Nanjing Massacre

• 1. Introduction

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  The Nanjing Massacre began on the 13th of December 1937, the day Japanese troops entered the Chinese capital, and what followed in the weeks and months ahead stands as one of the worst wartime atrocities in recorded history. Before a single soldier crossed the city gates, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka had already issued a written order: "kill all captives". The International Military Tribunal for the Far East would later estimate that more than 200,000 people were killed. Estimates of rape range from 4,000 to over 80,000, with figures around 20,000 being most commonly cited. One third of the city was destroyed by arson. And yet the massacre almost did not happen in this form at all. Japanese military planners had drawn up an alternative: a week of saturation bombing with mustard gas and incendiary explosives that one historian described as "a holocaust for one city". What emerges from the diaries, testimonies, and newspaper dispatches of people who were there is not a single event but a system, one that operated from the high command all the way down to individual soldiers, and that continued long after the world assumed it had ended.

• 2. Road to the Capital

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  The Second Sino-Japanese War commenced on the 7th of July 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, and within months the conflict had consumed Shanghai in brutal urban combat. The Battle of Shanghai was more difficult and prolonged than Japan had anticipated. General Iwane Matsui had expressed his intention to advance on Nanjing even before departing for Shanghai, firmly believing that capturing the Chinese capital would cause the entire Nationalist Government to collapse. The General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo initially resisted, wanting the war to end, but eventually relented to Matsui's pressure.

  As the Japanese army marched the roughly 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing, the journey itself became a campaign of terror. Japanese commanders ordered troops to treat all Chinese outside Shanghai as belligerents, to kill them, and destroy their homes. Japanese aircraft strafed unarmed farmers and refugees. Entire villages were torched. On the 23rd of November, soldiers set fire to the Nanqiantou hamlet near Wuxi, locking many inhabitants inside the burning houses. A two-year-old boy was wrestled from his mother and thrown into the flames.

  On the 29th of November, the Japanese 3rd Battalion from the 16th Division rounded up eighty civilians in Changzhou and massacred them with heavy machine guns. Army doctor Hosaka Akira, present at the killing, recalled the sight of people praying, crying, and begging before the guns opened fire. In urban areas, Jiading saw 8,000 civilian residents murdered after shelling. The city of Zhenjiang was captured on the 8th of December, set ablaze, and burned for ten days, with soldiers executing anyone who tried to douse the flames.

  A Japanese journalist embedded with the Tenth Army wrote at the time that the rapid advance toward Nanjing was sustained by what he described as a tacit understanding among officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wished. This was not aberrant behavior at the fringes of an otherwise disciplined force. It was the mode of march.

• 3. The Order to Kill

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  Prince Yasuhiko Asaka arrived at the front on the 8th of December 1937, three days after departing Tokyo by plane. He had been sent to Nanjing by Emperor Hirohito, who had noted in a palace memorandum that Asaka's attitude was "not good", and assigned him the campaign as an opportunity to make amends. At the front, lieutenant-generals Kesago Nakajima and Heisuke Yanagawa briefed Asaka: preliminary negotiations suggested that approximately 300,000 Chinese troops in the vicinity were ready to surrender.

  Asaka's response was the order to "kill all captives". Some accounts hold that his aide-de-camp, lieutenant colonel Isamu Cho, sent the order under the Prince's sign-manual without Asaka's knowledge. Others hold that Asaka signed it directly. Japanese researcher Ono Kenji's analysis of wartime materials directly implicated Asaka in issuing the order to illegally execute Chinese captives. Regardless of who wrote the words, Asaka gave no orders to stop the carnage once it began.

  The legal foundation for what followed had been laid months earlier. On the 5th of August 1937, Emperor Hirohito ratified the Japanese army's proposal to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners. That decision flowed downward through the command structure and surfaced in December in Nanjing. After the war, Asaka was granted immunity from prosecution as a member of the imperial family and was never tried. He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939 and remained on the Supreme War Council until the war's end in August 1945.

• 4. Six Weeks of Killing

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  On the 13th of December, the 6th and 114th Divisions of the Japanese Army were first to enter Nanjing, followed simultaneously by the 9th Division at Guanghua Gate and the 16th Division at the Zhongshan and Taiping gates. The massacres were organized to kill as many people as possible in the shortest time, typically driving rows of unarmed prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River and cutting them down with machine guns before finishing survivors with bayonets.

  Between the 15th and the 17th of December, troops from the Yamada Detachment including the 65th Infantry Regiment led between 17,000 and 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks near Mufushan and machine-gunned them to death, then disposed of the bodies by burning or flushing them downstream. A soldier from the 13th Division wrote in his diary that he stabbed thirty survivors atop the resulting mountain of corpses, borrowing a buddy's sword to attempt decapitations. The Straw String Gorge Massacre took place on the 18th of December; prisoners had their hands bound for most of the morning before being divided into four columns and shot at dusk. It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop.

  At Taiping Gate, Japanese troops gathered 1,300 soldiers and civilians, blew them up with landmines, doused survivors with petrol, set them on fire, and finished the survivors with bayonets. In a trench known as the Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch, measuring about 300 meters long and 5 meters wide, estimates of those buried range from 4,000 to 20,000. New York Times correspondent F. Tillman Durdin witnessed Japanese soldiers gun down approximately two hundred Chinese within ten minutes. He left Nanjing on the 17th of December aboard the USS Oahu, reporting in early January that the Japanese had admitted to rounding up around 15,000 Chinese men in the first three days and had captured another 25,000 soldiers who were systematically executed.

  Canadian historian Bob Wakabayashi's analysis of Japanese wartime records identified the illegal killing of 46,215 men considered by the IJA to be military personnel. The IJA 16th Division alone executed between 4,000 and 12,000 prisoners near Xiaguan and shoved the corpses into the Yangtze, transforming it, in Wakabayashi's phrase, into "a river of dead bodies".

• 5. Mass Rape and Sexual Terror

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  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. Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary on the 19th of December 1937 that he and others estimated at least 1,000 rapes a night, and many by day, with women being carried off every morning, afternoon, and evening.

  A large number of rapes were conducted systematically, door to door. Japanese soldier Takokoro Kozo recalled coal trucks being sent into city streets and villages to seize women, who were then allocated to groups of fifteen to twenty soldiers. Women were killed after rapes, often through mutilation. American correspondent Edgar Snow wrote that women described as discards were often bayoneted by drunken soldiers, and that mothers were frequently forced to watch their babies beheaded before being raped themselves.

  At Ginling Girls College, run by Christian missionary Minnie Vautrin within the Safety Zone, approximately 100 women and girls were raped in a single night according to John Rabe's diary entry for the 17th of December. A young woman in Safety Zone case records had been raped six or seven times daily over multiple days. Case 14 in the committee's documented complaints, reported on the 18th of December, described seven girls aged between 16 and 21 taken from the Military College; five returned.

  Surgeon Robert O. Wilson, writing to his family on the 7th of March 1938 from the university hospital, estimated conservatively that about 100,000 people had been slaughtered in cold blood. His letters from the 15th and the 18th of December 1937 described two girls of about 16 raped to death in a refugee camp, and a boy of eight years old stabbed with five bayonet wounds, one penetrating his stomach. Author Iris Chang, in her book The Rape of Nanking, documented cases of Japanese troops forcing family members to commit incestuous acts while other family members were made to watch.

• 6. The Safety Zone and Its Defenders

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  As the Japanese army approached Nanjing, most Western residents fled, leaving 27 foreigners behind. Fifteen of the remaining 22 who stayed formed the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone on the 22nd of November, demarcated with Red Cross flags in the western quarter of the city. German businessman John Rabe was elected leader, in part because his Nazi Party membership made him useful: the German-Japanese Anti-Comintern Pact gave him a degree of standing with the occupiers. The Safety Zone is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives, with some estimates placing the figure between 200,000 and 250,000.

  Rabe's diaries are among the most comprehensive firsthand records of what occurred. On the 13th of December he wrote that his party came across corpses every 100 to 200 yards, their bodies showing bullet holes in the back. He intervened personally on the 17th of December when two Japanese soldiers climbed his garden wall and was able to turn them away by displaying his Nazi Party badge. By the 5th of February 1938, the International Committee had forwarded to the Japanese embassy a total of 450 documented cases of murder, rape, torture, and disorder.

  American missionary John Magee remained in the city to produce a 16 mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the massacre. On the 10th of February 1938, Germany's Legation Secretary Georg Rosen wrote to his Foreign Ministry recommending purchase of Magee's footage, describing it as bearing eloquent witness to the atrocities while noting that the reign of terror continued "to a considerable degree" even as he wrote.

  At the age of 26, a Dane named Bernhard Arp Sindberg began working as a guard at a cement factory days before the invasion. He and German colleague Karl Gunther converted the factory into a refugee camp sheltering approximately 6,000 to 10,000 civilians. Knowing that Imperial Japan was not hostile toward Denmark or Nazi Germany, Sindberg painted a large Danish flag on the roof and placed the Danish flag and the German swastika around the perimeter. Whenever Japanese soldiers approached the gate, Sindberg would step out with the Danish flag and speak with them until they left. Sindberg was also an amateur photographer, and his documentation from inside the factory constitutes another layer of the historical record.

• 7. Causes and Culpability

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  Multiple overlapping forces produced the Nanjing Massacre. Historian Edward Drea argues that the brutalization and hierarchy of violence within the Imperial Japanese Army socialized many of its members to accept a culture of cruelty against those perceived as weaker. Japanese recruits were routinely subjected to harsh abuse in training, and Japanese soldiers were disciplined violently by officers who were themselves disciplined by their superiors. That violence, turned outward, found its outlet in Nanjing.

  Racism was structural, not incidental. Japanese author Tsuda Michio documented the case of a Japanese sergeant who had raped and killed numerous Chinese women but became impotent after discovering that one victim was actually a Japanese woman who had married a Chinese man. Former soldier Shiro Azuma, in a 1998 interview, described being taught that the Chinese were not a superior race and that contempt for them was the natural attitude. He recalled the logic his unit used: during rape, the women were human; afterward, they became, in his words, pig's flesh.

  The prolonged difficulty of the Battle of Shanghai also plays a part in most scholarly accounts. Associate Professor Jennifer M. Dixon of Villanova University noted that the battle was more difficult and prolonged than Japan anticipated, which contributed to a desire among officers and soldiers for revenge. Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe justified the massacre as retaliation against Kuomintang aggression and had personally rejected Chiang Kai-shek's offer of negotiation through a German ambassador before Nanjing fell.

  Historian Jean-Louis Margolin distinguished between the executions of prisoners, which were systematic and tolerated by higher officers, and the killings of civilians, which he argued were individual acts not ordered by command. Historian Yuki Tanaka reached a different conclusion, arguing that while Japan did not endorse a clear policy of genocide, the military campaign in China was "undoubtedly genocidal", with Nanjing as a typical example. General Matsui himself, on the 18th of December 1937, told a civilian aide that he had unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on the city, and on New Year's Day confided over a toast to a Japanese diplomat: "My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable."

• 8. Aftermath and Denial

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  After the war, General Iwane Matsui and several other commanders at Nanjing were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some Japanese military leaders were not tried only because they had been killed or had committed ritual suicide before the tribunals began. Prince Asaka escaped all prosecution through imperial family immunity. In February 1938, both Asaka and Matsui had been recalled to Japan; Matsui returned to retirement while Asaka remained on the Supreme War Council until August 1945.

  The historical record was deliberately thinned. Between the announcement of a ceasefire on the 15th of August 1945 and the arrival of American troops on the 28th of August, Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered orders to field commands across the Pacific and East Asia to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes. Professor Tanaka Hiromi of Japan's National Defense Academy estimated that less than 0.1 percent of the material ordered for destruction survived. Japan's director of Military History Archives confirmed in 2003 that as much as 70 percent of Japan's wartime records were destroyed.

  Some concealed documents surfaced only decades later. A two-volume collection of military records related to the Nanjing operations was not published until 1989. Excerpts from the diary of Kesago Nakajima, a commander at Nanjing, became available only in the early 1980s. The killing contest between officers Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, which the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun had covered like a sporting event in 1937, became the subject of ferocious debate in Japan starting in 1967. In 2005, a Tokyo district judge dismissed a lawsuit by the lieutenants' families, stating that "the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people" and that the story could not be proven clearly false.

  The massacre remains a live fault line in Sino-Japanese relations. Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have continued to deny or minimize the events. The death toll debate, ranging from 40,000 to over 340,000 depending on geographic scope and methodology, has itself become a contested political arena. What is not contested is that by the 28th of March 1938, when the collaborating weixin zhengfu government was established and atrocities by Japanese troops began to lessen, the Safety Zone's last refugee camps would not close until May of that year, three weeks after the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone had been forcibly renamed the Nanjing International Rescue Committee on the 18th of February 1938.