Please
note: The following subject matter is of immense importance, but could
be difficult to read. There is a Frank Discussion Of Rape And Other
Atrocities Committed During War.
After
entering a large museum in one of the world’s most ancient cities and
the former capital of the Chinese empire, Nanking—or Nanjing as it’s
known today—my 18-year-old daughter Sophia and I walked over a glass
walkway that allowed us to look down 10 feet of earth and observe an
ancient footpath. Lights highlighted the ground under the glass while
the room we were in was dark.
To
our right hung numerous photographs on a black wall showing Japanese
soldiers slaughtering Chinese citizens in December 1937 revealed by
individual lights, the types one sees on art museum paintings. Dead
babies, severed heads, piles of bodies on Yangtze River banks, and
helpless prisoners of war were all documented there by photographs taken
by the perpetrators themselves, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers who had
conquered Nanking.
The photo collage
documented an orgy of slaughter. Walking along the pathway, there was a
rectangular centerpiece in the hall ringed by 3-foot walls. Many, on
gazing over the lips of the precipice, shook their heads. Some put their
hands together and offered prayers to the heavens. Others whispered to
companions, “Bastards,” “I hate the Japanese,” “How can Japan deny
this?” or “America should’ve dropped more bombs on the assholes.”
Visitors’ eyes were grave and focused. The air vibrated with their
energy.
My daughter, standing 5’11” with
blond hair and blue eyes stood out in the crowd of mostly local Han
Chinese. Everyone was silent except for those walking away from the
centerpiece. Sophia looked over the wall first and then she glanced at
me with wide eyes filled with sadness. I thought of what Dante wrote in
the Inferno: “In truth I found myself upon the brink of an abyss, the
melancholy valley containing thundering, unending wailings.” As I looked
over, I beheld a mass grave.
Many skulls
showed signs of having either been crushed by a heavy object or shot by a
bullet. Other skulls had been removed from their bodies, settling
several feet away from the shoulders. Sophia and I weren’t aware yet
that this crime scene was not even close to being the museum’s biggest.
One
much larger awaited us in another building where hundreds of bodies
lay; old ladies, POWs and children, their remains bearing evidence the
Japanese had killed them with guns, swords and clubs. We were walking
over a massive unplanned cemetery where everyone had met an untimely and
murderous end; the Japanese had “stained the world with blood” to quote
Dante again. Lining the exhibit were jars of human remains mixed with
the earth that had absorbed their flesh.
My
daughter and I were visiting one of the largest crime scenes in
history. Sophia was accompanying me because she is fluent in Chinese and
was helping me conduct research. On this day, our journey took us to
The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese
Invaders in Nanjing. I had been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington
D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe
in Berlin, and Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Krakow, Poland,
but nothing had prepared me for this massive complex built to remind
the world of the Rape of Nanking.
The
European sites show evidence of mass murder with Auschwitz being the
most dramatic. The former death camp had large rooms full of shoes,
shaven female hair and suitcases of the deceased. However, here we
observed hundreds of skeletons, often with their empty black eye sockets
starring at us as if pleading to never forget. The gloomy air vibrated
with messages from their shattered bones, relying on the living to
recount their stories. The sheer size of the extermination reminded me
of Dante’s phrase: “I should never have believed that death could have
unmade so many souls.” How could an apparently cultured civilization
like Japan unleash soldiers who could commit such atrocities?
Before
and during World War II, Japanese fascists preached that everything
Japanese was superior and anything non-Japanese barbaric. Gaijin (or
non-Japanese) were viewed as non-human. For decades, Japanese citizens
had been indoctrinated with “evidence” that Japan’s enemies, like
Caucasians and Chinese “were inferior, even subhuman creatures for whom
no respect was possible.” Uno Shintarō, who beheaded prisoners, wrote,
“we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you’re winning, the
losers look…miserable. We concluded that the Yamato race was superior.”
George Orwell wrote that for centuries, the Japanese preached “a racial
theory…more extreme” than the Nazis, claiming “their own race to be
divine and all others hereditarily inferior.” James Young, a former
Japanese prisoner, wrote an insightful 1940 book Our Enemy in which he
supported Orwell’s conclusions, writing about the Nanking massacre:
“[The Japanese] duplicat[ed] all Nazi brutalities, exceed[ed] them, and
add[ed] a whole satanic range of their own peculiar cruelties.” This was
especially exhibited during the Rape of Nanking, which encompasses for
my study the Imperial Japanese military march from Shanghai in November
1937 to the final destruction of Nanking in January 1938.
The
majority of the slaughter happened after the Chinese army of 150,000
(the Nanking Garrison Force) disintegrated under the better led and
equipped Japanese by mid-December. The majority of Chinese soldiers
(approximately 90,000) had laid down their arms, 10,000 had died in
battle defending Nanking, and 47,000 had escaped west. Many have asked
why the Chinese did not fight more ferociously at Nanking. Chiang
Kai-Shek’s men had fought bravely around Shanghai for months, inflicting
thousands of casualties on the IJA in protracted urban warfare that
started in September 1937, but when his men retreated in November to
Nanking, it was an exhausted force and city leaders had not prepared the
capital for defensive battle. The Chinese commander, General Shengzhi
Tang, abandoned Nanking and the majority of his troops. He was ordered
to leave by Chiang Kai-Shek (who along with his wife also had abandoned
the city), but one would think he and the Generalissimo would have
looked out for their troops before leaving. Without effective
leadership, the Chinese soldiers showed little initiative and caused
much “military confusion.” As a result, the Chinese at Nanking were
quickly defeated.
Capturing so many
prisoners of war, the IJA resorted to wholesale butchery. Military
correspondent Yukio Omata provided testimony to the POW executions:
“Those
in the first row were beheaded, those in the second row were forced to
dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were
beheaded. The killing went on non-stop, from morning until night, but
they were only able to kill 2,000 persons in this way. The next day,
tired of killing in this fashion, they set up machineguns. Two of them
raked a cross-fire at the lined-up prisoners. Rat-atat-tat. Triggers
were pulled. The prisoners fled into the water, but no one was able to
make it to the other shore.”
It is
estimated that out of the 300,000 individuals murdered during the
campaign from Shanghai to Nanking in the winter of 1937-38, some
80,000-90,000 were defenseless National Chinese POWs. “It was a
slaughter, a massacre” according to many historian Sun Zhaiwei. IJA
commander at Nanking, General Iwane Matsui, “lacked any idea that the
killing of POWs was a violation of international law and a grave crime
against humanity” to further quote Zhaiwei. At the same time defenseless
POWs were killed by Matsui’s 10th Army, rapes were occurring
everywhere. A graphic interview given by IJA soldier Shirō Azuma who
committed such crimes was stunning:
At
first, we used some kinky words like Bikankan. Bi means “[Pussy],”
Kankan means ‘look.’ Bikankan means, ‘Let’s see a woman open up her
legs.’ Chinese women didn’t wear underpants. Instead, they wore trousers
tied with a string. There was no belt. As we pulled the string, the
buttocks were exposed. We ‘Bikankan.’ We looked. After a while we would
say something like, ‘It’s my day to take a bath,’ and 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.”
Yale University
historian Jonathan Spence wrote that Nanking’s “period of terror and
destruction” ranks “among the worst in…modern warfare... [It was] a
storm of violence and cruelty that has few parallels.” Today in the
Chinese consciousness, it is as significant for them as Auschwitz is for
Jews. The 200 miles between Shanghai and Nanking in the fall and
winter of 1937 was a flotsam of rape and dead bodies, a literal
“carnival of death” according to the Museum of the Pacific War in
Fredericksburg, Texas.
Horrible executions
and gratuitous murder were observed at Soochow, a mid-point between
Shanghai and Nanking and its devastation mirrored countless other towns.
Similar acts happened in cities surrounding Nanking such as Mufushan,
Wuhu, Nit’ang, Wuxi and Suzhou. This Japanese pattern of behavior
demonstrates that “these murders followed such a similar pattern over
such a wide range of territory and covered such a long period of time,
and so many were committed after protests had been registered by neutral
nations that…only positive orders from above [like Prime Minister
Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito] made them possible” according to
historian James Scott.
As a result of
troops being sent to conquer Nanking without supplies, they had to
source their own food. In doing so they did not have to destroy
thousands of homesteads, but they did so anyway. Victims called the IJA
Huang-chün, an “army of locusts.” Japan used this campaign to create
fear and submission.
Civilians were
massacred openly to entertain soldiers and encourage others to conduct
themselves similarly. The IJA soldiers acted “beyond the bounds of
permitted aspirations” to quote Joseph Conrad from his work "Heart of
Darkness."
Besides seizing more
territory and resources for Japan, another reason for taking Nanking was
that it was Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang capital. Taking this city was
not only a military victory, but also a triumph politically and
psychologically, showing the world Japan waged a “war of annihilation.”
For destroying and raping Nanking, Hirohito decorated his generals with
medals.
All these Nanking atrocities
happened with the encouragement, approval and knowledge of Japanese
commanders: General Iwane Matsui (Commander 10th Army), Lieutenant
General Hisao Tani (6th Division Commander), Lieutenant General Kesago
Nakajima (16th Division Commander) and Lieutenant General Prince
Yasuhiko Asaka (Hirohito’s 50-year-old granduncle), an ultranationalist
on the Supreme War Council. After battle started, Lieutenant General
Nakajima lent his sword to help a subordinate fulfill such criminal
orders: “Takayama Kenshi visited me at noon today [13 December]. There
happened to be seven captives, so I asked him to try to behead them with
my sword. I did not expect him to do such a good job—he cut off two
heads.”
When IJA soldiers were not
executing Chinese men, they raped women and girls. It became their
obsession. “Chinese witnesses saw Japanese rape girls under ten years of
age…and then slash them in half by sword.” Australian journalist Harold
John Timperley called the Japanese “lust-mad.” In some cases, soldiers
would enter a village, round up the men, escort them outside town and
place them under armed guard. Then, IJA soldiers took turns returning to
the village and raping the women. Chinese men would sit on the side of
the road trembling as they heard the screams of their wives, daughters
and sisters but could do nothing. In Nanking, two husbands who ran back
for their wives to save them were shot by their guards. Women were taken
to IJA camps and never heard of again.
Japanese
went beyond rape and butchered women, killed infants and small children
in front of their mothers and buried people alive. IJA soldiers
castrated prisoners before using them for bayonet practice, or doused
them with gasoline and lit them afire. They tortured the elderly to
death. Some Nazis in the International Safety Zone, such as John Rabe,
wrote Adolf Hitler to help stop these atrocities, calling the IJA
“bestial machinery.” He also wrote the Japanese Embassy along with
others for help detailing IJA crimes (the Embassy did nothing).
Dead
women lay naked in the streets, brutally violated. IJA soldiers hunted
citizens like rabbits. In fact, the killings would have been more
widespread had the expatriate community, led by Nazi Party Member John
Rabe who chaired the International Committee for the Nanking Safety
Zone, not set up a precinct to protect civilians.
These
expatriates saved 200,000 by defending a Japanese-free zone and using
international pressure to keep IJA forces at bay. Although repeatedly
badgered to provide them with women to rape, the expatriates refused to
give into their demands, although they could not protect everyone and
some were violated. Outside that zone, most Chinese suffered horribly.
By
February 1937 things settled down, but the Imperial Japanese Army’s
march to Nanking had added a landmass the size of Connecticut to the
Empire and secured one of the most important ports in the world,
Shanghai. The Japanese had utterly destroyed the Nationalist capital and
devastated the entire population. For the next eight years, this whole
region continued to suffer murder, rape and pillage. The Rape of Nanking
goes down as not only one of the worst crimes against humanity during
World War II, but one of the most horrible chapters in the history of
humankind.
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