Dec+13th,+1937

=Dec 13th, 1937=

I headed to a place of crime with my whirled heart. Today was my first time walking out of the operational headquarters after I got ill. The degree of murder and rape was actually subsided, but it was still evidently happening - Chinese people were still getting murdered by the hands of Japanese military soldiers.

Since it has been long after I walked outside, I had to depend myself on a cane that my wife made. Outside of the headquarter was so gray. I couldn’t find not only any happiness, but also any hope. It was a hopeless day at Nanking. The empty house and countless corpses on the ground...this was what I saw right after I stepped out from my place. I couldn’t believed that these were all done by humans. It was too barbaric and cruel. All these things happened while I was in bed. I couldn’t even cry- I was just astonished and disgusted. I walked into a house in which a soldier led, ignoring all the corpses.

In the tumbledown house there were two women having their hair seized by the Japanese soldiers. Tears were drooping from their eyes. They were shouting- like an animal- in Chinese but I couldn’t understand a word. But, obviously I could understand what had happened. I saw a dead woman’s body in front of me. This woman would have been their mother. This women embraced these crying girls with her warm temperature until about few minutes ago. As a mother of a family, I couldn’t imagine how she had felt seeing her girls being seized by the soldiers but couldn’t do anything because of the bullet going through her body.

I just looked around the room. When I did that, I could see a girl’s eye looking at me. Actually, it could have been a decoration of a clothes that was shiny. If I think of it now, I can’t really identify what I saw. However I thought I saw a girl’s eye, having to look at her family members getting killed and raped.

I walked closely to the closet. The soldiers were too busy handling the two girls. I put my hand on the handle. I wasn’t trying to kill her. As if I was in a trance, I just walked up to the closet.

General! One soldier called me. He said there was a telegram to me from the head officer. I seemed very important so I had to stop everything and go. When I stepped backwards, I stepped on something, and it was a rugged doll. Not pretty, but small and soft. It was already stepped by the soldiers so it was very dirty and muddy.

Suddenly, I thought of a doll that my daughter kept every single day. Every time- even when she was eating and sleeping- my daughter kept a rugged doll by her side. She loved the doll, because her name was carved on the doll. My wife handmade the doll for day and night for my daughter's birthday. What will they be doing right now? Are they okay? Is my daughter getting along with her friends? I haven’t been with them over a year. I haven’t seen my daughter growing and my wife aging. I was such a bad father and a husband.

I took the rugged doll with me when I left the house.