China commemorates National Memorial Day for victims of Nanjing Massacre

By Efe Ozkan

ISTANBUL (AA) – The Chinese national flag was lowered to half-mast on Friday to mark National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre.

Thousands of people dressed in black gathered in Nanjing, east China's Jiangsu province, with white flowers pinned to their chests, to participate in the memorial ceremony, as sirens began to blare at 10:01 a.m. local time (0201GMT), with drivers stopping their vehicles, honking in unison, and pedestrians pausing to observe a moment of silence in memory of the victims, according to Xinhua news agency.

The Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre, which is located at the massacre victims' burial site, opened to the public in 1985.

Since becoming the main venue for the national memorial ceremony in 2014, the hall has received approximately 5 million visitors per year. This year alone, 125,278 comments were received, with a daily average of more than 400.

Since 2014, China has dedicated Dec. 13 as a national memorial day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the day when Japanese troops captured Nanjing on Dec. 13, 1937, the Chinese republic's capital at the time.

Japan continues to deny that such a massacre occurred, although much of the world has long accepted it, despite varying estimates of how many people were killed.

In October 2015, UNESCO accepted Chinese documents supporting claims of Japanese “atrocities” in Nanjing in its Memory of the World register.