The Nanjing massacre

On 13 December 1937 units of General Iwane Matsui’s Japanese Central China Area Army entered Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. The city’s defence had collapsed the day before, and tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers who had failed to cross the Yangtze had thrown away their weapons and uniforms. That same day began what the Chinese call the Great Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese most often the Nanjing Incident, and Western historians the Nanjing massacre or the Rape of Nanking. For about six weeks, and in the surrounding counties until the spring of 1938, Japanese soldiers shot and bayoneted prisoners, murdered men suspected of military service, killed civilians, including women and children, raped tens of thousands of women and girls, looted homes and shops, and burned a large part of the city. The number of victims is still disputed, and the range of the dispute speaks for itself: the Tokyo tribunal accepted a figure of more than 200,000 dead, the Chinese tribunal in Nanjing and the official historiography of the PRC give 300,000, and most present-day Japanese and Western historians estimate the death toll at anywhere from several tens of thousands to around 200,000. The Nanjing massacre is one of the gravest war crimes of the 20th century and still casts a shadow over relations between China and Japan.

From Shanghai to Nanjing

The war that broke out in the summer of 1937 after the Marco Polo Bridge incident spread to Shanghai in August. The three-month Battle of Shanghai cost both sides enormous losses, and it also frayed the nerves of the Japanese army: its soldiers, many of them reservists torn from their families, had expected a quick victory and instead became bogged down in bloody fighting for every canal and every village. Only the landing of General Heisuke Yanagawa’s 10th Army in Hangzhou Bay on 5 November forced the Chinese into a retreat that soon turned into flight. The General Staff in Tokyo set the troops a line they were forbidden to cross, but Matsui had pressed from the outset for a march on the capital, and the 10th Army set off westwards on its own initiative. On 1 December Tokyo accepted the fait accompli and issued the order to capture Nanjing. On 2 December command of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army passed to Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, the Emperor’s uncle (husband of one of Emperor Meiji’s daughters), because the ailing Matsui was directing the operation as a whole from his headquarters in Suzhou.

The march from the coast to Nanjing was itself marked by atrocities. Japanese units, advancing faster than their supplies could follow, lived by plunder. Villages were burned, men were killed as potential guerrillas, women were raped. The writer Tatsuzō Ishikawa, who talked to soldiers of the 16th Division at the beginning of 1938, described this in his novel Living Soldiers. The censors confiscated the issue of the magazine that carried it, and the author was given a suspended prison sentence. In those same days the Tokyo newspaper Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun reported, like a sporting contest, a “race” between two second lieutenants of the 16th Division, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, to kill a hundred people with the sword. Historians still argue over how much of the story was true and how much propaganda boasting, but the very fact that a major daily printed it with pride says a great deal about the atmosphere of the campaign.

The army’s attitude to prisoners also played an important part. Japan had not declared war on China, calling it an “incident”, and in August 1937 the War Ministry instructed the troops in China not to apply the convention on the laws and customs of war strictly and to avoid even the term “prisoner of war”. In the diary of the commander of the 16th Division, General Kesago Nakajima, the entry for 13 December records that “as a rule, the policy is not to take prisoners”. According to some scholars, similar instructions came from Prince Asaka’s staff. The dispute concerns who issued them, not the fact that they were carried out on a mass scale.

The city at the moment of its fall

Before the war Nanjing had about a million inhabitants. When Japanese air raids began in the autumn and news of the fate of captured towns came in from Shanghai, most of the better-off residents left for the interior, together with the government offices. Chiang Kai-shek’s government moved to Wuhan and Chongqing, and Chiang himself left the city on 7 December. Those who stayed in Nanjing were the poorest and those who had nowhere to go, together with refugees from the surrounding villages. Estimates of the population at the time of the city’s fall range from about 200,000–250,000 (according to the foreigners’ committee of the time) to more than half a million. The defence was entrusted to General Tang Shengzhi, who promised to fight to the end but had at his disposal several tens of thousands of soldiers, many of them exhausted after Shanghai or freshly mobilised recruits. To deprive the enemy of cover, the Chinese themselves burned many districts and villages outside the walls.

A dozen or so foreigners who had decided to stay – many of them American missionaries, doctors and university teachers – set up the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone on 22 November. At its head was the German John Rabe, head of the local branch of Siemens and a member of the NSDAP. He was chosen partly because Germany was linked to Japan by the Anti-Comintern Pact, and it was hoped that his swastika party badge would impress Japanese soldiers. The zone, covering a few square kilometres in the western part of the city, with the university, Ginling College and the diplomatic missions, was never formally recognised by the Japanese, but during the fighting it was largely spared from shelling. In the first days of December more than 200,000 people took refuge there.

13 December and the first days

After several days of assault, on the evening of 12 December Tang Shengzhi gave the order to withdraw and crossed the river himself. The order did not reach all units and caused chaos. Crowds of soldiers and civilians surged towards the Yijiang Gate and the waterfront in the Xiaguan district, where there were not enough boats for everyone. Many drowned in the Yangtze; others threw away their weapons, took off their uniforms and tried to hide in the city. On the morning of 13 December Japanese divisions entered through the Zhonghua, Guanghua, Zhongshan and Taiping Gates, and navy ships appeared on the river.

From the first hours Japanese units began the so-called mopping-up of hidden soldiers in the city. In practice this meant detaining all men of military age in whom they claimed to detect calluses from weapons on their hands, marks from a helmet on their foreheads, a military bearing or simply a “suspicious look”. Porters, rickshaw men, policemen, firemen and labourers were detained. From 14 December the Japanese also entered the Safety Zone and led hundreds of men out of the refugee camps. The detainees were tied up and marched to the river, to the outskirts of the city or to ponds, where they were mown down with machine guns and finished off with bayonets, and their bodies were burned or thrown into the Yangtze. The largest of these executions took place in mid-December at the foot of the Mufushan hills by the river, where units of the 13th Division killed, according to various estimates, anywhere from several thousand to more than ten thousand prisoners who had earlier surrendered of their own accord. The combat reports of individual Japanese units, published after the war, including by the veterans’ association, list in total tens of thousands of prisoners “disposed of” or “shot”. On the basis of Japanese documents alone, the Canadian historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi counted more than 46,000 men deemed to be soldiers who were killed in this way.

Civilians were killed too, indiscriminately and often for no reason at all: passers-by in the streets, people who ran at the sight of a patrol, residents of houses that soldiers entered in search of loot and women. John Rabe noted on 13 December that during a drive around the city he came across bodies every hundred or two hundred metres, and that the civilian corpses he examined had bullet wounds in the back. American journalists who left Nanjing a few days after its capture, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News and Tillman Durdin of The New York Times, were the first to describe to the world the mass executions and the streets full of corpses. Durdin noted that some Japanese units and some officers showed restraint, but he called the conduct of the army as a whole a disgrace to its country.

Rape, looting and fire

The fate of women was especially terrible. Soldiers went from house to house, carried off women and girls in lorries, gang-raped them, often in front of their families, and then killed and mutilated many of them. The victims included both children and old women. The Tokyo tribunal accepted that some 20,000 rapes took place in the city alone in the first month of the occupation. Other estimates go as high as 80,000, while the most cautious speak of several thousand documented cases and a vast number of unreported ones. The American missionary Minnie Vautrin took in up to 10,000 women and children on the grounds of Ginling College, a women’s college, and almost every night turned away soldiers who came looking for victims. By February 1938 the Safety Zone committee had passed to the Japanese embassy lists of several hundred carefully described cases of murder, rape and looting that its members had witnessed themselves or had verified.

Looting went on at the same time. Soldiers, often in front of their officers, plundered shops, houses, embassies and missions, taking food, valuables, furniture and bicycles, and made Chinese carry the loot for them. Many buildings were set on fire after being plundered. The fires burned for weeks and, according to contemporary accounts, consumed about a third of the city’s buildings, including almost the whole of the main shopping street.

On 17 December Matsui, still ill, made a ceremonial entry into Nanjing at the head of a parade, and the following day he held a memorial service for the fallen. To ensure his safety, units speeded up the “mopping-up” of the city, which according to many historians further increased the number of executions. Over the following days Matsui heard about the rapes and looting, and noted in his diary that “some such acts are unavoidable”. Years later he claimed that he had wept with anger while reprimanding his subordinates, but he did nothing that effectively stopped the crimes.

The Safety Zone

The Safety Zone was not safe in the full sense of the word, since soldiers entered it whenever they wished. Even so, the death rate within it was incomparably lower than in the rest of the city and in the suburbs. Rabe, the doctors of the university hospital and the missionaries distributed food, took in the wounded, intervened with Japanese diplomats and personally threw soldiers out of the camps, invoking their German and American citizenship. The Dane Bernhard Sindberg and the German Karl Günther set up a camp for several thousand refugees at a cement works outside the city. The American clergyman John Magee secretly filmed the wounded and rape victims in the hospital – one of the few pieces of film evidence of the crime. It is estimated that the committee’s work saved the lives of tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of people.

The end of the massacre and the death toll

The first three weeks were the worst. At the end of December the Japanese began registering the population and issuing passes, and on 1 January 1938 they set up a Chinese self-government committee under their control. At the beginning of January American, British and German diplomats returned to the city, and their reports confirmed the committee’s accounts. At the turn of January and February the occupation authorities forced the refugees to leave the camps and dissolved the Safety Zone committee in its existing form. Killings and rapes nevertheless continued for weeks, especially in the six surrounding counties, where the Japanese burned villages in reprisal for guerrilla activity. Some historians, among them Tokushi Kasahara and Wakabayashi, therefore consider that the massacre lasted from the beginning of December 1937 until the end of March 1938, when the collaborationist “Reformed Government” was set up in Nanjing.

The exact number of victims cannot be established. In August 1945 the Japanese authorities destroyed a large part of the military records, bodies were burned and thrown into the river, and the time frame and geographical extent of the crime are defined in different ways. The Tokyo tribunal, relying on witness testimony and on the figures of charitable societies that had buried some 155,000 bodies, found that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners had been killed in and around Nanjing during the first six weeks. The Chinese tribunal in Nanjing in 1947 gave a figure of more than 300,000, and this became the official figure in the PRC, inscribed on the wall of the memorial museum to the victims. Some historians believe that the figures of one of these burial societies are greatly inflated. John Rabe estimated the number of civilians killed within the walls at 50,000–60,000, while the American sociologist Lewis Smythe, on the basis of a survey conducted in the spring of 1938, put it at a little over ten thousand in the city and more than 26,000 in the surrounding area, although his survey by its nature omitted families that had been wiped out entirely. The Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata estimates the death toll at around 40,000; Tokushi Kasahara at “more than 100,000, close to 200,000 or more”; and Wakabayashi at more than 100,000 but fewer than 200,000 in the city and the six counties. In the 2010 report of a joint Japanese–Chinese panel of historians, the Japanese side acknowledged that the massacre took place and gave estimates ranging from about 20,000 to 200,000, while the Chinese side kept to the figure of 300,000. The Japanese government officially acknowledges that the killing of a large number of non-combatants and looting by the Japanese army cannot be denied, and considers the number of victims difficult to determine.

The reckoning

News from Nanjing reached Tokyo both through diplomats and through the army. At the beginning of 1938 the General Staff recalled Matsui, Prince Asaka and dozens of other senior officers from China, but no one was punished, and the Japanese press presented the capture of Nanjing as a great victory, celebrated in Tokyo with lantern processions. After the war the International Military Tribunal for the Far East found Matsui guilty of having known about the crimes and done nothing effective to stop them. He was hanged on 23 December 1948, together with the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Kōki Hirota, whom the tribunal held responsible, among other things, for failing to act on the reports from Nanjing. The judgment against Matsui became one of the first precedents for command responsibility in international law. The Chinese tribunal in Nanjing sentenced to death and executed by firing squad the commander of the 6th Division, General Hisao Tani, in 1947, and in 1948 Mukai, Noda and Captain Gunkichi Tanaka. Prince Asaka, as a member of the imperial family, never stood trial thanks to a decision by General Douglas MacArthur, and when questioned he denied that any massacre had taken place. Emperor Hirohito was not put on trial either; there is no evidence that in December 1937 he knew the scale of the crimes.

Denial and memory

As early as the 1970s publications appeared in Japan claiming that the massacre was an “illusion” or an invention of Chinese and American propaganda, and that those killed were exclusively “soldiers in civilian clothes” who could lawfully be shot. These claims are untenable. The crime is documented independently by the diaries and reports of foreigners, including citizens of Germany, Japan’s partner in the Anti-Comintern Pact; by diplomats’ reports; by survivors’ testimony; by photographs; by Magee’s film; and above all by Japanese sources – the diaries of soldiers and officers and the reports of units. The army veterans’ association Kaikōsha, which in the 1980s collected testimony in order to refute the “Nanjing myth”, published in 1985 an apology to the Chinese people for the “large-scale unlawful killing”. One of the leading deniers, Matsui’s former secretary Masaaki Tanaka, introduced several hundred alterations into the general’s diary when he published it, as other researchers revealed. The shooting without trial of thousands of disarmed prisoners and random men was a war crime regardless of whether they had previously worn uniform.

In China relatively little was said about the massacre in the first decades after the war. Its memory returned forcefully in the 1980s, when disputes over history textbooks intensified in Japan. In 1985 the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre was opened, since 2014 13 December has been a national day of remembrance in the PRC, and in 2015 the documents of the massacre were inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. Iris Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking, published in 1997, brought the crime back to the attention of Western readers. Rabe’s diary, published in the 1990s, made the NSDAP member who saved Chinese lives a symbol of ordinary decency.

Significance

The Japanese command had counted on the fall of the capital forcing Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate. The opposite happened. The Chinese government moved into the interior, and the news of what had befallen Nanjing strengthened the will to resist and the newly concluded Second United Front with the communists. The mediation of the German ambassador Oskar Trautmann failed, and in January 1938 Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe announced that Japan would no longer deal with Chiang’s government. The war, which Tokyo still called an “incident”, turned into a long, gruelling struggle that tied down most of the Japanese army and ultimately pushed Japan towards war with the United States and Britain.

Nanjing also showed what the war in Asia would be like. The killing of prisoners, the murder of civilians as “suspects”, and mass rape – after which the army, instead of punishing the culprits, began setting up brothels on a large scale with comfort women – were later repeated throughout China, in Singapore, in Manila and on the occupied islands of the Pacific. In the West the reports from Nanjing, together with the almost simultaneous sinking of the gunboat Panay, began to change Americans’ image of Japan, although sanctions were still a long way off. In March 1940 Wang Jingwei’s collaborationist government took office in Nanjing, and in 1946 the testimony of witnesses to December 1937 became one of the main strands of the Tokyo trial.