Click the card below to choose your character
A 16-year-old girl who was forced to be one of Comfort women of the Japanese military.
A Chinese officer who fought until the last moment and took his own life rather than be captured.
A 8-year-old girl who was picked out from a pile of the dead.
A journalist who was hunted by the Japanese army with a $150,000 bounty on his head.
A Japanese war orphan who was raised by four Chinese and had lived in China for fifteen years.
A Village in China 1941
The morning is still quiet when the soldiers arrive in your village. Japanese uniforms. Boots on dirt roads. Men shouting orders you don’t understand. Some neighbors are dragged away. Some never stand up again. You only know that the village you woke up in is no longer yours.
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A Village in China 1941
Women try to hide. Mothers cover their daughters. Grandmothers clutch the hands of girls too young to speak. But the soldiers don’t distinguish age. They pull women out of homes, one after another. Young women are taken away and are forced to be their Comfort women. And every scream feels like a warning meant for you.
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A Village in China 1941
A lot of people flee to the mountains. You run too—bare feet, heartbeat too loud. But you’re not fast enough.
A Japanese officer sees you. His shadow grows larger as he approaches. You are lifted off the ground. You land on dry hay. You want to scream, but fear presses your voice into silence.
You are sixteen. Still a child. But none of that matters here.
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A Village in China 1941
They move all of you to a stronghold in Calais, Lingao County. A place that smells of metal, earth, and fear.
Your days are long. You cut turf. You carry dirt. You help build the airfield the soldiers want. You are not allowed to stop.
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A Village in China 1941
At night, the barracks wake again. Officers. Soldiers. A line of footsteps coming closer.
Your body stops belonging to you. Time becomes a blur of labor and dread.
You wonder how long a body can survive without rest or mercy.
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A Village in China 1941
Half a month passes. One night, a scream cuts through the camp. The soldier watching you runs out instantly—pants half on, boots unfastened. You curl up, listening. Then you peek outside. Moonlight falls on a terrible scene: Villagers carry the body of a woman. Her hair tangled. Her skin so pale it looks like dusk has touched her forever. You freeze. A thought enters you quietly, like a knife slipping under the skin: If you stay, you will die next.
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A Village in China 1941
That same night, two soldiers finish with you and leave. You can hear their laughter as they walk away.
You wait. Wait until the footsteps fade. Until the night holds its breath. Then you move.
One step. Another. You slip into the darkness.
Branches scratch your arms. Grass cuts your feet. But you do not stop. Because every step is a step away from death. And for the first time in months, you choose where your body goes.
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A Village in China 1941
You run until the sky turns pale. Until birds begin to call. Until you collapse under a tree
and realize you are still alive.
Even years later, when you remember that night, your hands still shake. You know if they had caught you again, you would not be here to tell your story.
Survival has its own kind of pain. But it is still survival.
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Exit
A Village in China 1941
You run until the sky turns pale. Until birds begin to call. Until you collapse under a tree
and realize you are still alive.
Even years later, when you remember that night, your hands still shake. You know if they had caught you again, you would not be here to tell your story.
Survival has its own kind of pain. But it is still survival.
Exit
Nanjing 1937
You stand on the eastern wall of Nanjing on December 9, facing the direction from which the Japanese artillery has been advancing for days. The shockwaves of the bombardment run through the stones beneath your boots, but you remain on the parapet because the units at Guanghua Gate and Zhongshan Gate must see that their commanders are still present. Reports arrive continuously: enemy pressure is intensifying on both the eastern and southern fronts, and several defensive sectors are requesting immediate reinforcement. You issue orders without hesitation, transferring a battalion from Qingliang Mountain to support Guanghua Gate, understanding that every movement now is a calculation made under fire.
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Nanjing 1937
As the fighting continues into December 10, you receive word that the defense at Zhongshan Gate is becoming unstable. Without waiting for the Army to reorganize, you pull another military police battalion from the Ming Palace sector and send it to strengthen the gate. Inside the city, shells land at irregular intervals, and smoke drifts through the streets. You climb to vantage points along the walls, observing the Japanese formations pressing closer. You do this repeatedly, despite the intensity of shellfire, because you know that the sight of their commander on the city wall steadies the men more than any written order.
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Nanjing 1937
By December 12, the military police and police forces under your authority have suffered severe casualties. Some units are no longer at full strength; others are mixing with retreating soldiers from the regular Army. You begin directing the construction of internal barricades and street obstacles, expecting that close-quarters fighting will soon reach the urban core. Before these preparations can take shape, headquarters issues an abrupt instruction at 4 p.m., all military police units are to assemble at Huaiqiying. You understand immediately that this is the prelude to a general breakout. Since the military police can retreat in a disciplined formation but the police force cannot, you transfer command of the military police to Colonel Luo Yousheng and remain responsible for collecting police personnel scattered across the city.
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Nanjing 1937
The retreat that night does not resemble an organized movement. Regular Army units and remnants of other formations are converging toward Xiaguan by every available street, many without officers or clear orders. Fires burn through entire blocks, and the sound of sporadic gunfire echoes between buildings. You push forward with Deputy Chief Fang Chao, gathering small groups of policemen from intersections, alleyways, and damaged precinct buildings. Although the plan calls for you to reach Xiaguan by 10 p.m., the congestion, the wounded, the abandoned equipment, and the constant detours force your column to slow. By the time you step onto the riverfront, the sky has already begun to pale.
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Nanjing 1937
The riverbank at Xiaguan is in complete disorder. Soldiers from multiple units are trying to cross the Yangtze River at once, but there are not enough boats to carry even a fraction of them. Some vessels are already damaged; others are overloaded and begin to capsize soon after leaving shore. Those who cannot find space on a boat clutch planks, doors, or driftwood, attempting to paddle toward Pukou, only to slip beneath the current within minutes. You try to impose order where there is none—calming your policemen, assessing which boats might still be serviceable, and dividing the officers into small groups to board in shifts. Progress is slow, and in the end only Fang Chao and around 300 policemen manage to reach the opposite bank.
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Nanjing 1937
At 1:30 p.m. on December 13, Japanese units reach Xiaguan after breaking through the northern sector of Nanjing. The leading elements of the 16th Division and the 33rd Regiment begin firing toward the river, targeting soldiers who are still struggling to board or push off. Machine-gun fire sweeps across the water, and several boats are hit before they move far from shore. Realizing that the situation is deteriorating rapidly, you gather the men still around you—some policemen, some stragglers from Army units—and direct them back toward positions where they can fire on the advancing Japanese, not to reverse the tide but to delay it long enough for a few more Chinese soldiers to escape.
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Nanjing 1937
The counterattack you lead is improvised and limited, composed of men who have been fighting, retreating, and running for nearly four days. Ammunition is scarce, and some rifles have only a few rounds left. Nevertheless, the small force you assemble manages to slow the Japanese advance briefly. More soldiers, seeing the stand you are making, return from the river’s edge to join the line. For a short time, gunfire on both sides intensifies, rising above the clash of the riverfront. But the Japanese bring in additional companies, and the pressure on your position increases steadily. Meanwhile, across the river, Pukou is also under attack, eliminating the last hope of a coordinated crossing.
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Nanjing 1937
With escape now impossible and the Japanese closing in, your position becomes untenable. You have already been wounded in the fighting, though you cannot recall the exact moment it happened. The men around you are exhausted, and many have fallen where they stood. You have seen enough battle to know what happens to officers captured alive under these circumstances.
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Nanjing 1937
You check your pistol, confirm that one round remains, and understand what this final decision means. You look once more at the river, at the smoke drifting above Xiaguan, and at the scattered remnants of the forces you have tried to protect. Then you raise the pistol and end your life, choosing death over the certainty of humiliation and torture. You are forty-five years old.
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Nanjing 1937
You were born in Nanjing, in May 1929. At the time, you could not know that you would become one of only two survivors in a household of nine. You lived at No. 5, New Road Intersection, in the southern part of the city. The home belonged to a Muslim landlord named Ha. Three generations shared that space—your grandparents, your parents, your older sisters, your baby sister, and you. A full, crowded, ordinary home. Until the morning of December 13, 1937, when everything changed.
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Nanjing 1937
You remember the sound: fists striking the wooden door. Around thirty Japanese soldiers stood outside. When the landlord opened the door, he was shot immediately. Your father knelt, trying to stop the violence from spreading further into the house. He, too, was killed within seconds. Your mother, startled and desperate to protect the baby in her arms, hid under a table. Soldiers dragged her out. What followed was an assault you could not fully understand then, but whose reality stayed with you for life. When it ended, she no longer moved.
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Nanjing 1937
From the adjacent room came cries—your grandparents and your teenage sisters were there. You learned later how your grandparents tried to shield the two girls, only to be killed themselves. Your sisters, scarcely older than children, faced violations and violence that ended their lives. While this happened, you stayed under the quilt on the bed, trying to disappear into the shadows. The soldiers found you anyway. A bayonet struck your back—one blow, then another, then a third. You lost consciousness.
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Nanjing 1937
When you woke again, it was to the sound of your four-year-old sister crying. The room was cold and unfamiliar in its silence. You held her hand and called out for your mother, though you already knew she would not answer. All around you were the still forms of the people you had known your entire life. You were eight years old. She was four. And the two of you were alone.
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Nanjing 1937
You searched the house for anything that could keep you alive. In the kitchen, you found some leftover fried rice and hardened rice crusts. Water came from the tank. You lived like that—two children among the bodies of your family—for fourteen days. Outside, the city burned and shook, but inside the house time stopped.
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Nanjing 1937
Eventually, someone found you. A local charity known as the “Old People’s Hall” took you and your sister in. Your uncle tried to help as well, though poverty limited what he could offer. By the age of twelve, you were supporting yourself—selling vegetables, working as a servant, accepting whatever jobs might bring a little food, a little money, a little stability. All of it began on that single morning, when seven members of your family were killed, and only two children emerged from the silence that followed.
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Nanjing 1937
Years passed, but the memories never left you. Whenever you spoke about that day, tears came before you could stop them. The grief lived close to the surface, undimmed with time. Still, you chose to tell your story—not to provoke anger, but to record truth. To make sure it would not be forgotten. To ensure that your survival meant something.
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Real-Life Prototype
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Shanghai 1937
You arrive in the smoke before you realize you’re breathing it. The air carries the metallic smell of blood and the burnt sting of explosives. You think you’ve prepared yourself for war—its noise, its chaos—but nothing prepares you for how quiet it becomes after the bombs stop falling. On August 28, 1937, the Japanese military has hit Shanghai South Railway Station with more than twenty bombs. Civilians lie where they were running, where they were waiting, where they were simply trying to live. You lift your camera because it is the only thing you can lift without shaking.
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Shanghai 1937
You’re here because you’ve spent your whole life chasing images. As a boy you loved photography; in 1918 you studied it in America. You joined the ranks of news agencies and film companies—English, American, later Chinese. You crossed Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet as an explorer with a camera. But nothing from those years taught you how to walk between the broken bodies of mothers and sons on a train platform, how to keep your hands steady when the soles of your shoes become wet—too wet—and you look down and understand why.
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Shanghai 1937
You reload film. You force yourself to focus. The ruins around you tilt and sway with heat. A collapsed overpass, overturned train cars, torn suitcases spilling clothes that will never be worn again. And then you hear it—a single cry, sharp enough to split the silence. You turn, and there he is: a baby, barely one year old, covered in soot and blood, sitting alone on the shattered platform. He is crying in the way only a child can cry: with no idea that the world is ending.
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Shanghai 1937
You move toward him without thinking. His mother is dead on the tracks. His tiny body is burned by shrapnel. His older brother is bleeding, his father frantic. You do the only thing you can do: you take the photograph. You capture his face, his wounds, his grief. Not because you want to remember it, but because you know the world must. You work quickly—his brother, his father, the ruined station, the empty space where safety should be. Then you call the Red Cross.
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Shanghai 1937
Weeks later, the image travels farther than you ever have. On October 4, 1937, Life magazine publishes it on its cover. Chinese Baby. The world sees his tears, your lens, the violence that produced both. One hundred thirty-six million people look at the tiny boy on the broken tracks and feel the weight of what is happening in China. The League of Nations holds the photo up as evidence. The American Red Cross prints it on posters. The war no longer feels distant.
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Shanghai 1937
Then the denials begin. The Japanese military calls your work staged, fake, a trick. They insist the station was a military target. You know it wasn’t. They insist the ruins are arranged. You know they weren’t. They want the world to unsee the baby’s face, to unhear his cry. When that fails, they put a price on your head—$150,000 for your capture. You become a man hunted for telling the truth.
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Shanghai 1937
You live under other people’s names. You move through cities as if every building has eyes. You avoid dark corners, bright windows, crowded rooms. A Japanese businessman nearly kills you once, but a friend asks you to tea and you leave the room before the knife finds you. Another time, you’re arrested in a foreign concession, almost delivered into the hands of the men who want you dead. Local police intervene just in time. You keep breathing, but only just.
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Shanghai 1937
Eventually you escape to Hong Kong under British protection. You carry your family, your camera, and the knowledge that so many others never got to flee. After the war you start again—as MGM’s chief photographer in Taiwan. You film rituals, seasons, the ordinary flow of life that people in wartime forget is a miracle. You live until 1981. You die at 81 years old. But the baby lives too.
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Shanghai 1937
His name is Wang Jiasheng. He survives the station, the burns, the shrapnel. The Red Cross takes him to an orphanage; a Soviet couple raises him. He grows up working on the railways in Shijiazhuang, carrying the scars on his back. Decades later, in 1992, a Japanese journalist finds him. By then he is an old man. He carries the weight of a photograph he never chose to be in. When asked about it—about war, about memory—he answers quietly: “I hate war, but I hate forgetting even more.”
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Real-Life Prototype
Exit
Japan War Orphan
You are three years old in 1945 when Japan’s defeat causes the collapse of the settlement where your family has lived in Ning’an County, Northeast China. Your father is drafted during the final chaos and never returns, leaving your mother, your newborn sister, and you without stability. With food supplies failing during winter, your sister dies, and you become severely malnourished, unable to eat or stand.
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Japan War Orphan
Your mother, unable to keep you alive, asks a Chinese peddler to carry you in his shoulder baskets from house to house to seek someone willing to take you in. You regain consciousness in a place you do not recognize, surrounded by unfamiliar adults, and begin to cry. A woman named Sun Zhenqin steps out from the onlookers, takes you into her home, and assumes responsibility for keeping you alive.
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Japan War Orphan
She gives you the name Laifu and feeds you with coarse grain ground into thin porridge, monitoring your condition through the nights. Your health improves, and you begin to move, then run, and eventually take part in routine village activities. You speak the Northeastern dialect, follow village children in work and play, and grow up in conditions similar to theirs.
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Japan War Orphan
In 1955, a search effort led by the Red Cross Society of China identifies you as the child sought by your biological mother in Japan. She travels to the village requesting your return. Local officials allow you to decide. When positioned between your Japanese mother and Sun Zhenqin, you move toward the foster mother who raised you, and you remain in the village.
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Japan War Orphan
You continue school without discrimination from classmates or teachers. One teacher, Liang Zhijie, encourages you to study and to recognize the dual position you occupy between China and Japan. Over time, discussions with him influence your thinking about your eventual return.
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Japan War Orphan
In 1958, at age sixteen, you board one of the last repatriation ships for Japanese war orphans. Your foster mother stands at the village entrance and repeats instructions for you to take care of yourself. You leave China with the language, habits, and childhood environment shaped entirely in the village.
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Japan War Orphan
In Japan, you face difficulties adapting to local food, language usage, and daily customs. You find that your memories and speech patterns reflect your childhood in China more than the country you have legally returned to. You spend years adjusting while encountering social attitudes that avoid or soften discussions about wartime events.
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Japan War Orphan
You join the Japan–China Friendship Association and begin work at its headquarters. You participate in public efforts aimed at supporting Japan–China normalization and speak about your experiences during events where opposition or hostility is sometimes present. You continue this work across multiple decades.
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Japan War Orphan
In 2015, aware that many war orphans are aging and their histories risk being lost, you write an autobiography. You prepare drafts in libraries and cafés, complete the manuscript, and publish it in China. In Japan, after multiple rejections, you pay with your pension to print 500 copies and visit bookstores individually to promote the book.
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Japan War Orphan
Across your life, you document how you were abandoned during the collapse of the settler community, taken in by Chinese villagers, raised by several foster parents, and eventually repatriated to Japan. Your personal record becomes one example of the several thousand Japanese children who remained in China after the war and were cared for by local families.
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Real-Life Prototype
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Dead To Rights
Le Chen
Created on December 1, 2025
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Transcript
Click the card below to choose your character
A 16-year-old girl who was forced to be one of Comfort women of the Japanese military.
A Chinese officer who fought until the last moment and took his own life rather than be captured.
A 8-year-old girl who was picked out from a pile of the dead.
A journalist who was hunted by the Japanese army with a $150,000 bounty on his head.
A Japanese war orphan who was raised by four Chinese and had lived in China for fifteen years.
A Village in China 1941
The morning is still quiet when the soldiers arrive in your village. Japanese uniforms. Boots on dirt roads. Men shouting orders you don’t understand. Some neighbors are dragged away. Some never stand up again. You only know that the village you woke up in is no longer yours.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
Women try to hide. Mothers cover their daughters. Grandmothers clutch the hands of girls too young to speak. But the soldiers don’t distinguish age. They pull women out of homes, one after another. Young women are taken away and are forced to be their Comfort women. And every scream feels like a warning meant for you.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
A lot of people flee to the mountains. You run too—bare feet, heartbeat too loud. But you’re not fast enough. A Japanese officer sees you. His shadow grows larger as he approaches. You are lifted off the ground. You land on dry hay. You want to scream, but fear presses your voice into silence. You are sixteen. Still a child. But none of that matters here.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
They move all of you to a stronghold in Calais, Lingao County. A place that smells of metal, earth, and fear. Your days are long. You cut turf. You carry dirt. You help build the airfield the soldiers want. You are not allowed to stop.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
At night, the barracks wake again. Officers. Soldiers. A line of footsteps coming closer. Your body stops belonging to you. Time becomes a blur of labor and dread. You wonder how long a body can survive without rest or mercy.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
Half a month passes. One night, a scream cuts through the camp. The soldier watching you runs out instantly—pants half on, boots unfastened. You curl up, listening. Then you peek outside. Moonlight falls on a terrible scene: Villagers carry the body of a woman. Her hair tangled. Her skin so pale it looks like dusk has touched her forever. You freeze. A thought enters you quietly, like a knife slipping under the skin: If you stay, you will die next.
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Exit
A Village in China 1941
That same night, two soldiers finish with you and leave. You can hear their laughter as they walk away. You wait. Wait until the footsteps fade. Until the night holds its breath. Then you move. One step. Another. You slip into the darkness. Branches scratch your arms. Grass cuts your feet. But you do not stop. Because every step is a step away from death. And for the first time in months, you choose where your body goes.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
You run until the sky turns pale. Until birds begin to call. Until you collapse under a tree and realize you are still alive. Even years later, when you remember that night, your hands still shake. You know if they had caught you again, you would not be here to tell your story. Survival has its own kind of pain. But it is still survival.
Continue
Exit
A Village in China 1941
You run until the sky turns pale. Until birds begin to call. Until you collapse under a tree and realize you are still alive. Even years later, when you remember that night, your hands still shake. You know if they had caught you again, you would not be here to tell your story. Survival has its own kind of pain. But it is still survival.
Exit
Nanjing 1937
You stand on the eastern wall of Nanjing on December 9, facing the direction from which the Japanese artillery has been advancing for days. The shockwaves of the bombardment run through the stones beneath your boots, but you remain on the parapet because the units at Guanghua Gate and Zhongshan Gate must see that their commanders are still present. Reports arrive continuously: enemy pressure is intensifying on both the eastern and southern fronts, and several defensive sectors are requesting immediate reinforcement. You issue orders without hesitation, transferring a battalion from Qingliang Mountain to support Guanghua Gate, understanding that every movement now is a calculation made under fire.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
As the fighting continues into December 10, you receive word that the defense at Zhongshan Gate is becoming unstable. Without waiting for the Army to reorganize, you pull another military police battalion from the Ming Palace sector and send it to strengthen the gate. Inside the city, shells land at irregular intervals, and smoke drifts through the streets. You climb to vantage points along the walls, observing the Japanese formations pressing closer. You do this repeatedly, despite the intensity of shellfire, because you know that the sight of their commander on the city wall steadies the men more than any written order.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
By December 12, the military police and police forces under your authority have suffered severe casualties. Some units are no longer at full strength; others are mixing with retreating soldiers from the regular Army. You begin directing the construction of internal barricades and street obstacles, expecting that close-quarters fighting will soon reach the urban core. Before these preparations can take shape, headquarters issues an abrupt instruction at 4 p.m., all military police units are to assemble at Huaiqiying. You understand immediately that this is the prelude to a general breakout. Since the military police can retreat in a disciplined formation but the police force cannot, you transfer command of the military police to Colonel Luo Yousheng and remain responsible for collecting police personnel scattered across the city.
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Exit
Nanjing 1937
The retreat that night does not resemble an organized movement. Regular Army units and remnants of other formations are converging toward Xiaguan by every available street, many without officers or clear orders. Fires burn through entire blocks, and the sound of sporadic gunfire echoes between buildings. You push forward with Deputy Chief Fang Chao, gathering small groups of policemen from intersections, alleyways, and damaged precinct buildings. Although the plan calls for you to reach Xiaguan by 10 p.m., the congestion, the wounded, the abandoned equipment, and the constant detours force your column to slow. By the time you step onto the riverfront, the sky has already begun to pale.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
The riverbank at Xiaguan is in complete disorder. Soldiers from multiple units are trying to cross the Yangtze River at once, but there are not enough boats to carry even a fraction of them. Some vessels are already damaged; others are overloaded and begin to capsize soon after leaving shore. Those who cannot find space on a boat clutch planks, doors, or driftwood, attempting to paddle toward Pukou, only to slip beneath the current within minutes. You try to impose order where there is none—calming your policemen, assessing which boats might still be serviceable, and dividing the officers into small groups to board in shifts. Progress is slow, and in the end only Fang Chao and around 300 policemen manage to reach the opposite bank.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
At 1:30 p.m. on December 13, Japanese units reach Xiaguan after breaking through the northern sector of Nanjing. The leading elements of the 16th Division and the 33rd Regiment begin firing toward the river, targeting soldiers who are still struggling to board or push off. Machine-gun fire sweeps across the water, and several boats are hit before they move far from shore. Realizing that the situation is deteriorating rapidly, you gather the men still around you—some policemen, some stragglers from Army units—and direct them back toward positions where they can fire on the advancing Japanese, not to reverse the tide but to delay it long enough for a few more Chinese soldiers to escape.
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Exit
Nanjing 1937
The counterattack you lead is improvised and limited, composed of men who have been fighting, retreating, and running for nearly four days. Ammunition is scarce, and some rifles have only a few rounds left. Nevertheless, the small force you assemble manages to slow the Japanese advance briefly. More soldiers, seeing the stand you are making, return from the river’s edge to join the line. For a short time, gunfire on both sides intensifies, rising above the clash of the riverfront. But the Japanese bring in additional companies, and the pressure on your position increases steadily. Meanwhile, across the river, Pukou is also under attack, eliminating the last hope of a coordinated crossing.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
With escape now impossible and the Japanese closing in, your position becomes untenable. You have already been wounded in the fighting, though you cannot recall the exact moment it happened. The men around you are exhausted, and many have fallen where they stood. You have seen enough battle to know what happens to officers captured alive under these circumstances.
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Exit
Nanjing 1937
You check your pistol, confirm that one round remains, and understand what this final decision means. You look once more at the river, at the smoke drifting above Xiaguan, and at the scattered remnants of the forces you have tried to protect. Then you raise the pistol and end your life, choosing death over the certainty of humiliation and torture. You are forty-five years old.
Exit
Nanjing 1937
You were born in Nanjing, in May 1929. At the time, you could not know that you would become one of only two survivors in a household of nine. You lived at No. 5, New Road Intersection, in the southern part of the city. The home belonged to a Muslim landlord named Ha. Three generations shared that space—your grandparents, your parents, your older sisters, your baby sister, and you. A full, crowded, ordinary home. Until the morning of December 13, 1937, when everything changed.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
You remember the sound: fists striking the wooden door. Around thirty Japanese soldiers stood outside. When the landlord opened the door, he was shot immediately. Your father knelt, trying to stop the violence from spreading further into the house. He, too, was killed within seconds. Your mother, startled and desperate to protect the baby in her arms, hid under a table. Soldiers dragged her out. What followed was an assault you could not fully understand then, but whose reality stayed with you for life. When it ended, she no longer moved.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
From the adjacent room came cries—your grandparents and your teenage sisters were there. You learned later how your grandparents tried to shield the two girls, only to be killed themselves. Your sisters, scarcely older than children, faced violations and violence that ended their lives. While this happened, you stayed under the quilt on the bed, trying to disappear into the shadows. The soldiers found you anyway. A bayonet struck your back—one blow, then another, then a third. You lost consciousness.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
When you woke again, it was to the sound of your four-year-old sister crying. The room was cold and unfamiliar in its silence. You held her hand and called out for your mother, though you already knew she would not answer. All around you were the still forms of the people you had known your entire life. You were eight years old. She was four. And the two of you were alone.
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Exit
Nanjing 1937
You searched the house for anything that could keep you alive. In the kitchen, you found some leftover fried rice and hardened rice crusts. Water came from the tank. You lived like that—two children among the bodies of your family—for fourteen days. Outside, the city burned and shook, but inside the house time stopped.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
Eventually, someone found you. A local charity known as the “Old People’s Hall” took you and your sister in. Your uncle tried to help as well, though poverty limited what he could offer. By the age of twelve, you were supporting yourself—selling vegetables, working as a servant, accepting whatever jobs might bring a little food, a little money, a little stability. All of it began on that single morning, when seven members of your family were killed, and only two children emerged from the silence that followed.
Continue
Exit
Nanjing 1937
Years passed, but the memories never left you. Whenever you spoke about that day, tears came before you could stop them. The grief lived close to the surface, undimmed with time. Still, you chose to tell your story—not to provoke anger, but to record truth. To make sure it would not be forgotten. To ensure that your survival meant something.
Continue
Exit
Real-Life Prototype
Exit
Shanghai 1937
You arrive in the smoke before you realize you’re breathing it. The air carries the metallic smell of blood and the burnt sting of explosives. You think you’ve prepared yourself for war—its noise, its chaos—but nothing prepares you for how quiet it becomes after the bombs stop falling. On August 28, 1937, the Japanese military has hit Shanghai South Railway Station with more than twenty bombs. Civilians lie where they were running, where they were waiting, where they were simply trying to live. You lift your camera because it is the only thing you can lift without shaking.
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Shanghai 1937
You’re here because you’ve spent your whole life chasing images. As a boy you loved photography; in 1918 you studied it in America. You joined the ranks of news agencies and film companies—English, American, later Chinese. You crossed Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet as an explorer with a camera. But nothing from those years taught you how to walk between the broken bodies of mothers and sons on a train platform, how to keep your hands steady when the soles of your shoes become wet—too wet—and you look down and understand why.
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Shanghai 1937
You reload film. You force yourself to focus. The ruins around you tilt and sway with heat. A collapsed overpass, overturned train cars, torn suitcases spilling clothes that will never be worn again. And then you hear it—a single cry, sharp enough to split the silence. You turn, and there he is: a baby, barely one year old, covered in soot and blood, sitting alone on the shattered platform. He is crying in the way only a child can cry: with no idea that the world is ending.
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Shanghai 1937
You move toward him without thinking. His mother is dead on the tracks. His tiny body is burned by shrapnel. His older brother is bleeding, his father frantic. You do the only thing you can do: you take the photograph. You capture his face, his wounds, his grief. Not because you want to remember it, but because you know the world must. You work quickly—his brother, his father, the ruined station, the empty space where safety should be. Then you call the Red Cross.
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Shanghai 1937
Weeks later, the image travels farther than you ever have. On October 4, 1937, Life magazine publishes it on its cover. Chinese Baby. The world sees his tears, your lens, the violence that produced both. One hundred thirty-six million people look at the tiny boy on the broken tracks and feel the weight of what is happening in China. The League of Nations holds the photo up as evidence. The American Red Cross prints it on posters. The war no longer feels distant.
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Shanghai 1937
Then the denials begin. The Japanese military calls your work staged, fake, a trick. They insist the station was a military target. You know it wasn’t. They insist the ruins are arranged. You know they weren’t. They want the world to unsee the baby’s face, to unhear his cry. When that fails, they put a price on your head—$150,000 for your capture. You become a man hunted for telling the truth.
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Shanghai 1937
You live under other people’s names. You move through cities as if every building has eyes. You avoid dark corners, bright windows, crowded rooms. A Japanese businessman nearly kills you once, but a friend asks you to tea and you leave the room before the knife finds you. Another time, you’re arrested in a foreign concession, almost delivered into the hands of the men who want you dead. Local police intervene just in time. You keep breathing, but only just.
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Shanghai 1937
Eventually you escape to Hong Kong under British protection. You carry your family, your camera, and the knowledge that so many others never got to flee. After the war you start again—as MGM’s chief photographer in Taiwan. You film rituals, seasons, the ordinary flow of life that people in wartime forget is a miracle. You live until 1981. You die at 81 years old. But the baby lives too.
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Shanghai 1937
His name is Wang Jiasheng. He survives the station, the burns, the shrapnel. The Red Cross takes him to an orphanage; a Soviet couple raises him. He grows up working on the railways in Shijiazhuang, carrying the scars on his back. Decades later, in 1992, a Japanese journalist finds him. By then he is an old man. He carries the weight of a photograph he never chose to be in. When asked about it—about war, about memory—he answers quietly: “I hate war, but I hate forgetting even more.”
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Real-Life Prototype
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Japan War Orphan
You are three years old in 1945 when Japan’s defeat causes the collapse of the settlement where your family has lived in Ning’an County, Northeast China. Your father is drafted during the final chaos and never returns, leaving your mother, your newborn sister, and you without stability. With food supplies failing during winter, your sister dies, and you become severely malnourished, unable to eat or stand.
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Japan War Orphan
Your mother, unable to keep you alive, asks a Chinese peddler to carry you in his shoulder baskets from house to house to seek someone willing to take you in. You regain consciousness in a place you do not recognize, surrounded by unfamiliar adults, and begin to cry. A woman named Sun Zhenqin steps out from the onlookers, takes you into her home, and assumes responsibility for keeping you alive.
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Japan War Orphan
She gives you the name Laifu and feeds you with coarse grain ground into thin porridge, monitoring your condition through the nights. Your health improves, and you begin to move, then run, and eventually take part in routine village activities. You speak the Northeastern dialect, follow village children in work and play, and grow up in conditions similar to theirs.
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Japan War Orphan
In 1955, a search effort led by the Red Cross Society of China identifies you as the child sought by your biological mother in Japan. She travels to the village requesting your return. Local officials allow you to decide. When positioned between your Japanese mother and Sun Zhenqin, you move toward the foster mother who raised you, and you remain in the village.
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Japan War Orphan
You continue school without discrimination from classmates or teachers. One teacher, Liang Zhijie, encourages you to study and to recognize the dual position you occupy between China and Japan. Over time, discussions with him influence your thinking about your eventual return.
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Japan War Orphan
In 1958, at age sixteen, you board one of the last repatriation ships for Japanese war orphans. Your foster mother stands at the village entrance and repeats instructions for you to take care of yourself. You leave China with the language, habits, and childhood environment shaped entirely in the village.
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Japan War Orphan
In Japan, you face difficulties adapting to local food, language usage, and daily customs. You find that your memories and speech patterns reflect your childhood in China more than the country you have legally returned to. You spend years adjusting while encountering social attitudes that avoid or soften discussions about wartime events.
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Japan War Orphan
You join the Japan–China Friendship Association and begin work at its headquarters. You participate in public efforts aimed at supporting Japan–China normalization and speak about your experiences during events where opposition or hostility is sometimes present. You continue this work across multiple decades.
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Japan War Orphan
In 2015, aware that many war orphans are aging and their histories risk being lost, you write an autobiography. You prepare drafts in libraries and cafés, complete the manuscript, and publish it in China. In Japan, after multiple rejections, you pay with your pension to print 500 copies and visit bookstores individually to promote the book.
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Japan War Orphan
Across your life, you document how you were abandoned during the collapse of the settler community, taken in by Chinese villagers, raised by several foster parents, and eventually repatriated to Japan. Your personal record becomes one example of the several thousand Japanese children who remained in China after the war and were cared for by local families.
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Real-Life Prototype
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