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Nanjing Massacre: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Nanjing Massacre
On the 13th of December 1937, the gates of Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, were breached by the Imperial Japanese Army, and a city of over one million souls was plunged into a nightmare that would last for weeks. The Japanese soldiers, fresh from a bloody and exhausting campaign in Shanghai, did not enter a conquered city; they entered a slaughterhouse. Within hours of the collapse of Chinese defenses, the systematic murder, rape, and arson began, transforming the capital into a landscape of death and terror. The massacre was not a spontaneous outburst of rage but a calculated campaign of terror, sanctioned from the highest levels of the Japanese command. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a member of the imperial family, had issued an order to "kill all captives" before the city's capture, effectively removing any legal or moral constraints on the treatment of prisoners and civilians. This order, whether signed by the Prince himself or issued by his aide under his name, provided the official sanction for the crimes that followed. The Japanese military, under the command of General Iwane Matsui, had planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital if the fighting had grown too intense, but the city fell so quickly that the gas was not deployed, leaving the soldiers to their own brutal devices. The massacre began on the 13th of December and continued to rampage through the city unchecked, with Japanese units murdering civilians, including children, women, and the elderly, and summarily executing thousands of captured Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war. The death toll, estimated by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East to be more than 200,000, remains a subject of historical debate, with newer estimates ranging from 100,000 to 200,000, and some scholars arguing for figures as high as 340,000. The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history, a dark chapter that continues to cast a long shadow over Sino-Japanese relations.
The March of Death
The horrors of Nanjing were not an isolated event but the culmination of a terror campaign that had been unfolding for months along the Lower Yangtze River. As the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing, they transformed the 170 miles between the two cities into a "nightmarish zone of death and destruction." Japanese aircraft frequently strafed unarmed farmers and refugees "for fun," and entire villages were set on fire, with inhabitants locked inside burning houses. On the 23rd of November, the Nanqiantou hamlet near Wuxi was set on fire, and many of its inhabitants were locked within the burning houses. Two women, one a 17-year-old girl and the other pregnant, were raped repeatedly until they could not walk. Afterwards, the soldiers rammed a broom into the teenager's vagina and stabbed her with a bayonet, then "cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and gouged out the fetus." A crying two-year-old boy was wrestled from his mother's arms and thrown into the flames, while the hysterically sobbing mother was bayoneted and thrown into a creek. The remaining thirty villagers were bayoneted, disemboweled, and also thrown into the creek. In another case on the 29th of November, the Japanese 3rd Battalion from the 16th Division rounded up eighty civilians in the village of Changzhou and massacred them with heavy machine guns. According to army doctor Hosaka Akira, "The people were all gathered in one place. They were all praying, crying, and begging for help. I just couldn't bear watching such a pitiful spectacle. Soon the heavy machine guns opened fire and the sight of those people screaming and falling to the ground is one I could not face even if I had had the heart of a monster." The Japanese 10th Army, advancing on Nanjing, had drawn up two plans for attacking the city. Plan A outlined a headlong rush for the city, while Plan B outlined the use of incendiary bombs and mustard gas canisters to "reduce the city to rubble." The implementation of such a plan would have resulted in "a holocaust for one city," as historian Bob Wakabayashi comments. The Japanese military had planned to use mustard gas and incendiaries on the Chinese capital, but the city fell so quickly that the gas was not deployed, leaving the soldiers to their own brutal devices. The massacre was not a spontaneous outburst of rage but a calculated campaign of terror, sanctioned from the highest levels of the Japanese command.
The Nanjing Massacre began on the 13th of December 1937 when the gates of Nanjing were breached by the Imperial Japanese Army and continued unchecked through the following weeks into early 1938. The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone reported 450 cases of murder and rape to the Japanese embassy by the 5th of February 1938.
Who ordered the systematic killing of captives during the Nanjing Massacre?
Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, a member of the imperial family, issued an order to kill all captives before the city's capture which sanctioned the crimes that followed. General Iwane Matsui commanded the Japanese military forces that carried out the massacre and planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital.
How many people died during the Nanjing Massacre according to historical estimates?
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated the death toll to be more than 200,000 while newer estimates range from 100,000 to 200,000 and some scholars argue for figures as high as 340,000. Robert O. Wilson provided a conservative estimate of 100,000 people slaughtered in cold blood including thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms.
What happened to the Japanese officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda during the Nanjing Massacre?
Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda participated in a killing contest to see who could kill 100 people first using only a sword and both officers surpassed their goal during the heat of battle. Noda killed 105 people while Mukai killed 106 people and journalists decided to begin another contest to kill 150 people.
How many lives did the Nanking Safety Zone save during the Nanjing Massacre?
The Nanking Safety Zone led by John Rabe is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives by providing sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees. Minnie Vautrin sheltered up to 10,000 women at Ginling Girls College while Bernhard Sindberg and Karl Gunther offered refuge to approximately 6,000 to 10,000 Chinese civilians at a cement factory.
How many women were raped during the Nanjing Massacre according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East?
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that Japanese soldiers committed approximately 20,000 cases of rape in the city during the first month of the occupation. Iris Chang estimated that the number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000 and some accounts suggest there were 80,000 rapes in total.
Perhaps the most notorious atrocity of the Nanjing Massacre was a killing contest between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda of the Japanese 16th Division, as reported in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Advertiser. The contest, a race between the two officers to see who could kill 100 people first using only a sword, was covered much like a sporting event with regular updates on the score over a series of days. From Jurong, Jiangsu to Tangshan, Mukai had killed 89 people while Noda had killed 78. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. By the time they had arrived at Purple Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Therefore, according to journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun of the 13th of December, they decided to begin another contest to kill 150 people. In 2000, historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi concurred with certain Japanese scholars who had argued that the contest was a concocted story by the Japanese army, with the collusion of the soldiers themselves for the purpose of raising their national fighting spirit. In 2005, a Tokyo district judge dismissed a suit by the families of the lieutenants, stating that "the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people" and that the story cannot be proven to be clearly false. The historicity of the event remains disputed in Japan, but the newspaper article itself, with its headline "Incredible Record' (in the Contest to Cut Down 100 People) , Mukai 106, 105 Noda , Both 2nd Lieutenants Go into Extra Innings," stands as a chilling testament to the dehumanization of the Chinese people and the brutalization of the Japanese soldiers. The contest was not an isolated incident but part of a systemic terror campaign meant to undermine the will to resist amongst the Chinese population. The Japanese military, under the command of General Iwane Matsui, had planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital if the fighting had grown too intense, but the city fell so quickly that the gas was not deployed, leaving the soldiers to their own brutal devices. The massacre was not a spontaneous outburst of rage but a calculated campaign of terror, sanctioned from the highest levels of the Japanese command.
The Safety Zone
As the Japanese army entered Nanjing, a group of Westerners, led by German businessman John Rabe, formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone in the western quarter of the city. Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party, was elected as its leader, in part because of his status as a member of the Nazi Party and the existence of the German-Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact. The Japanese government had previously agreed not to attack parts of the city that did not contain Chinese military forces, and the members of the Committee managed to persuade the Chinese government to move their troops out of the area. The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags, and it became a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of Chinese refugees. Minnie Vautrin, a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanjing, worked tirelessly in welcoming thousands of female refugees to stay in the college campus, sheltering up to 10,000 women. Bernhard Sindberg, a Dane named, began his role as a guard at a cement factory in Nanjing in December 1937, days before the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. As the massacre began, Sindberg and Karl Gunther, a German colleague, converted the cement factory into a makeshift refugee camp where they offered refuge and medical assistance to approximately 6,000 to 10,000 Chinese civilians. Knowing that Imperial Japan was not hostile towards Denmark or Nazi Germany, thus showing respect for their flags, Sindberg painted a large Danish flag on the cement factory roof to deter the Japanese army from bombing the factory. To keep Japanese troops away from the factory, he and Gunther strategically placed the Danish flag and the German swastika around the site. Whenever the Japanese approached the gate, Sindberg would display the Danish flag and step out to converse with them, and eventually, they would leave. Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. However, 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. 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. Rabe wrote that, from time to time, the Japanese would enter the Safety Zone at will, carry off a few hundred men and women, and either summarily execute them or rape and then kill them. By the 5th of February 1938, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone had forwarded to the Japanese embassy a total of 450 cases of murder, rape, torture and general disorder by Japanese soldiers that had been reported after the American, British and German diplomats had returned to their embassies.
The River of Dead Bodies
The Japanese military determined that they needed to eliminate any remaining Chinese soldiers hidden within the city, and the search process used an arbitrary criteria for identifying former Chinese soldiers. Chinese males who were deemed to be in good health were automatically presumed to be a soldier. During this operation, Japanese forces committed atrocities against the Chinese population. The criteria used in identifying former soldiers was often arbitrary, as was the case with one Japanese company which apprehended all men with "shoe sores, callouses on the face, extremely good posture, and/or sharp-looking eyes". For this reason many civilians were taken at the same time. According to George Fitch, head of Nanjing's YMCA, "rickshaw coolies, carpenters, and other laborers are frequently taken". Chinese police officers and firefighters were also targeted, with even street sweepers and Buddhist burial workers from the Red Swastika Society being marched away on suspicion of being soldiers. Those who fled at the approach of any Japanese soldiers risked being shot. The rounding-up and mass killings of male civilians and captured POWs were referred to euphemistically as "mopping-up operations" in Japanese communiqués, in a manner "just like the Germans were to talk about 'processing' or 'handling' Jews". In one of the largest massacres, on the 15th to the 17th of December, Japanese troops from the Yamada Detachment including the 65th Infantry Regiment systemically led 17,000 to 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River near Mufushan and machine-gunned them to death. They then disposed of the corpses by burning or flushing them downstream. Recent research by Ono Kenji has found that the mass killings were pre-planned and executed in a systemic manner in accordance with orders issued directly by Prince Asaka. A soldier from the IJA's 13th Division described killing wounded survivors of the Mufushan massacre in his diary: "I figured that I'd never get another chance like this, so I stabbed thirty of the damned Chinks. Climbing atop the mountain of corpses, I felt like a real devil-slayer, stabbing again and again, with all my might. 'Ugh, ugh,' the Chinks groaned. There were old folks as well as kids, but we killed them lock, stock, and barrel. I also borrowed a buddy's sword and tried to decapitate some. I've never experienced anything so unusual." The Straw String Gorge Massacre occurred along the banks of the Yangtze River on the 18th of December. For most of the morning, Japanese soldiers tied the POWs' hands together. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash desperately. It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop and even longer for the Japanese to bayonet each individual. The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. In many other instances, prisoners were decapitated, used for bayonet practice, or tied together, doused in gasoline and set on fire. Wounded Chinese soldiers who remained in the city were killed in their hospital beds, bayoneted, clubbed, or dragged outside and burned alive. The Japanese also extended their "search-and-destroy" operations to the Nanjing countryside. During the Battle of Nanjing, one of the Cantonese (Guangdong) armies had broken out of the Japanese encirclement and formed guerrilla bands that harassed Japanese forces whilst retreating south. In retaliation, Japanese units systemically wiped out towns and villages spread out in the outlying regions, perpetrating rapes, arson and indiscriminate massacres which "added up to an enormous number" of deaths. Thousands were led away and mass-executed in an excavation known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch", a trench measuring about 300 m long and 5 m wide. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000.
The Rape of Women
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that in the first month of the occupation, Japanese soldiers committed approximately 20,000 cases of rape in the city. Some estimates conclude there were 80,000 rapes. According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, rapes of all ages, including children and elderly women, were commonplace, and there were many instances of sadistic and violent behavior related to these rapes. Following the rapes, many women were killed and their bodies were mutilated. A large number of rapes were done systematically by the Japanese soldiers as they went from door to door, searching for girls, with many women being captured and gang-raped. Japanese soldier Takokoro Kozo recalled: "Women suffered most. No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to fifteen to twenty soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse. After raping we would also kill them. The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation," such as by penetrating vaginas with bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, or other objects. For example, a six-months pregnant woman was stabbed sixteen times in the face and body, one stab piercing and killing her unborn child. A young woman had a beer bottle rammed up her vagina after being raped, and was then shot. Edgar Snow wrote how "discards were often bayoneted by drunken Japanese soldiers." On the 19th of December 1937, the Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary: "I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! 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... People are hysterical... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases." A fifteen-year-old girl was locked naked in a barracks housing two hundred to three hundred Japanese soldiers and raped multiple times daily. American correspondent Edgar Snow wrote how "Frequently mothers had to watch their babies beheaded, and then submit to raping." YMCA head Fitch reported that a woman "had her five-months infant deliberately smothered by the brute to stop it crying while he raped her." On the 7th of March 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital in the Safety Zone administrated by the United States, wrote in a letter to his family, "a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms". Here are two excerpts from his letters of the 15th and the 18th of December 1937 to his family: "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. Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night, the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. 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. They bayoneted one little boy of eight who [had] five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. I think he will live." 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. For the 17th of December: "Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital... Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College...alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers." In a documentary film about the Nanjing Massacre, In the Name of the Emperor, a former Japanese soldier named Shiro Azuma spoke candidly about their treatment of women in Nanjing, telling that they would first expose the women's intimate parts: "Afterwards, rape and even murder would often follow: 'We took turns raping them. It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn't say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk.'" Iris Chang, author of the book Rape of Nanking, wrote one of the most comprehensive accounts of Japanese war atrocities in China. In her book, she estimated that the number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. Chang also states that not all rape victims were women. Some Chinese men were sodomized and forced to perform "repulsive sex acts." Japanese soldiers also raped teenage boys. There are also accounts of Japanese troops coercing families into committing incestuous acts; sons were forced to rape their mothers, fathers their daughters, and brothers their sisters. Other family members would be forced to look on. Instead of punishing the Japanese troops who were responsible for wholesale rape, "'The Japanese expeditionary Force in Central China issued an order to set up comfort houses during this period of time,' Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a prominent history professor at Chuo University, observes, 'because Japan was afraid of criticism from China, the United States of America and Europe following the case of massive rapes between battles in Shanghai and Nanjing.'"
The Aftermath and Denial
The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history, and it remains a contentious topic in Sino-Japanese relations, as Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have either denied or minimized the massacre. After the war, Matsui and several other commanders at Nanjing were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried only because by the time of the tribunals they had either already been killed or committed ritual suicide. Asaka was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family and never tried. The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history, and it remains a contentious topic in Sino-Japanese relations, as Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have either denied or minimized the massacre. The death toll of civilians is difficult to precisely calculate due to the many bodies deliberately burnt, buried in mass graves, or dumped into the Yangtze River. Robert O. Wilson, a physician, testified that cases of gun wounds "continued to come in [to the hospital of University of Nanjing] for a matter of some six or seven weeks following the fall of the city on the 13th of December 1937. The capacity of the hospital was normally one hundred and eighty beds, and this was kept full to overflowing during this entire period." Bradley Campbell described the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide, given the fact that residents were still killed in large numbers during the aftermath, despite the successful and certain outcome in battle. Jean-Louis Margolin wrote that while the executions of prisoners of war in Nanjing were systematic and tolerated by higher officers, the killings of civilians were individual acts not ordered by command. He therefore argued that the massacre did not reflect a centrally directed genocidal policy. On the 13th of December 1937, John Rabe wrote in his diary: "It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had presumably been fleeing and were shot from behind. The Japanese march through the city in groups of ten to twenty soldiers and loot the shops... I watched with my own eyes as they looted the café of our German baker Herr Kiessling. Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as [was] almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road." American vice consul James Espy arrived in Nanjing on the 6th of January 1938, to reopen the American embassy. 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. Their stories and those of the German residents tell of the city having fallen into the hands of the Japanese as captured prey, not merely taken in the course of organized warfare but seized by an invading army whose members seemed to have set upon the prize to commit unlimited depredations and violence. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. The civilian Chinese population remaining in the city crowded the streets of the so-called 'safety zone' as refugees, many of whom are destitute. Physical evidences are almost everywhere to the killing of men, women and children, of the breaking into and looting of property and of the burning and destruction of houses and buildings. It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. It would seem according to stories told us by foreign witnesses that the soldiers were let loose like a barbarian horde to desecrate the city. Men, women and children were killed in uncounted numbers throughout the city. Stories are heard of civilians being shot or bayoneted for no apparent reason." On the 10th of February 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Georg Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase. During the Japanese reign of terror in Nanjing, which, by the way, continues to this day to a considerable degree, the Reverend John Magee, a member of the American Episcopal Church Mission who has been here for almost a quarter of a century, took motion pictures that eloquently bear witness to the atrocities committed by the Japanese... One will have to wait and see whether the highest officers in the Japanese army succeed, as they have indicated, in stopping the activities of their troops, which continue even today.