Testimonial of Carol Chen-Shea

Carol Chen-Shea
Adjunct Lecturer – Department of Foreign Languages and Literature
Queensborough Community College, Bayside, New York
and
Adjunct Lecturer – Center for Ethnic Studies
Manhattan Community College, Manhattan, New York
2015 Asia Study Tour Participant

I was honored to have been selected to participate in the 2015 Peace and Reconciliation Asia Study Tour. We had visited Shanghai, Nanjing, Harbin and Beijing to study various Japanese war crimes during WWII which impacted Chinese civilians till today and next generations. Japanese crimes of atrocity included massacre, sexual slavery, slave labor and physical brutality, besides biological and chemical warfare. This period of history is familiar to me since I was a teenager. Before the tour, I looked forward to witnessing the history.

This tour is an absolutely touching and genuine experience about the killing field of WWII in China, which is still denied today by the invader, Japan, and largely neglected by the world. Hence, you will not help asking million times if those imperial Japanese soldiers are human after we visited the exhibition of war record, listened to the scholars’ researches and met with those survivors and bereaved families? Who allowed those soldiers and how to influence them considering themselves justified with inhumane killing to the different nations? We really cannot imagine how human’s deepest evil is. It really need to be stopped through education, as people are still awaken with soft heart and sensible.

Such an educational tour is rewarding to all educators to understand the true WWII in Asia and the contribution by Chinese people’s resolute resistance to end WWII, because it tied up one million and twenty five thousand Japanese soldiers in China. The NJ-ALPHA program enhanced my determination that we as human beings need to condemn such inhumane and evil things to avoid the resurrection of imperialism and militarism to endanger Asia and world peace again! I plan to share my experiences to my students and the community to benefit from the knowledge I obtained on this tour.

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