Nanjing Massacre

The Nanjing Massacre (Chinese: 南京大屠殺, pinyin: Nánjīng Dà Túshā; Japanese: 南京事件, Nankin Jiken or 南京大虐殺 Nankin Dai Gyaku-satsu), also known as the Rape of Nanking, refers to the widespread atrocities conducted against Chinese civilians in and around Nanjing after its fall to Japanese troops on December 13, 1937 in the Battle of Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945)

Before Nanjing Massacre, Japanesse army conducted atrocities against Chinese civilians in many other cities near capital of Nanjing including Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing and Changzhou.

Chinese sources estimated that 300,000 people were killed during the following three months (December 1937 - February 1938), though the number is still in dispute. The number cited in the popular book The Rape of Nanking was 260,000. According to some sources, there were only 200,000 people (including 50,000 soldiers) in Nanjing when it fell. The fact that Nanjing was awash with refugees at the time, and that many of the killings occurred outside of the city, complicate these estimates. It should be noted that the city normally held 250,000 people. However, by mid-1930s the city was filled with 1 million people, many of them refugees fleeing from the Japanese army which had invaded northeast China. Some reports by outside Western journalists stated that many thousands of the city's women were raped by Japanese soldiers, often repeatedly, before being killed.

Dramatic reports by American journalists of Japanese brutality against Chinese civilians in addition to the Panay incident which also occurred after the occupation of Nanjing, helped turn American public opinion against Japan and, in part, led to a series of events which culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

However, some right wing organizations in Japan insist this massacre to be a lie due to the needs of anti-Japan education in China, which frustrates the Sino-Japan relationship from time to time.

History

For events leading up to the Nanjing Massacre, see Battle of Nanjing. Generally, the Japanese took Tianjin in July and overran Shanghai in a three-month siege before they moved towards the capital Nanjing in 1937.

On November 20, 1937, as the Japanese invaders pressed on towards Nanjing, the Kuomingtang government announced that it was to relocate the capital of the Republic of China to Chongqing. The evacuation of the city was simultaneously ordered. However, most of those who got out belonged to the government and administrative classes, leaving behind them civilians trapped in the city. On the November 22, Americans and Europeans working in the city set up an "International Committee" and drew up "Safety Zones" to provide a temporary safe haven for the Chinese, since formal hostilities between Japan and the Western countries did not begin until 1941. The Safety Zones housed approximately 50,000 refugees. The "International Committee" was headed by John Rabe, a German national. The Committee was authorized with city administration by the KMT after it has evacuated. Rabe personally opened up his property to shelter 650 more refugees.

On November 25, the Japanese army encroached upon the city. At that time, the defending Chinese army had a force of one hundred thousand men, commanded by general Tang Shengzhi. Tang opted to relocate his forces back into the city in preparation for a siege.

On December 12, the gate to the city was blown open by the Japanese. Seeing all hope is lost, Tang ordered his troop to cross the Yangtze River to retreat. The Japanese finally captured the city the next day.

When the Japanese captured Nanjing, many of the residents in the city moved into the Safety Zones. The remaining people were the employees of companies and stores and some residents, who had to guard their properties. There were not many people in the streets. However, wounded soldiers, remnants of destroyed armies from the fronts, refugees from nearby places, old and young, flooded into Nanjing from Zhongshan gate and Zhonghua gate. After they arrived in Nanjing, the attack from Japanese became more intense, and they became more nervous and wanted to hide in the Safety Zones, but they were refused. At last, they hoped to break out and cross the Yangtze river. Part of the crowd moved onto the north Zhongshan avenue that leads to the bank of the river, and planned to break through Yijiang gate and cross the river from the Zhongshan dock at Xiaguan; another crowd moved onto Central Avenue, planned to break through Peace gate and cross the river. When the refugees moved to North Zhongshan Avenue and Central Avenue, a part of the KMT army was waiting on the bank of the river to escape, in fear that the refugees would obstruct their crossing, they closed the Yijiang gate and Peace gate, effectively trapping the civilians inside the city.

On December 13, the massacres began. The Imperial Army entered the main streets, especially the North Zhongshan avenue and the Central avenue, and began killing the refugees and looting the city. On the December 14, the slaughter increased as the Japanese mechanized troops entered the city. Approximately one-third of the buildings in the city were burned down. Many civilians were killed and some were drowned in the Yangtze River as they tried to swim across to escape the slaughter. On the December 16, 5,000 refugees were rounded up at the Overseas Chinese Guest House (now 21 N. Zhongshan Avenue in modern Nanjing) and executed. Their bodies were dumped in the river. Other sites of concentrated massacre includes Yanziji gate, Guanyin gate, forest farm of the Central University at Guanyinmen, and most notably, Caoxiexia, which was a KMT foretress. Many refugees were captured and used as live bayonet practice and were then decapitated. Some 2,000 refugees were buried alive near Mt. Zijing.

On December 17, after one week of atrocious slaughter, the Imperial Army formally held a victory parade and Gen. Matsui Iwane entered the city. Iwane ordered that the remaining residents open up their windows and doors to "welcome" the Japanese. Toward the end of December, the "Street Purge" began to exterminate any Chinese who to eliminate any anti-Japanese feelings. Many were tortured before being executed. Rape of Chinese women also continued throughout the six-week period. Many women were killed after the ordeal. Approximately 80,000 women were raped.

More slaughter ensued. One of the most horrific examples was how 2nd Lts. Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi killed 105 and 106 people by using katanas in the so-called "killing competition" to boost morale. This was described in Osaka's Mainichi Shinbun newspaper on February 9, 1938. The Japanese were also known to drop misleading flyers in the safety zones proclaiming that it was safe to return home to allow more killings in the city.

By the middle of February 1938, the streets of Nanjing was foul with hundreds of thousands of corpses, and they needed to be removed. This was done by digging a huge pit and dumping the bodies in. The Japanese also ordered those in the International Committee to help dispose the bodies. Approximately 150,000 bodies were accounted for this way.

In the international Safety Zone, Rabe tried to prevent as many atrocities as possible by showing his Nazi party membership. He and the international committee managed to save many refugees in spite of constant threats of violence and intimidation from the Japanese.

By the end of the massacre, approximately 250,000 were brutally killed. The city remained under Japanese control throughout the Sino-Japanese War, with a puppet government installed in 1940 headed by Wang Jingwei.

Causes

The Nanjing massacre was perhaps the most brutal event in Japanese invasion of China. There are several causes for this. In the Mukden Incident in 1931, Japanese has revealed its aggression in conquering China. The Communists and the KMT were still mired in a race for domination and did not resist the Japanese effectively. However, in 1937, following the Xian Incident, the Chinese finally agreed to form a united front, and the KMT then formally started an all-out defense against the Japanese threat. Compared to the Japanese army, the Chinese army was poorly trained and equipped, with some regiments armed primarily with swords and hand grenades and with virtually no anti-tank weaponry whatsoever. Following the battle at Marco Polo bridge, which formally started the Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese were swift in capturing major Chinese cities in the northeast.

However, in August of 1937 the Japanese army was faced with strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of Shanghai, effectively destroying any possibility of realizing the Japanese proclaimation of "三月亡華," or "Conquering China in Three Months." The battle in Shanghai was bloody as soldiers fought house to house, with both sides pouring into the battlefield to replenish those who fell. Many historians today believe that the situation in Shanghai nurtured the psychological conditions for Japanese soldiers to march on a berserk rampage in Nanking later on. By mid-November the Japanese finally captured the city with help of naval bombardment, but the General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo decided not to expand the war due to heavy casualties incurred and the increasingly low morale of the troops. However, on December 1, headquarters, ordered the Central China Area Army and the 10th Army to capture Nanjing, the capital of China. The Japanese army contained many army reserves who had families back home and expected to return home once the campaign in Shanghai was over. But orders came the Japanese troops already burdened with casualties in Shanghai and the possibility of being mired in China indefinitely, began projecting their inflamed animosities on Chinese soldiers and civilians throughout their march to Nanjing, which, according to many historians, was a prelude to the massive atrocities that would later take place in Nanjing.

In his memoirs, journalist Matsumoto Shigeharu, the Shanghai bureau chief of Domei News Agency, recalled a circulating rumor among his colleagues. "The reason that the Yanagawa Corps [the 10th Army] is advancing [to Nanjing] quite rapidly is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish." This was seen as the main cause that the brutalities were committed by ordinary infantry troops, not just by some specially-assigned killing squads.

Death toll estimates

Today the majority of historians estimate the death toll of the Nanjing Atrocities to range between 200,000 and 300,000 as claimed by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East or the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. In China the figure of 300,000, the death toll reckoned at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, is the official estimate engraved on the stone wall at the entrance of the "Qin-Hua Rijun Nanjing Datusha Yunan Tongbao Jinian-guan", or the "Memorial Hall for Compatriot Victims of the Japanese Military's Nanjing Massacre". Western estimates also correspond to this. For instance, on January 11, 1938, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Harold Timperley, apparently tried to cable a similar estimate but was censored out by the Japanese authorities in Shanghai because his report said that "not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians" were slaughtered in cold blood in "Nanjing and elsewhere." His message was relayed from Shanghai to Tokyo to be sent out to the Japanese Embassies in Europe and the United States. On January 17, 1938, when Japan's Foreign Minister, Hirota Koki, sent a message to his contact in Washington D.C., the cable was intercepted by American intelligence and translated into English. According to the translation, which is now available at the National Archives, Timperley also reported about robbery, rape, and other brutal conduct by the Japanese troops that were going on in the walled city. In 1947 at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, the verdict of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao, the commander of the 6th Division, quoted the figure of more than 300,000 victims. Apparently the estimation was made from burial records and eyewitness accounts. It concluded that some 190,000 were illegally executed on a massive scale at various execution sites and 150,000 were individually massacred. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated in its judgment that "over 200,000" civilians and prisoners of war were murdered during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation. That number was based on burial records submitted by two charitable organizations, the Red Swastika Society and the Chung Shan Tang (Tsung Shan Tong), the research done by Smythe and some estimates given by survivors. The main difference in calculating the number dead lies in the rationale in defining the range of the massacre. Some include the march from Shanghai into the massacre. However, it is generally accepted that Nanjing Massacre occurred from early December 1937 to late March 1938, when the Japanese army declared that public order has been restored.

Some try to refute the figure of 300,000 (or 200,000) in an attempt to prove that the atrocities did not take place. Others try to enshrine the figure of 300,000 (200,000) in an effort to emphasize the scale of the atrocities. Although the precise death toll has never been accepted by all sides as definite, it is an irrefutable fact that around 250,000 Chinese people were brutally murdered in a merciless fashion in Nanjing.

Historiography

Since the Second World War, some Japanese historians and politicians with nationalist or traditionalist perspectives have either denied the existence of atrocities (as, for example, Fujio Masayuki, a Minister of Education), or (more recently) sought to minimize them. The way in which the subject is taught in Japanese schools became the center of controversy in the Japanese textbook controversies of 1982 and 1986. Despite this persistent revisionism, the events following the fall of Nanking are well documented by journalists and other eyewitnesses and are not disputed by most historians, including the majority of Japanese historians.

The atrocity continues to receive attention from researchers in Japan. Those downplaying the massacre have most recently rallied around a group of historians associated with the Society for the Creation of New Textbooks. Their views also are often shared in publications associated with conservative publishers such as Bungei Shunjû and Sankei Shuppan. In response, two Japanese organizations have taken the lead in publishing material detailing the massacre and collecting related documents and accounts. The Study Group on the Nanjing Incident, founded by a group of historians in 1984 has published the most books responding directly to revisionist historians and the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, founded in 1993 has published many materials in their own journal.

External links

An English translation of a classified Chinese document on the Nanjing Massacre
Research Institute of Propaganda Photos (Machine translation of Japanese site)
Online documentary: The Nanking Atrocities
Princeton University's exhibit on the massacre - Contains a gallery of the atrocities.
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.
The Other Side, Nanking Massacre

Population changes of Nanking
History of Number of "Victims" (a mirror of lost page)

Books on the "Rape of Nanking", Pro and Con (multilingual version)