Zhang Xianwen, editor-in-chief of the report, states that the information collected was based on "a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Western raw materials, which is objective and just and is able to stand the trial of history". Just better. As Nanking fell to the Japanese, and their troops entered the city on the 13th of December, the streets were already crowded with a large number of . They do not mention sexual assaults. This district encompassed not only the city of Nanking proper, occupied by the Japanese from December 13, but also the six rural counties surrounding it, namely Jiangning, Lishui, Jurong, Jiangpu, Luhe, and Gaochun. Chinese soldiers were summarily executed in violation of the laws of war. The museum notes only that "Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothes, which numbered around 4000[34] were severely prosecuted". I am really, therefore, quite happy that I, at least, should have ended this way, in the sense that it may serve to urge self-reflection on many more members of the military of that time. Durdin, F. Tillman. There are no official numbers for the death toll . In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanjing and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans. . Since the late-1960s when the first academic works on the Nanking Massacre were produced, estimating the approximate death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of scholarly debate. He reportedly told one of his civilian aides: I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. In 1986 Ikuhiko Hata became the first historian to call this definition into question. [121] He was found guilty of war crimes, sentenced to death, and executed by shooting on 26 April 1947. "[47] Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:[48]. Hiroshi Yoshida concludes "more than 200,000" in his book. We thus have a total of more than 300,000 victims. Rape! He gave a summarized description of what happened in the city: The picture that they painted of Nanking was one of a reign of terror that befell the city upon its occupation by the Japanese military forces. [94] Wakabayashi concludes that estimates of over 200,000 are not credible. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), p. 193. The victims were blown up with landmines, then doused with petrol and set on fire. Never I have heard or read such brutality. [13], Perhaps the most notorious atrocity was a killing contest between two Japanese officers as reported in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Advertiser. Dec 17, 2021 2-min read. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers. [26][27] However, emotional arguments and political interference in the debate have tended to hinder the construction of an academic consensus on the number of people killed in the atrocity. Hs Shuhsi, ed. Prosecution's Witnesses. According to the archives research "The telegrams sent by the U.S. diplomats [in Berlin] pointed to the massacre of an estimated half a million people in Shanghai, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou". See: Death toll of the Nanking Massacre. ", "Case 16 A Chinese girl named Loh, who, with her mother and brother, was living in one of the Refugee Centers in the Refugee Zone, was shot through the head and killed by a Japanese soldier. In 2006 former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi made a pilgrimage to the shrine despite warnings from China and South Korea. The last murders in the house were of Ha's two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . Soon after the end of the war, Matsui and his lieutenant Tani Hisao, were tried and convicted for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were executed. [40], By contrast, Ikuhiko Hata also examined the Japanese Army's documents and tallied up a total of 30,000 Chinese POWs massacred out of a total Chinese force of 100,000. By the time they had arrived at Zijin Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. The massacre finally wound down in early 1938. "[1], One-third of the city was destroyed as a result of arson. . '"[55], For about three weeks since December 13, 1937,[1] the Imperial Japanese Army entered the Nanking Safety Zone to search for former Chinese soldiers hidden among refugees. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. The two men were described as vying to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword before the capture of Nanjing. Asaka denied the existence of any massacre and claimed never to have received complaints about the conduct of his troops.[119]. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha's death, begging them not to kill anyone else. Therefore, according to journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun of December 13, they decided to begin another contest to kill 150 people.[40]. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 85. 18 I Ho Lu, Japanese soldiers wanted a man's cigarette case and when he hesitated, one of the soldier crashed in the side of his head with a bayonet. The survivors were killed with bayonets.[69]. Improved in 24 Hours. The reason that 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. [36], From December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson, and other war crimes. Chang also states that not all rape victims were women. Yet, in China, this figure has come to symbolize the justice, legality, and authority of the post-war trials condemning Japan as the aggressor.[113]. [85] Approximately 70 percent of the Japanese army's wartime records were destroyed. [87] In 1994, nearly 20 diaries in his collection were published, which became an important source of evidence for the massacre. In response, Shichihei Yamamoto[140] and Akira Suzuki[141] wrote two controversial yet influential articles[clarification needed] which sparked the Japanese Negationist movement. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. The extent of the atrocities is hotly debated, with numbers ranging from Japanese ultra-nationalist claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000. [6] Over the course of its subsequent occupation of Nanking the Japanese Army hunted down the former Chinese soldiers within the city and in a large number of cases summarily executed them. [57] Soon after some denialists claimed that no massacre had taken place at all. [52][53] There are also accounts of Japanese troops coercing families to commit incestuous acts. I told them that after all our efforts to enhance the Imperial prestige, everything had been lost in one moment through the brutalities of the soldiers. One of the books by Hs, Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, was also adduced in court. Practically every building in the city was entered many, many times by these roving gangs of soldiers throughout the first six or seven weeks of the occupation". An official from South Korea said they would summon the Tokyo ambassador to protest. Pi means "hip," kankan means "look." [31] Nevertheless, even if Ch took the initiative, Asaka was nominally the officer in charge and gave no orders to stop the carnage. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. 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 . [159][160], The Massacre is sometimes compared to other disasters in China, which include the Great Chinese famine (195961)[161][162][163] and the Cultural Revolution. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered messages to field commands throughout the Pacific and East Asia ordering units to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes, For 17 December:[49]. "[142], On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first formal apology for Japanese actions during the war. On the other side of the city, the 11th Company of the 45th Regiment encountered some 20,000 Chinese soldiers who were making their way from Xiakuan. Languages. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. [42] For instance, after routing the Chinese in Nanking, Japanese soldiers fired upon and killed a large number of Chinese soldiers who were attempting to escape the battlefield by swimming across the Yangtze River. In a diary entry from Minnie Vautrin on December 15, 1937, she wrote about her experiences in the Safety Zone: The Japanese have looted widely yesterday and today, have destroyed schools, have killed citizens, and raped women. magazine surveyed members of each "school" for their opinions on the massacre, many of the so-called "centrists" advocated extremely low figures for the total number of victims, including Dokkyo University professor Akira Nakamura, journalist Yoshiko Sakurai, and researcher Toshio Tanabe, who each counted about 10,000 massacred, and military historian Takeshi Hara who selected 20,000. [122][123], Hisao Tani, a lieutenant general for the 6th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army, was tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in China. During the chaos following the attack of the city, some were killed in the Safety Zone, but the crimes that occurred in the rest of the city were far greater by all accounts. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . However, they feared that speaking out openly "would be detrimental to their careers. Didi Tang, Beijing. The grandfather grasped the body of his wife and was killed. Rabe commented on how efforts to remove these Chinese troops failed and Japanese soldiers began to lob grenades into the refugee zone.[10]. [7] At the same time soldiers of the Japanese Army also committed random acts of murder against civilians, and engaged in rape, arson, and looting. THE RAPE OF NANKING OR NANJING MASSACRE 5 The judges of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials) were prepared to accept that at least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the Japanese in the six weeks after Nanking fell.The judges were also prepared to accept that the death toll would be much higher if . [134] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao claims Mao never made any comment either contemporaneously or later in his life about the massacre, but did frequently remark with enduring bitterness about a political struggle between himself and Wang Ming which also occurred in December 1937. For most of the morning, Japanese soldiers tied the POWs' hands together. [18] John Rabe, the German head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese were killed in Nanking, though this estimate included both military casualties and massacred civilians. As those who are related to the prewar military, we simply apologize deeply to the people of China. The total death toll of the Nanking Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. All we are asking in our protest is that you restore order among your troops and get the normal city life going as soon as possible. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. "Convergence or Divergence? In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuz Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing. Eyewitness accounts include testimonies of expatriates engaged in humanitarian work (mostly physicians, professors, missionary and businessmen), journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. [27][50] French historian Jean-Louis Margolin, for instance, has strongly criticized Honda's argument, noting that "As, in our present knowledge, it is impossible to get convincing figures for such large areas, such methods may be considered as attempts to blur hopelessly the debate. Each girl was raped six or seven times daily reported December 18th. [56], In the early 1970s, Japanese historian Hora's estimate of 200,000 massacre victims was challenged for the first time by the journalist Akira Suzuki, who suggested that "several tens of thousands" had been killed. We looked. That's how they get their nationalism and pride, that Japan never made any mistake to other countries during the WW, instead, they're a victim of the US, they nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They also murdered hundreds of thousands . Chinese teacher sacked for questioning death toll in Nanjing massacre. [44] The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation,[45] such as by penetrating vaginas with bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, or other objects. [63], Pregnant women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes after rape. At noon on December 9, the Japanese military dropped leaflets into the city, urging the city of Nanjing to surrender within 24 hours, promising "no mercy" if the offer was refused. Prince Kan'in Kotohito, chief of staff of the Imperial Japanese Army during the massacre, had died before the end of the war in May 1945. [citation needed], On 18 February 1938, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was forcibly renamed the Nanjing International Rescue Committee, and the Safety Zone effectively ceased to function. [21], Then in 1997 Kasahara formulated a definition between the two. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 197175", Yang, Daqing. [16], In 2000, historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi concurred with certain Japanese scholars who had argued that the contest was a concocted story, with the collusion of the soldiers themselves for the purpose of raising the national fighting spirit. The Chinese government left for relocation on December 1, and the president left on December 7, leaving the fate of Nanjing to an International Committee led by John Rabe, a German national. In his diary kept during the aggression against the city and its occupation by the Imperial Japanese Army, the leader of the Safety Zone, John Rabe, wrote many comments about Japanese atrocities. [citation needed], To many Japanese scholars, post-war estimations were distorted by "victor's justice", when Japan was condemned as the sole aggressor. Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing". One thousand disarmed Chinese soldiers, whom the International Committee hoped to save, were taken from them and by this time are probably shot or bayoneted. [19] The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanking Massacre. The "Great Massacre School" group supports the validity of the findings at the Tokyo Trials, and concludes that there were at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 rape cases; whereas "The Illusion School" group rejects tribunal findings as "victor's justice". [112][170] The range of the death toll estimated by Japanese historians is from tens of thousands to 200,000. During the massacre, she worked tirelessly in welcoming thousands of female refugees to stay in the college campus, sheltering up to 10,000 women. [76], By February 5, 1938, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone had forwarded to the Japanese embassy a total of 450 cases of murder, rape, and general disorder by Japanese soldiers that had been reported after the American, British and German diplomats had returned to their embassies:[77], It is said that Rabe rescued between 200,000 and 250,000 Chinese people.[78][79]. The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. Outside of . [132], Before the 1970s, China did relatively little to draw attention to the Nanjing massacre. [74], The Japanese troops did respect the Zone to an extent; until the Japanese occupation, no shells entered that part of the city except a few stray shots. Matsui returned to retirement, but Prince Asaka remained on the Supreme War Council until the end of the war in August 1945. After the war, multiple Japanese military officers and Kki Hirota, former Prime Minister of Japan and foreign minister during the atrocities, were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Prosecution's Witnesses. Estimates of the number of victims vary based on the definitions of the geographical range and the duration of the event. Wilson, Dr. Robert O. English Articles. This 300,000 number is constantly hammered to us, being on gigantic signs on events related to remembering the massacre, and a must-mention whenever a textbook/TV program mentions the massacre. The baby was killed with a bayonet. Chiang's strategy was to follow the suggestion of his German advisers to draw the Japanese army deep into China and use China's vast territory as a defensive strength. To preserve the army for future battles, most of it was withdrawn. Although Koizumi denied that he was trying to glorify war or historical Japanese militarism, the Chinese Foreign Ministry accused Koizumi of "wrecking the political foundations of China-Japan relations". In July 1937 war broke out in northern China between China and Japan, and by August the fighting had spread to the city of Shanghai. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. The center of the debate rests on the validity of burial records and oral history. [21] When Yoshiaki Itakura, an independent writer who became one of the leading researchers of the Nanking Incident,[21][32] analyzed the records of the Japanese Army, he multiplied his final tally by 0.6 in order to account for exaggeration and reached the total of 13,000 to 19,000 massacre victims. The Japanese army leadership assigned sections of the safety zone to some units to separate alleged plain-clothed soldiers from the civilians. [3] After capturing Shanghai the Japanese Army decided on December 1 to continue its military campaign to the capital city of the Nationalist government of China, Nanking, which is roughly 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. Yoshida contended that over time the event has acquired different meanings to different people. Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the primary officers in charge of the Japanese troops at Nanjing were put on trial. Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned to death. [18][23] However, the prosecution at these trials made little effort to verify the accuracy of their death toll estimates and a considerable amount of dubious and now discredited data was accepted by both tribunals. [41], Since then Kasahara has proposed a definition between these two. Updated on March 06, 2017. Only since the 1990s, through the revisionist Patriotic Education Campaign, the massacre has become a national memory as an episode of the "Century of Humiliation" prior to the communist founding of a "New China". Numerological arguments about the death count and distinctions of comparative atrocities do not address this point. Many innocent men were misidentified and killed.[1]. [143], He offered his apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. [35] Three quarters of the population had fled Nanjing before the Japanese arrived. 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