again. The model looked so much more elegant than the actual streets, as often happens. Looking over this model of the Gulou district gives me the idea of a tour that utilises the Droste effect. I can imagine a tour that represents itself within the tour, and that representation in turn contains its own image of itself. Such a tour has a wicked potential for self-conscious commentary. Having met a VR specialist last week and heard about some of the current possibilities, this is not as fanciful a notion as it may seem. That would indeed be a tour of tours - a tour in which all of the tours would have to appear superficially identical while the commentary framing them would be free to roam wild.
When I learnt that Dublin Cityscape offers a circular bus tour of the city that is almost half the price of their main competitor, I was immediately sold, which maybe earns me the title of Dublin Cheapskate. We piled aboard at St Patricks Cathedral and took to the top deck. This first part of the route turned out to be a particularly desolate stretch; public housing in a state of mild decay, empty plots abandoned to weeds and tedious corner shops selling a predictable arsenal of goods with which to assault body and mind. To compensate for this, the driver sang us a song about a fair Dublin lady. He sang like... a bus driver.
Here is the bus's route, shown in green, which sort of resembles a bug with two antenna pointing out to the left. There were some deals thrown in at stops along the way, one them being a €1 discount on entry to the rapidly approaching Guinness Storehouse. It was a little too early in the day and we were not even 30 minutes into this two and a half hour bus tour. Another time.
Viewed from the top deck of the bus, the city often appeared very ordinary; a mish-mash of unspectacular buildings hosting a chaotic assortment of business and people. There was no obvious magic, it looked much like a middling British city just about keeping its head above water. This first impression of Dublin lacking in style did change over time and once the eyes adjusted and I learnt more about the city's substance, the place grew on me. That process took more time than the two and half hours of the bus ride, however. Because this was a relatively long tour that included more than a few B-list locations, it inevitably showed a more flat and realistic portrait of the city.
It would be unfair to say that the tour was uniformly mundane, however, it did also include the formal side of the city such as the official residence of the president, even if it was only seen from afar. The driver's stories and jokes were considerably better than his singling and he did include a joke about the building's current resident, the diminutive Michael Higgins.
After what seemed like an age spinning around interminable suburbs, we finally came to the city centre. Actually, it was an age of driving up and down grey streets that was lightened up with some creative nicknames for places and monuments, the best being "the floozie in the jacuzzi". The one topic he kept returning to was the Easter Rising of 1916 which lead to the country's subsequent independence. As this year marked the 100th anniversary of this event that was to become the modern state's foundation story, it was something very much in the air. The General Post Office played a central role in the rising and we heard much of the fate of the leaders, executed by the British Army.
Time was ticking and we made a lunch stop to take advantage of a two for the price of one meal promotion that come with the tour. This was also the opportunity to try a drop of the iconic beverage and assert that it is much better drank locally. It was a fine pint but I must say I have also tasted great Guinness outside of Ireland. I rather think this aura of authenticity, drinking at the source, so to speak, is a little exaggerated. Yes I appreciate that the general standard is probably higher over here but there is also an element of exclusivity in saying you have travelled and sampled rather than just stumbling round the corner to your usual dumb local in Hounslow. Whether it be national pride or touristic kudos, there is every reason to continue to assert Guinness is better in Dublin because those who have not tried it are in no position to refute the claim. So I should rephrase my opinion: it was a superb pint, so much better than anything back home.
On the subject of beer, hopping abroad the service once again and driving on, our new driver pointed out the Dublin Convention Centre which, he said, looked like a giant can of beer being held to the mouth. If that is the product of an alcoholic imagination, I must also share one with him, it does fit.
The new driver continued more or less where the old one left off with the Easter Uprising, a narrative that was reinforced everywhere I looked. I read an interesting article How does Dublin remember? that makes the point that the manner of the remembrance is very much a reflection of the contingencies of the present. Apparently, until quite recently, the 1916 guided tours where very niche and given almost exclusively to tourists. That has changed with the implementation of the peace process in the north and 1916 less associated with an ongoing armed conflict. A noticeable absence in the narrative, however, was the Irish Civil War which followed independence, as that, presumably, could still be divisive. The Ken Loach film The Wind That Shakes The Barley is set in that period and is centred around the question of, what sort of state were the Irish rebels fighting for. It's well worth watching if, like me, your history classes at school studiously ignored this important period of Irish and British history. Not the final word, but a good place to start.
The day was wearing on and I spied one of the company's employees in the depths of a mid-afternoon lull. I remember that feeling only too well from countless summer jobs that were a character-building blot on my teenage years.
The bus stopped beside Trinity College and while waiting this song, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, played through the sound system. I heard it afresh and, for the first time, made a connection between Irish soldiers (then part of the British army) fighting in the 1st World War and the battle for independence that had begun back home in Ireland. That is a connection not in the original song by Eric Bogle but is a new layer that comes out in this cover of it by The Dubliners. Ronnie Drew's voice is well-matched with this song and I'm guessing his is the voice that bus drivers aspire to, a seemingly artless art that is, of course, very difficult to actually produce.
And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore. They're tired old heroes from a forgotten war.
And the young people ask, what are they marching for? And I ask myself the same question.
There is only so many hours you can spend viewing a new city from the top of a bus and it was high time to continue on foot. We pulled up beside a very louche statue of Oscar Wilde and shortly afterwards spilled out onto the street. The driver had mentioned the literary greats and how they were celebrated in the Dublin Writers Museum. When I stopped to think about it, however, they all left Dublin. I was already familiar with this phenomenon coming from the city of Portsmouth which tries to claim Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as its own on, I should add, considerably more tenuous grounds. Nonetheless, the fact that Wilde, Shaw, Joyce and Beckett all left the city in order to make their names, is not a side issue. For all the Bloom's Day celebrations that have become a part of the city's calendar, those who stayed and those who came are, I would suggest, the city's greatest literary heritage.
And so off the bus and into Temple Bar we strode where yet another version of the authentic Dublin was on display. I daresay if I lived in the city I'd avoid the area like the plague because of the tourists, junkies and high prices. That said, unattractive though it may be, it certainly was a spectacle and might well be, for many visitors, the city's definitive one. Which sort of authenticity did I want? All of them, I'd greedily assert, and more besides. Two days was not enough.
The York Ghost Hunt is just one of several ghosts tours that ply their trade up down the city's nighttime streets and alleyways. I stumbled across it during the day, noticing the guide drumming up business around the evening's starting point, the wonderfully named street, The Shambles. Little did I know there were so many competing tours in town or that the one I was to take had had been attached in the local paper for "making a total mockery out of a beautiful and well established style of walk”. This war between competing ghost tours of York seemed to revolve around 'my' ghost hunt accepting a hen night carrying a giant inflatable phallus on the tour. Having spent a few days in York, I can see how that could happen.
Come the appointed hour, our guide arrived in vintage undertakers garb and took cash from the large crowd that had gathered. Standing on a small set of steps, he spelt out what the tour would be in his slow, precise delivery. It became immediately clear that this tour was not going to chill or haunt, it was going to be played for laughs. He dragged in a Canadian volunteer to play the fall guy and we were off.
The complaint in the local paper, that this tour "makes a mockery" of ghost tours is more or less true, but this is clearly done by design. In a sense, this isn't really a ghost tour at all, it is a comedy show that uses the form of the ghost tour but, in another way, he did manage to tell the story of some of York's most famous haunted sites so it remains, first and foremost, a ghost tour. Somehow, ghost tours have something inherently ridiculous about them and for them to receive this treatment is not so shocking. If this were a tour of a war memorial it would be a different story: people would, ironically, be up in arms.
Although billed as a 'ghost hunt' there was no sense of this search taking place in the present tense. We were following a tour that felt like it had been given a great many times before and honed to extract the most laughs. Here it reminded me of Bizarre Bath, another popular comedy tour in an historic British city. I would have quite liked to have gone on a genuine open-ended hunt on which we didn't know where we would finish and might just as likely find ourselves in a KFC as a graveyard. But no, no self-respecting ghost would be seen dead in a fast food outlet. We instead followed a spectral topography: a 15th century townhouse, the steps of the famous York Minster and a medieval alleyway. One of the exciting things about history is its spatial anarchy: Richard III's body was found in a municipal car-park in Leicester. Here, however, everything went to support an idea of the city and its sites that was essentially touristic in origin. That should be no surprise since this is a show for tourists.
With the light now failing, it became difficult to capture any more pictures of the tour. There is however a clip on Youtube that gives a good flavour of the York Ghost Hunt.
We ended the tour with the story of a gruesome child murderer after which the crowd drifted off in all directions, none the wiser but entertained for an hour or so. The jokes were often crude but never became obscene, this remained a family event. To return the question of whether of not it is appropriate to parody a ghost tour, I have to conclude that it is. Most ghost tours already include some self-conscious comedy because a completely serious ghost hunt would probably come over as cranky. Where this tour differs from the others is that it looks at ghost tours primarily as content to be ridiculed, and the form as a very handy hook upon which to hang the show and sell it to a mass audience. This formula is portable in space and genre and it might even be a good a thing to have one or two jokers in the pack, like this, in order to keep the more conventional tours on their toes. I'd caution against the idea of a 'good old days' when tours played by the rules; formats evolve and have to stay relevant to the public, who vote with their feet. I'd be perfectly happy if all the city's comedians decided to leave the bars and clubs and make their shows on the street instead. That is not likely to happen and this will remain a speciality dish that still leaves more than enough space for serious tours, if such a thing still exists and is not itself a phantom.
I have noticed that there are Jewish history tours in many cities across Europe and I have been meaning to take one of them for a while to see what they are like. For one reason or another I never got round to it but did instead recently discover that there was one in Shanghai. I never realised that the city had a significant Jewish history so, rather than discovering the Jewish history of Paris, Prague or Porto, it was to China's most populous city Shanghai that I turned.
I found it amusing that when I stepped inside I was asked to wear an elasticated plastic bag around my shoes. The reason given was to keep the place clean but, since I have not had this request in other museums, I began asking myself whether it was because the building was a former synagogue. Lost in such speculation, I didn't precisely catch what the guide was trying to tell my group. I was on the English language tour and my group mostly consisted of elderly Jewish American who had come on a Smithsonian Journeys package tour of China. Upstairs, another group was on the Chinese tour.
On this metal wall outside were the names of the Shanghai Jews as recorded in the city register. I saw two American men studying it carefully, looking for the names of family members. They were clearly moved when they found one. Our guide, however, had no obvious Jewish ancestry. He did, however, have a keen interest in Jewish history and culture and while he had an odd accent, even by Chinese standards, his English was good and he could tell the story with some precision and charm.
Stepping into the modern museum, we watched a grainy video and were then shown around the exhibits. We touched upon this one about Ho Feng Shan who our guide dubbed 'the Chinese Schindler'. It seems he had a particularly vivid life and there was only time time to hear about his role in issuing a large number of exit visas permitting Jews in Austria to escape to Shanghai. His actions were not officially recognised in his lifetime, indeed he fell out with the ROC government who denied him his pension over a dispute he claimed was politically motivated. Settling in California, it was only after he died that he was publicly thanked and his wartime actions held up first by Israel and then, interestingly, by the PRC. At least, that is how the history is told here. An interesting candidate for a bio-pic, I would say.
The guide stopped to show us this map of the different routes Jews took to come to Shanghai. Because the museum contained so much material, when explanations were given at all, they were often somewhat rushed in order to keep the tour under an hour in length. This meant I did not appreciate until later that different Jewish groups had been settling in the city for some period of time before the war and there existed stratification amongst them.
This picture of the Israeli Prime Minister put a face on something I had been increasingly feeling through the tour. Namely, that in order to understand this museum it was important to understand the processes by which it came about and to ask whether it served any purposes in addition to that of remembrance. The narrative of the Shanghai Jews, while known to some, was not celebrated until fairly recently. A number of things had to happen to thaw what were not immediately warm relations between the states of Israeliand the PRC, created in 1948 and 1949 respectively, in order for this episode of history to be given the embassy treatment. In China that would be the process of political and economic reform from the 80s onwards. In Shanghai, its relative calm during the political turbulence of 1989combined with the more recent taking stock of and promotion of the city's heritage, must figure too. As for the Israeli side, I know less, though there are, apparently, early movements afoot in transforming Hongkou into a 'new Xintiandi' with Israeli investment. Whether these financial relations are simply the fruits of improved diplomatic relations and a shared history or are in some way the motor for political engagement and cultural diplomacy, is difficult to say.
This is the short video Xie Xie Shanghai that was made in 2015 and which features Benjamin Netanyahu, amongst others, saying thank you to the city for providing Jewish refugees shelter during the war. The video is curious in that it mixes a political message with tourist aesthetics. The beach and bar scenes come straight out of a 'Visit Israel' promotional video and is another example of the tourist gaze exceeding itself and finding its way, now, into state level diplomacy.
The top floor of the museum was where Shanghai's Jewish history was put into the service of political education. Most notable was this educational video (chapter 4) that contrasted Western thought with Chinese thought. Western thought was characterised as conquering nature and as the science of evolution, which slid effortlessly into Nazism, while Chinese thought centred upon living in harmony with nature. Confucian values were attributed to the Jewish American politician Michael Blumenthal, values that rubbed off on him during the time he grew up a refugee in Shanghai. Essentially, anything positive was linked to traditional Chinese culture while anything negative was of Western origin.I had the impression that whoever produced the video was not used to having to defend their opinions in any sort of open debate. If they had, they would have had to have come up with something a bit more refined and robust. In the UK such a video would simply be laughed at then ignored but here it passes for normal.
The museum is today's focal point to the Jewish heritage of Hongkou, but the neighbourhood also has a walking route taking in other historic sites, too. There was not so much to see and a guide would have helped to bring the otherwise blank addresses to life. Disturbingly, a series of public artworks on the side of the street commemorating the area's Jewish heritage, had been slashed. This one shows the youthful American artist Peter Max, being taught to paint. Who did this, or why it happened, I have no idea. There is no significant history of anti-Semitism in Shanghai, as far as I am aware, but there is more to this story than my brief tour could reveal.
Final stop was The White Horse Cafe, a reconstruction of a Jewish cafe that used to do business nearby. The place was unusual not only on account of the man inexplicably crashed out on the lawn outside, but also because it was a European-style cafe run by and for Chinese customers. I should be used to this concept by now as we have had French-themed cafe chains in the UK, such as Cafe Rouge, for a while. I seem to remember that last time I went to a Cafe Rouge (a rare event) they had employed some foreign students as their waiters, but I also recall that the whole place felt like a protracted and ever so slightly embarrassing fancy dress party. White Horse Cafe had the same vibe. Here, this game was augmented by an exhibition upstairs about Polish Catholics saving Jews. The exhibition was sponsored by a southern Polish regional governmental body, an area trying to establish connections in Shanghai on the back of the Jewish Refugee Museum. While the story that the exhibition panels recounted was no doubt true, the whole thing smacked just a little too obviously of political opportunism to be taken entirely at face value.
The Amsterdam Free Walking Tour is one that is heavily promoted online to the extent that it will probably be the first one you'll see displayed if you search for Amsterdam tours. That's because it's run by a big player in the guided tour business, that's to say, by a company that is running tours right across Europe. There was such a large crowd assembled on the morning I arrived, we were divided into no fewer than eight separate groups with some of the groups for English speakers and some Spanish. It was an impressive operation, but a tour is still only as good as the individual guide, so how is their walking tour?
The tour is a three-hour walk around the city-centre with a focus on history. Our guide was a Dutch man with a loud voice.
He took us to the Red Light District and here he explained its history before heading onto the Dutch East India Company, birthplace of modern capitalism, or so he said. He seemed to keep on saying 'fuck' a lot. This was not a family tour.
As the tour went on there was a subtle shift in the way he gave it. At first he played the part of the loud, funny, Dutch young man. With time, however, he became slightly less funny and slightly quieter. The shift was not huge but it was noticeable. It felt as if he were playing a character at the beginning that was not precisely him but which was instead what the tourists wanted to see or, more to the point, the role that the company told him to play.
I also had the feeling he had been giving the tour just a bit too frequently. Every now and then he would forget what he was saying mid-sentence and go into auto-pilot. This is the nightmare moment for a guide: when you start waffling. He would usually catch himself quite quickly and we'd see just a second of him searching for his words. That second, when his guard was down, when he was not in character but really just himself, was something I started to quite enjoy watching out for. I had the feeling that this was when the tour was hitting against something solid.
The tour was advertised as a free walking tour but it was not free in the sense of the free walking tours of Bath, which the guides refuse to take money for. This was free in the sense that you are meant to pay as much for it as you feel it is worth. What's more, I also spent 3 euros reserving my place online which I discovered, when I arrived at the start point, was unnecessary since most people just showed up without reserving. While it is still a popular and appreciated service, it might be better not to call it 'free'. Indeed during the interval in the tour, taken a city-centre cafe, there is some concentrated business with the selling of other tours and tickets onto the tourists. You can say this is all a part of the service of guiding people; they do need tips and advice on what to do and see after all. The thing is, this is not disinterested advice, the tips invariably gravitate towards companies and services with which the guides company has a business relation with. At one point in the tour the guide says the most important reason behind Amsterdam's tolerance was an almost exclusive focus on one question, "does it make money?" This tour company has a strategy in place that does indeed make money and it does so by drawing people in, particularly young people, with the label of 'free', and to then use the trust that is generated through the tour and turn that trust into euros. I also heard, from a different source, that the company works by charging the guides 2 or 3 euros for each of the tourists who start their tour. In this way the guide is under pressure to maximise the tips they get from the tourists and this shows in the way he is constantly pumping us and building up to the collection at the end. For a 'free' tour there was a conspicuously large amount of talk amount money.
Beijing has its tourist sights, and I've seen most of the major ones, one way or another, by now. However, when I read that there was a museum I had not yet visited and that it had an audio guide, I needed no further encouragement. OK so the museum turned out to be the anti-Japanese museum which is more a political place than a standard tourist place but no problem, that's what this blog is for. I was hooked. Getting to this museum proved to be a minor challenge as it is located in an out of the way spot far from any subway stations on the West 5th ring road. Although Beijing is a capital city and has its international community, it's somewhat localised and this area was clearly well off that map.
Parked outside of the Museum of the War of Chinese People's Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were clusters of black cars, the type synonymous with Communist Party officials and 'don't give a fuck' drivers. The museum's name hardly rolls of the tongue but each part of it is there for a reason, as I was to discover. Passing through the airport style security at the entrance, I was asked to show ID and when the woman at the desk realised I could speak a bit of Chinese she was quite friendly and handed me a free ticket. I'm guessing they don't see many foreign visitors here outside of political guests invited for formal occasions.
I rented one of the audio handsets from the information desk where two ladies were drinking tea. The audio tour was very formal in the sense that the woman speaking gave absolutelynothing of herself. It sounded like the script had been written by an official historian and her job was simply to deliver the message over discrete Chinese elevator music. Her English was passable but she had a strong accent and broken rhythm which made for a monotonous commentary. Sometimes the accumulation of dates, names and numbers can have a hypnotic effect beating the listener into submission but this audio tour didn't even achieve that, it simply banalised the material. Once in a while new sentences had been dropped into the pre-existing recording but they had not managed to do this smoothly so these words popped out and drew attention to themselves.
There were lots of maps and displays of war memorabilia; the most popular items proved to be the guns.
A striking thing about the period photos was that there was one that looked quite unlike any of the others. Whereas the rest were grainy photographs, snapshots salvaged from the past, this one looked like it had been photoshopped just a little too energetically.
The staff, who outnumbered the visitors to the museum, wore a variety of uniforms: many of the men looked more like soldiers than museum attendants while the women looked like police clerks. What they had in common was they pretty much all looked utterly bored. I became interested in observing how the different members of staff seemed to cope with the challenge of working in such a sleepy environment. There were some who appeared bored in a very stoic professional way displaying a degree of dignity and gravitas. Others gathered in pairs and spent the afternoon stretching out a prolonged gossip while some sat alone playing with their phones their entire body sinking into a cloud of entropy. The lights in many of the rooms were set to a motion detector and only illuminated when someone entered. This got me playing with them looking for where the sensor was located and then sneaking up into the darkened room. I guess I was looking for things to entertain myself with and that is where the museum took me.
It was all too easy to switch off but then every now and then I'd see something that would jolt me back into the present such as this Japanese torture instrument put on display to show what life was like under occupation.
The translation of the audio tour and signage was neither good nor bad, it was simply heavy handed and while it had its Chinglish moments it managed to avoid any genuinely laugh out loud funny mistakes. For example, again and again the Japanese were described as wantonly doing this or that to the point that I could be pretty well be sure that she'd throw in at least one wantonly in each paragraph and I was practically waiting for her to say it. The texts more or less repeated the same information and expanded upon it with the odd spelling mistake and formatting error here and there but again, nothing drastic that took me seriously outside of the material.
20th Century Chinese history is anything but simple. The museum nonetheless offered an authoritative version of what happened. Not knowing the intricacies of it myself I had to simply wander around and soak up what was given. That said, I did notice a few things that left more questions than answers such as this photograph of Chiang Kai-shek with his wife and the American Joseph Stilwell. The commentary I had heard up to this point had stressed how the fight against the Japanese had been led by the Communist party and then, here was the a photo of the Americans who were assisting the fight against the Japanese, but they seemed to be closer with the other side in the Chinese Civil War, the republicans led by Chiang Kai-shek. Why were the Americans siding with them if they were the junior partner?
The narrative that was built up by the text was that the Republicans were in favour of compromising with the Japanese and some even formed a puppet state under Japanese rule. Other versions of the history exist, however, which counter this marginalising of the Republican role in fighting the Japanese such as that recently offered by Taiwanese Hao Bosun.
The issue I read underneath this was that the Civil War, interrupted by the Japanese invasion, was the defining period of the Chinese Communist Party and quite possibly the catalyst that brought them to power. The exhibition wanted to emphasise their legitimacy over the Kuomintang, who finally took shelter in Taiwan. The tricky thing here is that the issue of Taiwan is an ongoing sovereignty dispute with competing territorial claims and the exhibition was quite obviously laying out the PRC's official position on the matter. Looking at this I was reminded of the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London as that's a museum that ostensively sets out to show the reality of war but inevitably shows it from a very British perspective without even seeming to set out to do so. In that sense the place is not so obviously trying to make you believe a certain line, it is itself a manifestation of an underlying national ideology. I used to sometimes visit the IWM with a friend and we'd walk around and laugh at how old fashioned it was and imitate the retired soldiers who worked there as guides telling their war stories to whoever would listen. It wasn't possible to extract that sort of ironic humour out of this visit as this was not my country's vanity on show and besides, the very real mass killing resulting from the Japanese occupation was too present in the displays. Still, the question remained with me throughout, what are the purposes behind the creation of this museum that opened only in 1987?
The most prominent display was saved towards the end of the tour, the scene of Japan's surrender. The fact that this was life-sized and also featured as a painting was difficult not to miss.
There was a large notice on display reading "Chinese and Japanese People Should Be Friends Forever" and nearby it was this picture. This brought to the surface the second underlying tension in the museum: contemporary China-Japan relations. I have the impression that there remains widespread popular hostility towards the Japanese in China today, though that doesn't necessarily stop people buying their cars. While the government wants to maintain peaceful relations and restrict conflict to the realm of economics, peaceful relations are on certain terms and one of those is the full acknowledgment of Japanese culpability in the war. Alongside that are more worldly territorial claims, neither of which are currently being fully met. This museum was indeed the location for a presidential speech along those lines.
Anti-Japanese TV dramas are a big deal in China; if you switch on the TV at any time of the day and flick through the channels, chances are you'll find one. The wall shows many moments from these dramas, which most mainland Chinese visitors will be familiar with to a greater or lesser extent. I couldn't help but again make analogies with my own country which for a long time saturated itself in Second World War movies that reassured the British public that they were on the side of the righteous. I already felt that those movies were kind of stale to me when I was growing up in the 80s so I am surprised to see how prominent such movies and TV series still are here in China today. With such a long time having now elapsed between the war and our present day, animosities must be drawn mostly from movies and second hand experiences, rather than direct experience. As such, getting the story right is more important than ever as it is all too possible to stoke hatred for political expediency or even for plain entertainment value. With such divergent interests and narratives between China, Japan and Taiwan it is difficult to see where any sort of consensus can emerge. With this in mind I left the museum tuning over Nietzsche's line "there are no facts only interpretations". I later read the museum's website which claims it has received over 16.6 million visitors since opening, a number that I find hard to believe based on my visit where I saw about 10 visitors in the space of an hour and a half. I have the feeling they are quite happy to interpret facts very liberally here, and as such, a visit to this museum is most definitely educative, though I'm not sure the lessons I took away with me were those that were intended.
