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“But it says on the Internet that it’s 280 kuai.”

“Okay. Two-eighty.”

So easy!

Earlier that day, at a small newsstand, I’d stopped to purchase an umbrella. The proprietor typed 70 onto his calculator. I typed 30. Sold. True, the typical Nanjinite could probably get it for 6 yuan, but I took my triumphs where I could. I’d then found a cavernous restaurant where, beneath a ceiling of lanterns and birdcages, an elderly man plucked at a traditional instrument—toing, toing—while a woman dressed in silk sang old-school Chinese songs. The available dishes were wrapped in cellophane before an open kitchen, and I simply had to point at the dish that my heart desired, and the chef would rustle it up and deliver it to my table and stool, which was an excellent table and stool for a leprechaun but made me feel like Gulliver. As I inhaled a steaming bowl of clams, shrimps, and cabbage, and sipped at my Tsingtao, I thought, Gosh, I like it here. Nanjing is a fine city. But I had not come to Nanjing to enjoy myself; I had come to understand the serious antipathy for the Japanese that seems to lurk deep within the Chinese soul. Which is why I found myself the following morning in Jiang-dongmen, a neighborhood not far from the Yangtze River, and the site of the Memorial Hall for Compatriots Killed in the Nanjing Massacre.

And I was not alone. No. There were hundreds of schoolkids taking a field trip into the grim past. And grim it is. Right where we stood, thousands of people had been slain when the Japanese marched into Nanjing late in 1937. Their bones are even visible, jutting through mounds of dirt that are encased behind glass. Outside, on the Mourning Square, I had encountered a statue of Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking, a book published in 1998 that demonstrated that the Nanjing Massacre wasn’t simply one of those really, really bad things that happened during World War II, which had started a little earlier for China when Japan invaded during the summer of 1937. This was something far, far beyond bad. The Nanjing Massacre attained a level of murderous cruelty that makes you wonder not only what exactly went on inside the head of a Japanese soldier as he bayoneted a child but, more broader still, how it is that human beings can do this to other human beings. For six weeks, the Japanese brutally slaughtered 300,000 unarmed, defenseless people. It was a sadistic barbarism without equal. As Iris Chang recounted in her well-documented book, soldiers competed to see who could decapitate the greatest number of people in the shortest amount of time. Kill and count! Kill and count! they encouraged one another. With bayonets, they ripped open the stomachs of pregnant women, pulling out the fetuses. Tens of thousands of women were raped before they were killed. “Blood was splattered everywhere as if the heavens had been raining blood,” recalled one of the few survivors. And strangely, so much of it was photographed, not only by the handful of Western missionaries who had remained in Nanjing, but by the Japanese soldiers themselves. These photographs were now on display, and as I peered at these images of rape and murder over the heads of murmuring schoolkids, I wondered what exactly these images would do to the psyche of a child, because they were certainly messing with mine. Toward the end of the exhibit are photographs of the Japanese officers who oversaw the butchery, and I watched the kids dutifully jot their names down. They might not have had a beef with Japan earlier, but they certainly did now. And with good reason, of course. The commander in chief of Japanese forces in Nanjing, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, would go on to live out his days as a prosperous golf course developer.

It’s remarkable that relations between Japan and China today are as civil as they are. The two countries are bound together by mutual economic interests. The Japanese are major investors in China, and now that China has become an economic power in its own right, the Chinese government,