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The Nanking Massacre (simplified Chinese: 南京大屠杀; traditional Chinese: 南京大屠殺, pinyin: Nánjīng Dàtúshā; Japanese: 南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu), also known as the Rape of Nanking and sometimes in Japan as the Nanking Incident (南京事件, Nankin Jiken), refers to the widespread atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in and around Nanking (now transliterated in pinyin as Nanjing), China, after the capital's fall to Japanese troops on 13 December, 1937.

After the capture of Shanghai in October 1937, the Japanese army moved north and captured Nanking in the Battle of Nanking, on 13 December, 1937. By then the Chinese Nationalist army had fled the city and the Japanese entered the city virtually resistance free. More than 300,000 Chinese civilians had been killed. The time period of the massacre is not clearly defined, though the period of unruly carnage lasted well into 6 weeks after, until early February 1938.

War crimes committed during this episode include looting, rape, arson and the killing of civilians and prisoners of war. It is not known how many Nationalist soldiers were trapped within the walled city and disguised themselves as civilians, but a large number of deaths also occurred to women and children. The extent of the atrocities is debated, with numbers ranging from the present Chinese Communist Party's claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000, to the claim of the Japanese army at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East that the death toll was military in nature, and that there were no organized massacres or atrocities carried out on civilians. In the death sentence against the commander of the Japanese army in Nanking, General Matsui Iwane, the number was set at 100,000.

The event continues to be a source of controversy between China and Japan. In Japan, opinion among the public is divided, with some sentiment, especially among conservatives, that the Nanking Massacre has been exaggerated (if not fabricated) as a diplomatic weapon directed against Japan. Some Japanese historians continue to maintain the Nanking Massacre is propaganda on the part of the Chinese Communist Party, although most Japanese people have now recognized that the atrocities did in fact occur. In China, however, the event is a major focal point of Chinese nationalism. Any attempts to question the Massacre's authenticity are considered historical revisionism, and as such, continue to generate anger and resentment.

Events leading to the Massacre

Following the Mukden Incident in 1931, Japan began its invasion of Manchuria, China. Because the Communists and the Kuomintang (KMT) were engaged in the Chinese Civil War they were distracted from the reality of Japanese advances. However, in 1937, following the Xi'an Incident, the Chinese communists and nationalists agreed to form a united front. The KMT then formally started an all-out defense against the Japanese threat. However, the Chinese army was poorly trained and equipped: some regiments were armed primarily with swords and hand grenades and few had anti-tank weaponry. Despite their difficulties, it is likely that China fielded the largest army in the world at the time in terms of troop numbers. 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.

The Massacre is considered to be the most infamous event in the Japanese invasion of China. In August of 1937, the Japanese army faced strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties in the Battle of Shanghai, effectively destroying the possibility of conquering China in three months. The Battle in Shanghai was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat. Many historians today believe that the traumatic situation in Shanghai nurtured some of the psychological conditions for Japanese soldiers to later march on Nanking. By mid-November the Japanese had captured the city with help of naval bombardment. The General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo decided not to expand the war due to heavy casualties incurred and the low morale of the troops. However, on December 1, headquarters ordered the Central China Area Army and the 10th Army to capture Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China.

After losing the Battle of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek knew the fall of Nanking would be simply a matter of time. Leaving General Tang Shengzhi in charge of the city for the Battle of Nanking, Chiang and many of his advisors flew to Chongqing, China's wartime capital for the next seven years. Although walls of defense were constructed, they were never effectively used. In the absence of an organized retreat, the situation before the Japanese entered Nanking was chaotic. On December 13, the Japanese entered a city virtually free of any military resistance.


Death toll estimates

There is debate as to the extent of the war atrocities in Nanking, especially regarding estimates of the death toll. The issues involved in calculating the number of dead lay in defining the geographical range and time period of killing as well as the question of what "type" of killing is to be included in the definition of the term "massacre".

Geographical Extent and the Killing Duration

On one side is the view 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 congregate. 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 CCP's estimate of 300,000 deaths is a vast exaggeration.

However many historians include a much larger area around the city. The Xianquan area is the suburbs of Nanjing city (which is about 66 miles), and including that region the combined population of suburban and urban Nanking runs to some 535,000 and 635,000 just prior to the Japanese occupation. Because the entire Jiangsu province fell under the administration of Nanking, some historians also include six xian (counties) around Nanking starting from Suzhou, at the western edge of Jiangsu province, known as the Nanjing Special Municipality.

The period of the massacre, hence, is naturally defined by the geography of the massacre. 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 then defined the period of the massacre to the ensuing 6 weeks. Conservative estimates say the massacre started from December 14, when the troops entered the Safety Zone, and that it lasted for 6 weeks. Those 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 result, the number of death toll swell significantly.

Prisoners of war debate

Another point of debate is the question of whom to count as the victims of Japanese atrocities. Historians agree that the Japanese army indiscriminately killed many civilians in Nanking city, and that these should be counted in the death toll of the massacre. Over the course of the campaign through China, the Japanese army did not take prisoners of war and summarily executed Chinese soldiers during or after combat. Moreover, the army executed plain-clothed guerilla combatants who were hiding among civilians. It is unclear how many innocent civilians were wrongly accused of being guerilla combatants and were dispatched in this manner.

To make matters more difficult, archival evidence such as burial records only state the body count and not which type of group to which each body belonged. Therefore, it provides no means to distinguish whether bodies were the result of "legitimate" or "illegitimate" killing. Many different categories of varying legitimacy exist: soldiers killed during combat, surrendered soldiers summarily executed after the battle, plain-clothed guerilla combatants, plain-clothed soldiers hiding among civilians, civilians wrongly suspected of being guerrila combatants, or those bystanders attacked during the period of indiscriminate killing, rape and looting (which all the scholars deem to be illegitimate).

Various Estimates

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East or the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, stated the death toll of the Nanking Massacre as ranging between 200,000 and 300,000. 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.

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 death tolls. Apparently 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 individually massacred. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated in its judgment that "over 200,000" or "over 100,000" 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.

At the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals, the Nanking Massacre death toll was presented either as "more than 200,000" or "more than 100,000".

Modern historians like Kasahara Tokushi at 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, came up to an estimate approaching or over 200,000. 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

Presently China and Japan have acknowledged the existence of war atrocities. However, disputes over the historical portrayal of events has been at the root of continuing political tensions between China and Japan.

Widespread atrocities committed by the Japanese in Nanking were first reported to the world by the Westerners residing in Nanking city's Safety Zone. For instance, on January 11, 1938, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Harold Timperley, apparently tried to cable a similar estimate but was censored 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. Also, 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.

File:Slayers.jpg
Two Japanese sublieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tuyoshi said to be competing with each other to see who could kill one hundred Chinese first. The bold headline said, "Contest to Kill First 100 Chinese with Sword Extended When Both Fighters Exceed Mark — Mukai Scores 106 and Noda 105"


Post-1972 Japanese Interest

Interest in the Nanking Massacre did not renew until 1972, the year China and Japan normalized their relationship. 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 serialized articles titled "Chugoku no Tabi" ("Travel to China"), written by journalist Katsuichi Honda, which 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 Chinese 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 occurrence of killings and rapes took place mainly in the 1970s, during which Chinese official statements about the event came under attack because they relied 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 side of the debate.


Chinese and International Historiography

On the Chinese side, the public perception of the Nanking Massacre and Japan itself turned around after first Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin became the heads of state. Historically, Chinese nationalism and the legitimacy of the communist government are defined by their struggle against the Japanese aggressor and their eventual victory. Since the 1980s China began to openly cover reports and encourage research of the Massacre by scholars, as well as building the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall at Jiangdong Gate to commemorate victims in 1985.

The controversy was related outside Japan by some journalists who followed the domestic debate but interest in the West remained muted until the publication of The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang in 1997. Even though the standard of historical research was described as highly flawed by both sides of the debate in Japan, it did bring the controversy to a much wider Western audience. Chang made public the diaries of Minnie Vautrin and John Rabe, leading to their eventual dissemination to the public. John Rabe's diaries were first published in German in 1997 and then translated into English in 1998.

Current Situation in Japan

In Japan, as far as Japanese academics are concerned, the controversy over the existence of atrocities ended in the early 1990s. Both sides accept that killings did occur; however, disagreement exists over the actual numbers, which depends on the standard of inclusion of archival or anecdotal evidence, definition of the period of the massacre, as well as geographical coverage.

Currently, no notable group, including right-wing nationalists, deny the occurrence of the killings and the debate has shifted mainly to the death toll, to the extent of rapes and civilian killings (as opposed to POW and suspected guerrillas) and to the appropriateness of using the word "massacre". Apologists insist that burial records from the Red Swastika Society and the Chung Shan Tang (Tsung Shan Tong) were never cross-examined at the Tokyo and Nanjing trials, arguing therefore that the estimates derived from these two sets of records should be heavily discounted. They also admit that personal records of Japanese soldiers do suggest the occurrence of rapes, but insist that this does not determine the extent of rapes. Moreover, they regard personal testimonies from the Chinese side to be propaganda. They also point out that there are no documented records of the rapes, unlike the burial records that exist and document the killings, and therefore argue that the assertion of mass rape is unsubstantiated. They further insist that the majority of those killed were POWs and "suspected guerrillas", which they consider to be legitimate killing, so that the use of descriptive word "massacre" is inappropriate.

However, within the public the debate still continues. Those downplaying the massacre have most recently rallied around a group of academic and journalists associated with the Society for the Creation of New Textbooks. Their views are often shared in publications associated with right-wing publishers such as Bungei Shunjū 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; the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, founded in 1993, has published many materials in its own journal. Like the academics, the general Japanese public are also divided in their opinions of the Massacre. While young Japanese were now taught that atrocities did occur, many continue to believe that the Massacre is hugely exaggerated in both scale and number by Chinese politicians using it as an offensive charge to scupper Japan's reputation in the world community. As such some continue to question the veracity of the Massacre's evidence, as seen in proliferation of private websites set up for nationalistic purposes. Other Japanese severely criticize this attitude and urge widespread admission of Japanese war crimes by active compensation of war victims.

The Society for the Creation of New Textbooks produced history textbooks for junior high school and submitted them to the Ministry of Education. The Ministry ordered corrections in 137 places. After the corrections, the book passed the 2001 inspection. This has again caused fury from Korea and China, both sides demanding reinspection. The book was published and wrongly appeared to be a best-seller, because of the systematic distribution of most of the 750,000 copies by the Society for the Creation of New Textbooks. However the 2002 rate of adoption of this textbook in schools was only 0.039%.

In October 2004, the Japanese manga comic book "Kuni ga Moeru" or "The Country is Burning" by Hiroshi Motomiya was suspended from the manga anthology Weekly Shonen Jump because it "depicted the Nanking Atrocities as 'real.'" Certain Japanese politicians and civilians wanted the manga censored or removed because they claimed that the incident never occurred and there was no proof of it. "Kuni ga Moeru" is a historical fiction about a Japanese bureaucrat during the Showa Era (1926-1989). The controversy arose when the author copied a photograph from the time, emphasizing the Japanese uniforms on the soldiers. The photo's authenticity cannot be verified and thus incited cries that the author distorted the history.

Western Personnel In Nanking (1937)

Fortunately, many western personnel such as reporters from Germany, U.S. were in Nanking at the time to witness this atrocious event. Most of them had stayed inside the "International Safety Zones"--very small areas circled out for non-Chinese people to stay.

See also

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, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: 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
  • 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
  • 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 Find this book at Amazon.co.jp (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.

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