SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 9 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds from the Asian community including local overseas Chinese on Sunday mourned China's victims killed by imperial Japanese troops during World War II (WWII), calling for world peace for future generations.

The annual memorial event, Nanjing Ji (Remembrance of Nanjing Massacre), was held earlier in the day to honor over 300,000 Chinese people who were killed by invading Japanese troops in the Chinese city of Nanjing on Dec. 13, 1937, later remembered as the Nanjing Massacre. This year marks the 81st anniversary of the heinous crime committed by the Japanese military.

The Japanese forces also raped more than 20,000 Chinese women including teenage girls and perpetrated mass looting in the city in the six weeks after they captured Nanjing.

Jennifer Cheung, chair of the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition, one of the leading sponsors of the memorial activity, said the right-wing elements in Japan have been trying to deny the Nanjing Massacre and lie about history.

"But we in the United States will tell the truth ... and tell the world we will not forget what happened (more than eight decades ago), particularly making sure that our younger generations will learn about it," Cheung said.

The history of "this massacre cannot be forgotten in China and in the world. Because if the world forgets it, history will be repeated," she said.

Ying-Ying Chang, the mother of Iris Chang, the late famous Chinese American writer of the book "The Rape of Nanking," told Xinhua that Japan has not made an official apology to the Chinese victims and the Chinese people, and not faced up to this tragic episode in history.

"We must educate our younger generations about this history. If we don't let them know about it, no lessons would be learned," she said.

"We want world peace, not war, and we don't want to see such a tragedy happen again," Chang added.

"The past isn't past. The past is present. Sometimes it seems that wars are constant (in today's world) and we are always in a state of war ... because we don't remember it, because people try to whitewash what happened," Judith Mirkinson, president of the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, told an audience of more than 350 people who had gathered in downtown San Francisco to pay their respects to the victims of the Nanjing Massacre.

Chinese Deputy Consul to San Francisco Zou Yonghong said Sunday's memorial was of special significance, as it aimed to remember history and tell people to treasure peace.

"We are here to remember the victims killed 81 years ago not for the sake of passing hatred to the next generation, but for the purpose of taking history as a mirror, so that the historical tragedy would never happen again," Zou said.

Only when people learn lessons from the past, can peace be anticipated and a better future be sought after, she said.

An 85-year-old eyewitness to the Japanese war crime from China's northeast region attended the event to tell the audience about the bitter sufferings of his family at the hands of the Japanese aggressive forces.

The event was sponsored by a number of grassroots organizations from the Chinese, Japanese, Korean and various other communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Rape of Nanking Redress Coalition, the San Francisco Committee to Promote the Reunification of China, the Comfort Women Justice Coalition, and the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of Sino-Japanese War.