The Japanese Army, one million strong, has already conquered We have surrounded the city of Nanking... The Japanese Army shall show no mercy toward those who offer resistance, treating them with extreme severity, but shall harm neither innocent civilians nor Chinese military ^*ills" target="_blank" >to your troops on behalf of the Japanese Army. Open the gates to Nanking in a peaceful manner, and obey the [following instructions.

The Japanese awaited an answer. When no Chinese envoy had arrived by 1:00 p.m. the following day, General Matsui issued the command to take Nanjing by force. On December 12, after two days of Japanese attack, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Sheng-chi ordered his men to retreat. What followed was nothing short of chaos. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in a desperate attempt to blend in, and many others were shot in the back by their own comrades as they tried to flee. Those who actually made it outside the city walls fled north to the Yangtze, only to find that there were no vessels remaining to take them. Some then jumped into the wintry waters and drowned.

On December 13, the Japanese entered the walled city of Nanjing, virtually free of any military resistance.

Atrocities begin

Immediately after the city's fall, a group of foreign expatriates headed by John Rabe formed the 15-man International Committee on November 22 and drew up the Nanking Safety Zone in order to safeguard the lives of civilians in the city, where the population ran from 200,000 to 250,000. It is likely that the civilian death toll would have been much higher had this safe haven not been created. Rabe and American missionary Lewis S. C. Smythe, the secretary of the International Committee, who was also a professor of sociology at the University of Nanking, recorded atrocities of the Japanese troops and filed reports of complaints to the Japanese embassy.

Nanjing Hospital was the site of some of the most gruesome atrocities committed during the occupation. Bandages were torn from the flesh of the wounded, casts were smashed with clubs, and nurses were repeatedly raped.

Rape

Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night--one of the girls was but 12 years old....Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out "Ging ming! Ging ming!"--save our lives. (Minnie Vautrin's diary, Dec. 16, 1937)

It is a horrible story to relate; I know not where to begin nor to end. Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape: We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. (James McCallum, letter to his family, Dec. 19, 1937)

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that 20,000 (and perhaps up to 80,000) women were raped—their ages ranging from as young as seven to the elderly. Rapes were often performed in public during the day, sometimes in front of spouses or family members. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped. The women were then killed immediately after the rape, often by mutilation. According to some testimonies, other women were forced into military prostitution as comfort women. There are even stories of Japanese troops forcing families to commit acts of incest: sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers were forced to rape daughters. One pregnant woman who was gang-raped by Japanese soldiers gave birth only a few hours later; miraculously, the baby was perfectly healthy (Robert B. Edgerton, Warriors of the Rising Sun). Monks who had declared a life of celibacy were forced to rape women for the amusement of the Japanese. Instances of Chinese men being forced to commit sex with corpses were not unheard of. Any resistance would be met with summary executions. While the rape peaked immediately following the fall of the city, it continued for the duration of the Japanese occupation.

Murder

The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital. (Robert Wilson, letter to his family, Dec. 15)

They not only killed every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages.... Just the day before yesterday we saw a poor wretch killed very near the house where we are living. (John Magee, letter to his wife, Dec. 19)

They soldiers bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. (Robert Wilson, letter to his family, Dec. 18)

Immediately after the fall of the city, Japanese troops embarked on a frenzied search for former soldiers, in which thousands of young men were captured. Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned so their bodies would be carried down to Shanghai. Others were reportedly used for live bayonet practice. Decapitation was a popular method of killing, while more drastic practices include burning, nailing to trees, live burial, and hanging by the tongue. Some people were beaten to death. The Japanese also summarily executed many pedestrians on the streets, usually under the pretext that they might be soldiers disguised in civilian clothing.

Thousands were led away and mass-executed in an excavation known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch", a trench measuring about 300m long and 5m wide. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. However, most scholars and historians consider the number to be around 12,000 victims.

Women and children were not spared from the horrors of the massacres. Witnesses recall Japanese soldiers throwing babies into the air and catching them with their bayonets. Pregnant women were often the target of murder, as they would often be bayoneted in the belly, sometimes after rape. Many women were first brutally raped then killed.

Theft and arson

It is estimated that over one-third and as much as two-thirds of the city was destroyed as a result of arson. According to reports, Japanese troops torched newly-built government buildings as well as the homes of many civilians. There was considerable destruction to areas outside the city walls. Soldiers pillaged from the poor and the wealthy alike. The lack of resistance from Chinese troops and civilians in Nanjing meant that the Japanese soldiers were free to divy up the city's valuables as they saw fit. This resulted in the widespread looting and burglary. General Matsui Iwane was given an art collection worth $2,000,000 that was stolen from a Shanghai banker.

Death toll estimates

Hirota.gif|thumb|right|Manchester Guardian correspondent H.J. Timperley wrote this telegram, which was stopped by Japanese censors in Shanghai. It was forwarded to the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C. on January 17th, 1938, by Japanese foreign minister Kōki Hirota, where the transmission was intercepted and decoded by the Americans. "Since return (to) Shanghai (a) few days ago I investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese Army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts (of) reliable eye-witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility (is) beyond question afford convincing proof (that) Japanese Army behaved and (is) continuing (to) behave in (a) fashion reminiscent (of) Attila (and) his Huns. (Not) less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians slaughtered, many cases (in) cold blood."]] There is great debate as to the extent of the war atrocities in Nanjing, especially regarding estimates of the death toll. The issues involved in calculating the number of victims are largely based on the debatees' definitions of the geographical range and the duration of the event, as well as their definition of the "victims".

Range and duration

The most conservative viewpoint is that the geographical area of the incident should be limited to the few square kilometers of the city known as the Safety Zone, where the civilians gathered after the invasion. Many Japanese historians seized upon the fact that during Japanese invasion there were only 200,000–250,000 citizens in Nanjing as reported by John Rabe, to argue that the PRC's estimate of 300,000 deaths is a vast exaggeration.

However, many historians include a much larger area around the city. Including the Xiaguan district (the suburbs north of Nanjing city, about 31 square km in size) and other areas on the outskirts of the city, the population of greater Nanjing was running between 535,000 and 635,000 just prior to the Japanese occupation. Some historians also include six counties around Nanjing, known as the Nanjing Special Municipality.

The duration of the incident is naturally defined by its geography: the larger the area, the earlier the Japanese entered it, and therefore the longer the duration. The Battle of Nanking ended on December 13, when the divisions of the Japanese Army entered the walled city of Nanking. The Tokyo War Crime Tribunal defined the period of the massacre to the ensuing six weeks. More conservative estimates say the massacre started on December 14, when the troops entered the Safety Zone, and that it lasted for 6 weeks. Historians who define the Nanking Massacre as having started from the time the Japanese army entered Jiangsu province push the beginning of the massacre to around mid-November to early December (Suzhou fell on November 19), and stretch the end of the massacre to late March 1938. As a consequence, the number of victims put forward by these historians is, naturally, much greater than other, more conservative estimates.

Defining the victims

Another point of contention is the question of whom to count as the victims of the atrocities. All historians agree that numerous civilians were killed in Nanjing. Throughout the campaign in China, the Japanese army took few, if any, prisoners of war, and captured and surrendered Chinese soldiers were also summarily executed after combat. The army also executed many men whom they believed to be plain-clothed guerilla combatants hiding amongst civilian populations. It is unclear how many innocent civilians were wrongly accused and were dispatched in this manner.

While all historians agree that innocent civilians should be counted in the death toll of the massacre, different groups have different positions on the legitimacy of the following: soldiers killed during combat; surrendered/captured soldiers summarily executed after battle; plain-clothed guerilla combatants; plain-clothed soldiers hiding among civilians; civilians wrongly suspected of being guerilla combatants. Unfortunately, archival evidence, such as burial records, state only the number of bodies, and not to which group each of the dead belonged. Therefore, they provide no means to distinguish who was killed "legitimately" and "illegitimately". The debate continues.

Various estimates

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated in two (seemingly conflicting) reports that "over 200,000" and "over 100,000" civilians and prisoners of war were murdered during the first six weeks of the occupation. That number was based on burial records submitted by charitable organizations—including the Red Swastika Society and the Chung Shan Tang (Tsung Shan Tong)—the research done by Smythe, and some estimates given by survivors.

In 1947, at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, the verdict of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao—the commander of the 6th Division—quoted a figure of more than 300,000 dead. This estimate was made from burial records and eyewitness accounts. It concluded that some 190,000 were illegally executed at various execution sites and 150,000 were killed one-by-one. The death toll of 300,000 is the official estimate engraved on the stone wall at the entrance of the "Memorial Hall for Compatriot Victims of the Japanese Military's Nanking Massacre" in Nanjing.

Some modern Japanese historians, such as Kasahara Tokushi of Tsuru University and Fujiwara Akira, a professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University, take into account the entire Nanjing Special Municipality, which consisted of the walled city and its neighboring six counties, and have come up to an estimate of approximately 200,000 dead. Other Japanese historians, depending on their definition of the geographical and time duration of the killings, place the death toll on a much wider scale from 40,000 to 300,000. In China today most estimates of the Nanking Massacre range from 200,000 to 400,000, with no notable historian going below 100,000.

Historiography and debate

At present, both China and Japan have acknowledged the occurrence of wartime atrocities. However, disputes over the historical portrayal of these events have been at the root of continuing political tensions between China and Japan.

The widespread atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanjing were first reported to the world by the Westerners residing in the Nanjing Safety Zone. For instance, on January 11, 1938, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Harold Timperley, tried to cable his estimate of "not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians" killed in cold blood in "Nanjing and elsewhere". His message was relayed from Shanghai to Tokyo by Kōki Hirota, to be sent out to the Japanese embassies in Europe and the United States. Dramatic reports of Japanese brutality against Chinese civilians by American journalists, as well as the Panay incident, which occurred just before the occupation of Nanjing, helped turn American public opinion against Japan. These, in part, led to a series of events which culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Post-1972 Japanese interest

Interest in the Nanking Massacre waned into near obscurity until 1972, the year China and Japan normalized diplomatic relationships. In China, to foster the newly found friendship to Japan, the Communist Government under Mao Zedong ostensibly suppressed the mention of the Nanking Massacre from public discourse and the media, which the Communist Party directly controlled. Therefore, the entire debate on the Nanking massacre during the 1970s took place in Japan. In commemoration of the normalization, one major Japanese newspaper, Asahi Shimbun, ran a series of articles entitled , written by journalist Katsuichi Honda. The articles detailed the atrocities of the Japanese Army within China, including the Nanking Massacre. In the series, Honda mentioned an episode in which two officers competed to slay 100 people with their swords. The truth of this incident is hotly disputed and critics seized on the opportunity to imply that the episode, as well as the Nanking Massacre and all its accompanying articles, were largely falsified. This is regarded as the start of the Nanking Massacre controversy in Japan.

The debate concerning the actual occurrence of killings and rapes took place mainly in the 1970s. The Chinese government's statements about the event came under attack during this time, because they were said to rely too heavily on personal testimonies and anecdotal evidence. Also coming under attack were the burial records presented in the Tokyo War Crime Court, which were said to be fabrications by the Chinese government. However, recent excavation activities and relatively objective and comprehensive re-evaluation have proven that the original casualities may have been underestimated largely due to the fact that the large number of refugees fleeing from other provinces and killed in Nanking was uncertain until recently.

The Ienaga textbook incident

The controversy flared up again in 1982, when the Japanese Ministry of Education censored any mention of the Nanking Massacre in a high school textbook. The reason given by the ministry was that the Nanking Massacre was not a well-established historical event. The author of the textbook, Professor Saburō Ienaga, sued the Ministry of Education in an extended case, which was won by the plaintiff in 1997.

A number of Japanese cabinet ministers, as well as some high-ranking politicians, have also made comments denying the atrocities committed by the Japanese army in World War II. They were subsequently forced to resign after protests from China and South Korea. In response to these and similar incidents, a number of Japanese journalists and historians formed the Nankin Jiken Chōsa Kenkyūkai (Nanjing Incident Research Group). The research group has collected large quantities of archival materials as well as testimonies from both Chinese and Japanese.

While most in Japan do not deny that a massacre took place in Nanking, many Japanese citizens feel that the extent of crimes committed have been exaggerated in order to give a pretext to surging Chinese nationalism, which aims to weaken Japanese power and influence in the region. This is especially true with the more hardline members of the government cabinet, who have grown increasingly wary of China's military build-up in recent years.

See also

• Changteh Chemical Weapon Attack
• Death Railway
• Fascism
• Historical revisionism
• History of the Republic of China
• Japanese nationalism
• Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform
• Japanese war crimes
• Kaimingye germ weapon attack
• List of war apology statements issued by Japan
• Manila Massacre
• Nanking Safety Zone
• Sanko sakusen
• Shantung Incident
• Shiro Azuma
• Sook Ching Massacre
• Tongzhou Incident
• Unit 100
• Unit 731

References

Further reading

• Askew, David. "The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone: An Introduction" Sino-Japanese Studies Vol. 14, April 2002 (Article outlining membership and their reports of the events that transpired during the massacre)
• Askew, David, "The Nanjing Incident: An Examination of the Civilian Population" Sino-Japanese Studies Vol. 13, March 2001 (Article analyzes a wide variety of figures on the population of Nanjing before, during, and after the massacre)
• Brook, Timothy, ed. Documents on the Rape of Nanjing, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. ISBN 0472111345 (Does not include the Rabe diaries but a reprint of "Hsu Shuhsi, Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, Kelly and Walsh, 1939".)
• Chang, Iris, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Foreword by William C. Kirby; Penguin USA (Paper), 1998. ISBN 0140277447
• Hua-ling Hu, The Courage of Minnie Vautrin, Foreword by Paul Simon; March 2000, ISBN 0809323036
• Fogel, Joshua, ed. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0520220072
• Higashinakano, Shudo. The Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction: A Historian's Quest for the Truth. Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan, 2005. ISBN 4916079124
• Honda, Katsuichi, Sandness, Karen trans. The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame, London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. ISBN 0765603357
• Kajimoto, Masato "Mistranslations in Honda Katsuichi's the Nanjing Massacre" Sino-Japanese Studies, 13. 2 (March 2001) pp.32-44
• Lu, Suping, They Were in Nanjing: The Nanjing Massacre Witnessed by American and British Nationals, Hong Kong University Press, 2004.
• Rabe, John, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, Vintage (Paper), 2000. ISBN 0375701974
• Robert Sabella, Fei Fei Li and David Liu, eds. Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). ISBN 0765608170.
• Yamamoto, Masahiro, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity, Praeger Publishers, 2000. ISBN 0275969045
• Tanaka, Masaaki, What Really Happened in Nanking, Sekai Shuppan, 2000. ISBN 4916079078
• Yoshida, Takeshi "A Japanese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre", Columbia East Asian Review, Fall 1999. (A much longer and more detailed version of this article is in above in the work edited by Joshua Fogel)
• Takemoto, Tadao and Ohara, Yasuo The Alleged "Nanking Massacre": Japan's rebuttal to China's forged claims, Meisei-sha, Inc., 2000, (Tokyo Trial revisited) ISBN 4944219059
• Young, Shi; Yin, James. "Rape of Nanking: Undeniable history in photographs" Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1997.
• Qi, Shouhua. "When the Purple Mountain Burns: A Novel" San Francisco: Long River Press, 2005. ISBN 1592650414
• Zhang, Kaiyuan, ed. Eyewitnesses to Massacre, An East Gate Book, 2001. (includes documentation of American missionaries; M.S.Bates, G.A.Fitch, E.H.Foster, J.G.Magee, J.H.MaCallum, W.P.Mills, L.S.C.Smyth, A.N.Steward, Minnie Vautrin and R.O.Wilson.) ISBN 0765606844
• Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 1971-75",The Journal of Japanese Studies, Vol.26 No.2 Summer 2000.
• Murase, Moriyasu,Watashino Jyugun Cyugoku-sensen(My China Front), Nippon Kikanshi Syuppan Center, 1987 (revised in 2005).(includes disturbing photos, 149 page photogravure) ISBN 4889008365 (村瀬守保,私の従軍中国戦線)
• Yang, Daqing. "Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing" American Historical Review 104, 3 (June 1999), 842-865.

External links

• 1937 Nanking Massacre Nanking Massacre website including articles and photos
• BBC News: Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing
• CNN news: For Chinese, 1937 not far away
• "Denying Genocide: The Evolution of the Denial of the Holocaust and the Nanking Massacre," college research paper by Joseph Chapel, 2004
• English translation of a classified Chinese document on the Nanjing Massacre
• Genocide in the 20th Century The Rape of Nanking 1937-1938
• Japanese Army's Atrocities - Nanjing Massacre — Contains archived documents including photos and maps.
• A Japanese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre — Details the transpirations of history revisionism in the Japanese media, research done by Columbia University.
• Japan Today - New evidence of Rape of Nanking atrocity
• Nanjing Massacre Memory Hall
• The Nanking Atrocities by S. Raines & J.P. Banas — Warning, explicit photos
• Never Forget - Historical Facts of Nanjing Massacre.
• New Research on the Nanjing Incident — Detailed article by David Askew Discussing New Research on the Massacre and its Victims
• One final victim of the Rape of Nanking? — Iris Chang
• Online documentary: The Nanking Atrocities, Timothy Takemoto — Comprehensive account of the Nanjing Massacre including photos, video clips, interviews, and documented materials.
• Princeton University's exhibit on the massacre — Student-run event. Contains a gallery of the atrocities.
• Refutation by Tanaka Masaaki
• Research Institute of Propaganda Photos (Machine translation of Japanese site)
• WWW Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre

1937 | Second Sino-Japanese War | World War II crimes | Nanjing | History of Nanjing | Japanese war crimes | Women in World War II

Massaker von Nanking | Masacre de Nanjing | Masakro de Nankingo | Massacre de Nankin | 난징 대학살 | Nanjing fjöldamorðin | Bloedbad van Nanking | 南京大虐殺 | Nanjing-massakren | Nanjingin verilöyly | Nanjingmassakern | Thảm sát Nam Kinh | 南京大屠殺