The Allison incident

On 26 January 1938, in Japanese-occupied Nanjing, a Japanese soldier struck John Moore Allison, third secretary of the United States embassy and consul, in the face, and then attacked his companion Charles Riggs, an American missionary lecturer at the University of Nanking (Jinling). The two men had come with the Japanese military police to investigate the abduction and rape of a Chinese woman. The slapping of a diplomat, less than seven weeks after the sinking of the gunboat Panay, provoked a wave of outrage in the United States. The Japanese government apologised and those responsible were court-martialled. The affair was minor in itself, but for Americans it became a symbol of how the Japanese army behaved in conquered China.

The Americans return to Nanjing

Allison, born in Kansas in 1905, knew Japan better than most American diplomats. After university he spent two years teaching English in Japanese schools, then worked for General Motors in Shanghai, and in 1932 he joined the American Foreign Service. He served as consul in Dalian and Jinan, and in 1937 was posted to the embassy in Nanjing.

On 13 December 1937 the Japanese captured Nanjing. Over the following weeks the Nanjing massacre unfolded: mass executions of prisoners and civilians, rape, looting and arson. The foreigners who had stayed in the city, among them a group of American missionaries and lecturers, ran a safety zone for refugees together with the German businessman John Rabe and recorded the atrocities. Foreign diplomats had been evacuated before the assault, and for several weeks the Japanese would not let them return. Allison and two colleagues reached the city aboard an American gunboat at the beginning of January 1938 and reopened the embassy. From then on he received complaints every day: Americans reported homes, missions and schools ransacked, American flags torn down and, above all, Japanese soldiers forcing their way into American institutions where thousands of Chinese had taken refuge. Allison passed these complaints on to the Japanese embassy and the army, which the military received with growing irritation.

The slap

A few days earlier, at night, armed Japanese soldiers had burst into an agricultural tools workshop belonging to the University of Nanking, an American missionary college, and carried off a Chinese woman. She later returned and said that she had been raped in a house occupied by soldiers. The case was reported to the Japanese embassy. On the afternoon of 26 January Allison and Riggs drove to the house with a Japanese consular policeman, military policemen, the victim and witnesses, so that the woman could identify the place.

According to Allison’s account, sent to Washington and published by the State Department on 28 January, the military policemen went into the courtyard with the woman, and the two Americans followed them as far as the gate. A Japanese soldier then began pushing Allison back, shouting “back, back”, and as Allison retreated he struck him in the face. He then slapped Riggs and, on hearing that he was dealing with Americans, went for him again and tore off his collar and buttons. The military policemen tried to restrain him, but without much conviction. Then an officer came out of the house and began hurling abuse at the Americans.

The Japanese version was different. The army claimed that Allison had tried to force his way into the building against the orders of the company commander and had behaved “like a prosecutor”, exceeding a consul’s authority. The truth about what had gone on inside the house was revealed after the war by Japanese historians, above all Ikuhiko Hata, on the basis of accounts by staff officers. The house was occupied by Lieutenant Gōzō Amano and his men, who had for some time been abducting women from the neighbourhood and raping them. When the army staff officer Tadao Hongō arrived to look into the matter, the soldiers refused to let him in, and Amano was found in a room with a woman. The scuffle at the gate had been an attempt to cover up these crimes.

The apology

On the morning of 27 January Hongō – a major, according to American documents – came to the American embassy and, on behalf of the commander of the Japanese forces in Nanjing, expressed his regret and apologised. Washington, however, demanded an official apology from the government. Secretary of State Cordell Hull instructed the ambassador in Tokyo, Joseph Grew, to lodge a protest. On the evening of 30 January the vice-minister for foreign affairs told Grew that the striking of an American consul by a Japanese soldier was a “highly regrettable occurrence”, expressed the government’s “deep regret” and promised a rigorous investigation and the punishment of those responsible. According to some studies, the diplomat Katsuo Okazaki, then consul general, also apologised. The Japanese side noted that the two sides’ accounts differed considerably. The same day Hongō announced that the unit commander and twenty soldiers would be court-martialled. Amano was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment – formally for intimidating a superior, not for the rapes.

Washington accepted the apology and the affair died down. According to some historians, however, the American press gave it more space than the Nanjing massacre itself, reports of which were then arriving piecemeal and late, whereas a slapped diplomat was an image that everyone understood. There were calls for a boycott of Japanese silk, Japan’s main export to America.

Significance

The Allison incident was one of many that winter. In the same weeks the American embassy recorded dozens of cases of American property being looted in Nanjing, and the State Department was compiling a list of Japanese violations of American rights in China, from the bombing of missions to the obstruction of trade. After the sinking of the Panay, every such case strengthened the conviction in Washington that the Japanese authorities either could not or would not control their own army. At that very moment, on 16 January 1938, the government of Fumimaro Konoe had announced that it would no longer deal with the government of Chiang Kai-shek, which heralded a long war in China and more and more disputes with the powers that had interests there. American public opinion, however, still did not want war, and for months to come the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt confined itself to protests.

Allison later had a distinguished career. During the war he served in London, and afterwards he was one of the architects of American policy towards defeated Japan and a co-author of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. From 1953 to 1957 he was ambassador in Tokyo. In March 1954 he signed there the agreement on American military assistance to Japan; the signature on the Japanese side was that of Foreign Minister Katsuo Okazaki – the same man who, according to the accounts mentioned earlier, had apologised to him in 1938 for the blow in Nanjing.