Rape of Nanjing



The Rape of Nanjing or Nanjing Massacre was a wartime atrocity committed by Japanese soldiers in between December 1937 and March 1938 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, following their successful invasion and capture of the city of Nanjing (南京, usually Anglicised as Nanking at the time) which was then the capital of the Republic of China and a Special Administrative District.

During the following massacre, between 250,000 and 300,000 civilians were commonly quoted as being the number killed (including disarmed POWs), and according to Western witnesses 20,000 women were raped. The Japanese invaders also raped men, children, and the elderly, mutilated and murdered many of their rape victims, and forced some families to engage in incest.

The carnage was so bad that the decided to intervene and put a stop to it.

In Japan, the episode is called Nanking Jiken (南京事件, ナンキンじけん) or "Nanking Incident".

Events
With the outbreak of the in mid-1937, the armies of Imperial Japan (IJA) smashed through northern China, quickly capturing the old Chinese capital at Beijing (then commonly anglicized as "Peking"). After capturing Shanghai later that year, the door was opened for Japanese forces to travel up the Yangtze and attack the Nationalist government at its seat of power in Nanjing.

The Nanjing Massacre is far from the only example of Japanese wartime atrocities; the Imperial Japanese Army encouraged a policy of intentional savagery, hoping the horrors they unleashed would break the will of the Chinese partisans. It is only so well documented due to the presence of Western noncombatants who recorded what they witnessed.

Immediately following the fall of Nanjing, Japanese soldiers slaughtered thousands of Chinese soldiers who had surrendered to them. They then rounded up hundreds more POWs and civilians from the city and transported them outside the city's Taiping Gate to blow them up with landmines or burn them alive after dousing them with gasoline. The following six weeks of Japanese occupation in the city became even worse. IJA soldiers were encouraged by their officers to come up with ever more inventively awful ways to kill Chinese civilians. As Iris Chang wrote in The Rape of Nanking:

Things got so bad that John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi, teamed up with other foreigners to establish a "Safety Zone" where they could attempt to keep civilians safe. As Rabe wrote in his diary, he and the other Europeans and Americans lived in constant fear of the Japanese despite being theoretically safe:

Denial
As with a majority of mass injustices, there are those who deny the Rape of Nanjing even occurred. Many officials and historians claim that, while deaths and rapes did occur, they were on a far smaller scale than reported. The heightened problem in this particular case is that denial of this horror is part of mainstream Japanese politics, and is indeed tacitly subscribed to by the vast majority of Japanese. In fact, former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe (a grandson of former-Prime Minister and unprosecuted Class A war criminal, a man so brutal his own contemporaries nicknamed him "The Devil of Showa") has been a long-time denier. However, the figure of 300,000, first popularised by Australian journalist Harold John Timperley in his 1938 book What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China, is likely an overestimate. Lewis S. C. Smythe, who was a missionary and professor at Nanking University and also witness the massacre first hand, carried out an investigation as part of his job as Secretary of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone (December 14, 1937 -- February 10, 1938) and came up with the figure of 12,000 within the Nanking SAD and an additional 26,870 in surrounding villages. Smythe's figures are widely considered a likely underestimate today. There are also fundamental difference as to both spatial and temporal boundaries, and whether the estimated 100,000 POWs executed should be counted, in the legitimate academic discourse of methods of estimation. Today's academic consensus is that between 40,000 and 200,000 civilians died within Nanking SAD in the first 6 weeks of occupation, and one could therefore view attempts to put the figure much below 40,000 as "denials".

Former Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano and Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara have called the massacre a Chinese fabrication. Though the former apologized for this remark shortly thereafter, known nationalist crank Ishihara has yet to do so, and in fact has publicly promoted a denialist documentary.

During the Second World War, it appears that Nazi Germany's position was a denial of any wrongdoing, for what should hopefully be obvious reasons. The aforementioned John Rabe was, upon his return to Germany, detained by the Gestapo and ordered not to write or lecture about the events at Nanking.

As George Orwell put it in Looking Back on the Spanish War: "The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads – they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."

Other notable denialists

 * Masayuki Fujio: Former Minister of Education.
 * Nobukatsu Fujioka: A professor of education at Tokyo University who made an effort to have accounts of wartime atrocities committed by Japan removed from textbooks.
 * Motohiko Izawa: Historical fiction and mystery author who serves as a visiting professor to Shuchiin University.
 * Shūdō Higashinakano: A retired Professor of Intellectual History at Asia University.
 * Tomomi Inada: Former Defense Minister who resigned after a 2017 cover-up scandal.
 * Takashi Kawamura: Mayor of Nagoya.
 * Yoshinori Kobayashi: Manga artist who created the revisionist manga Shin Gōmanism Sengen Supesharu - Sensō Ron.
 * Jin Matsubara: Former Chairman of the National Safety Commission and Minister of State for Consumer and Food Safety.
 * Toshio Motoya: Real estate and hotel kingpin.
 * Nariaki Nakayama: Gaffe-prone Nippon Kaigi member and former Minister of Education.
 * Shingo Nishimura: A former attorney and member of the House of Representatives.
 * Hisahiko Okazaki: Diplomat who served in the Japanese embassy in Washington D.C., and later as ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Thailand.
 * Yoshiko Sakurai: A former writer for the Christian Science Monitor and TV reporter.
 * Koichi Sugiyama: A composer best known for his work on the Dragon Quest franchise.
 * Katsuya Takasu: A celebrity plastic surgeon who also engaged in Holocaust denial.
 * Masaaki Tanaka: A World War II veteran who was later found to have tampered with his then-superior's personal diary before its publication.
 * Yuko Tojo: The granddaughter of Hideki Tojo; an ultra-nationalist politician and Imperial Japanese apologist.
 * Shōichi Watanabe: A former English scholar, conservative spokesperson, and popular culture critic.
 * Sharin Yamano: A manga artist best known for creating the xenophobic, anti-Korean manga Manga Kenkanryu (Hating the Korean Wave), a reactionary piece against the resurgence South Korean popular culture in Japan.
 * Michael Yon: American war photographer and one of the few non-Japanese denialists of the Japanese war crimes.

Legacy in China
Since the 1990s, with growing nationalism in both countries, the Chinese government has been just as determined to keep the Nanjing Massacre in the world's memory as the Japanese right are to deny it. Currently, the Chinese Communist Party views the memory of the war and the atrocities as an essential tool to keep the loyalty of the people, almost constantly airing television specials on the subject as well as exhaustively teaching about it in their schools. The legacy of the war seems to be an increasingly important element of Chinese nationalism, particularly when aimed at their regional adversaries. Even more than 80 years later (Xi visited a memorial to commemorate the anniversary), the memory of the Massacre is a major sticking point between China and Japan, this despite warming relations. The official stance of the Chinese government is that Japan has not done enough to apologize. In Taiwan, the pan-Blue stance is similar to that of the PRC (e.g., in Decemeber 2014 then-president Ma of KMT attempted to play the nationalistic card after suffering heavy defeat in local elections in the aftermath of the Sunflower movement ), but the current ruling pan-Green stance is to completely sidestep the issue altogether (e.g. current president Tsai's opinion piece in 2009 as leader of opposition party) in favour of a closer alliance with Japan.