When Ha Menghe came home, everyone was dead. On a little television screen hung above a reconstruction of his house in Nanjing, the bearded old man recalls how as a young boy in 1937 he found the bodies of several relatives and a tenant family shot, raped or stabbed by invading Japanese soldiers during their occupation of what was then the Chinese capital.
The exhibit at the city’s memorial to victims of the Nanjing massacre illustrates the sore at the heart of relations between China and Japan.
Memories of the Japanese invasion and the cruelty of Japanese troops, kept alive by decades of nationalist propaganda by China’s ruling Communist party, have fostered deep-rooted antipathy towards Japan among Chinese people.