A ten-year-old Japanese boy died from his wounds on Thursday morning after he was stabbed by a 44-year-old Chinese man in Shenzhen.
A ten-year-old Japanese boy died from his wounds on Thursday morning after he was stabbed by a 44-year-old Chinese man near a school in Shenzhen, China.
Wednesday was the anniversary of the 1931 Mukden Incident, a bomb attack on a Japanese-owned railway in China. The Japanese blamed Chinese nationalists for carrying out the attack, setting the stage for Imperial Japan to invade and occupy the area. Modern historians consider it possible that the Japanese army staged the railroad bombing as a pretext for invading China.
September 18 is a day of national remembrance in China and it is a day they do not remember fondly. Japan has been complaining about a rising tide of anti-Japanese sentiment on Chinese social media over the past few months, including incendiary posts from some major Chinese social media influencers.
“I actually did not know 18th September was this day for Chinese people to take revenge for things in the Second World War,” the grieving Japanese father of the murdered boy said on Thursday.
“I have lived here for seven years and did not know we need to be cautious for being Japanese while living in China,” he said.
The victim, accompanied by his Chinese mother, was on his way to classes at a school that serves the hundreds of Japanese families living in Shenzhen. The assault, which took place within 200 yards of the school, was extremely brutal. Rescuers tried to keep the boy alive with a heart massage as he bled from stab wounds to the abdomen.
The boy died in the hospital on Thursday morning after Chinese doctors “made every effort to save his life,” according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
