[12][26][60] The figure was originally based on the verdict of the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal which added the burial records of 155,300 bodies with 72,291 destroyed corpses to arrive at a total of 279,586, though there was an apparent adding mistake in this calculation. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka told a war correspondent later that he was in a very perilous position when his headquarters was ambushed by Chinese forces that were in the midst of fleeing from Nanjing east of the city. [21] Noting that different definitions produce vastly different estimates, he believes that even the significant disagreements between the historians Tokushi Kasahara and Ikuhiko Hata would disappear if they had been using the same definitions. [73], According to Canadian scholar David Bruce MacDonald, the higher range of estimates of over 100,000 victims are more likely to be accurate,[74] whereas by contrast the Irish historian LM Cullen argues that the lower range of estimates, which put the death toll in tens of thousands, "are probably the most credible. The massacre has remained a wedge issue between modern China and Japan. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 382384. [87] In 1994, nearly 20 diaries in his collection were published, which became an important source of evidence for the massacre. Kasahara generally concludes that the death toll must have been well over 100,000, and possibly around 200,000. The report consists of eight volumes and was released to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the massacre. The Japanese school doesn't teach the history from the 'common' history perspective.. Please give us help. [13], Perhaps the most notorious atrocity was a killing contest between two Japanese officers as reported in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun and the English-language Japan Advertiser. This orthodox victimhood narrative has become entwined with the Chinese national identity and is very sensitive to the revisionist sentiments from the far-right in Japan, which makes the memory of the massacre a recurring point of tension in Sino-Japanese relations after 1982. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking, then the capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945). Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), p. 193. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 197175", Yang, Daqing. However, the actual number of victims is hard to determine, according to the government of Japan. [28], David Askew, a historian at Ritsumeikan University, states that the death toll of the Nanking Massacre can be calculated by modern-day historians on the basis of four types of sources. Nanking Massacre death toll. [34], In reference to the greatly divergent ways in which various scholars have delineated the massacre, Askew has affirmed that the debate on the death toll "is meaningless if two completely different definitions are being used". As we pulled the string, the buttocks were exposed. He and his staff realized that they could not risk the annihilation of their elite troops in a symbolic but hopeless defense of the capital. However, death toll estimates vary widely with some ranging as low as 40,000 . . The Rape of Nanjing, or the Nanjing Massacre, was the 1937 sacking of Nanjing by invading Japanese forces during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It was worse. . The massacre finally wound down in early 1938. On 10 February 1938, Legation Secretary of the German Embassy, Rosen, wrote to his Foreign Ministry about a film made in December by Reverend John Magee to recommend its purchase. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. ", "Case 14 On December 16, seven girls (ages ranged from 16 to 21) were taken away from the Military College. [clarification needed], In 1984, in an attempt to refute the allegations of war crimes in Nanjing, the Japanese Army Veterans Association (Kaikosha) interviewed former Japanese soldiers who had served in the Nanjing area from 1937 to 1938. [112], The duration of the incident is naturally defined by its geography: the earlier the Japanese entered the area, the longer the duration. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. The Chinese government left for relocation on December 1, and the president left on December 7, leaving the fate of Nanjing to an International Committee led by John Rabe, a German national. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 23 men and the younger by 3. Outside of . Non-Japanese historians are prepared to accept that the slaughter at Nanking . I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling Collegealone. After a while we would say something like, "It's my day to take a bath," and we took turns raping them. "Convergence or Divergence? [138], During the 1970s, Katsuichi Honda wrote a series of articles for the Asahi Shimbun on war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II (such as the Nanjing Massacre). Fifteen of the remaining 22 foreigners formed a committee, called the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone in the western quarter of the city. The final type of source mentioned by David Askew is data sampling, and though only one such survey of this variety was conducted, Lewis S.C. Smythe's "War Damage in the Nanking Area", it is an essential document for estimating civilian casualties of the atrocity. What happened within the city limits was even more humiliating for humanity. The American ambassador in Hankow replied that although he supported Rabe's proposal for a ceasefire, Chiang did not. . "[47] Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:[48]. The Nanjing massacre has also been described as one of the most barbaric episodes in the history of World War II although it officially began on September 1, 1939. . It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop and even longer for the Japanese to bayonet each individual. The seventh and last person in the first row was a pregnant woman. Whether Asaka ordered the Rape, or simply stood by as it happened, is disputed, but he took no action to stop the carnage. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. [7] By mid-November, the Japanese had captured Shanghai with the help of naval and aerial bombardment. Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing". [154] He said that there were isolated incidents of brutality but no widespread atrocity, and criticized the Tokyo Trials figure of 200,000. Soon after the end of the war, Matsui and his lieutenant Tani Hisao, were tried and convicted for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were executed. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. "[150][151], On February 24, 2012, Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara denied the Nanjing massacre. See: Death toll of the Nanking Massacre. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash desperately. [69] She found that Chinese historians favor estimates between 40,000 and 150,000 and that they "speculated that reducing the official Chinese estimate of victims would pave the way for greater reconciliation between Japan and China". Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 85. [158], Many Japanese prime ministers have visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine for Japanese war deaths up until the end of the Second World War, which includes war criminals that were involved in the Nanjing Massacre. [57] Nanking Massacre studies in Japan eventually became divided into three camps based on their death toll estimates: the "illusion" school of Nanking Massacre deniers, the "great massacre" school which believes hundreds of thousands were killed, and the "middle-of-the-road" or "centrist" school which puts the number in the tens of thousands. THE NANKING MASSACRE - Page 4: Defining the victims. An official from South Korea said they would summon the Tokyo ambassador to protest. On December 18, 1937, as General Iwane Matsui began to comprehend the full extent of the rape, murder, and looting in the city, he grew increasingly dismayed. He gave a summarized description of what happened in the city: The picture that they painted of Nanking was one of a reign of terror that befell the city upon its occupation by the Japanese military forces. The capacity of the hospital was normally one hundred and eighty beds, and this was kept full to overflowing during this entire period. On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. Tokyo Nichi Nichi, 13 December 1937 article on the killing contest. "[137], The debate concerning the massacre took place mainly in the 1970s, according to Higashinakano Shudo. As the Japanese approached, the Chinese army withdrew the bulk of its forces since Nanjing was not a defensible position. 18 I Ho Lu, Japanese soldiers wanted a man's cigarette case and when he hesitated, one of the soldier crashed in the side of his head with a bayonet. As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . On 19 December 1937, the Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:[46]. We looked. Essay On The Nanking Massacre. Rabe and American missionary Lewis S. C. Smythe, secretary of the International Committee and a professor of sociology at the University of Nanjing, recorded the actions of the Japanese troops and filed complaints with the Japanese embassy. [58] B. Campbell described the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide, given the fact that residents were still slaughtered en masse during the aftermath, despite the successful and certain outcome in battle. As the Japanese army approached Nanjing, most of them fled the city, leaving 27 foreigners. [59] However, Jean-Louis Margolin does not believe that the Nanjing atrocities should be considered a genocide because only prisoners of war were executed in a systematic manner and the targeting of civilians was sporadic and done without orders by individual actors. [17], In 2005, a Tokyo district judge dismissed a suit by the families of the lieutenants, stating that "the lieutenants admitted the fact that they raced to kill 100 people" and that the story cannot be proven to be clearly false. [18][33] Though Ikuhiko Hata has also used Japanese military records to calculate the death toll of the massacre, he does not account for exaggeration as Itakura did. The Japanese government had previously agreed not to attack parts of the city that did not contain Chinese military forces, and the members of the Committee managed to persuade the Chinese government to move their troops out of the area. [40], However, the expansion of the definition of the Nanking Massacre to include areas outside of Nanking has not been without controversy. Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness When I think of the feelings and sentiments of many of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanjing and of the future of the two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. The massacre occurred over six weeks starting December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. He agrees with Hata that Chinese soldiers actively engaged in combat were not massacre victims, but he also includes in his definition of the massacre any Chinese soldiers who were killed on the battlefield but not actively resisting, noting that many confrontations between the Chinese and Japanese Armies were more like one-sided slaughters than battles. A new report on the 1937-1938 massacre doesn't settle the contested issue of how many people died -- but it points to a much more [26][27] However, emotional arguments and political interference in the debate have tended to hinder the construction of an academic consensus on the number of people killed in the atrocity. That same afternoon, two small Japanese Navy fleets arrived on both sides of the Yangtze River. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital. A lesser debate rests on who among the dead to be included as "massacre victims". The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937. They do not mention sexual assaults. However, most scholars and historians consider the number to be more than 12,000 victims. [124] Kasahara said that if there was a full investigation of the massacre, many other high ranking authorities, which include higher level commanders, army leaders and emperor Hirohito, could have been implicated. This created panic in the area and hundreds of women moved into the Ginling College campus yesterday. Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried. [citation needed], The government of Japan believes it can not be denied that the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts by the Japanese army occurred. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. The Tokyo War Crime Tribunal defined the period of the massacre to the ensuing six weeks. The perpetrators also committed other war crimes such as mass rape, looting, and arson. It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese . For example, a two-volume collection of military documents related to the Nanjing operations was published in 1989; and disturbing excerpts from Kesago Nakajima's diary, a commander at Nanjing, was published in the early 1980s. "Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking After Chinese Command Fled." "[101] However, this estimate includes an accusation that the Japanese Army murdered 57,418 Chinese POWs at Mufushan, though the latest research indicates that between 4,000 and 20,000 were massacred,[102][103] and it also includes the 112,266 corpses allegedly buried by the Chongshantang, a charitable association, though today mainstream historians agree that the Chongshantang's records were at least greatly exaggerated if not entirely fabricated. [1] Hence, depending on the timeframe and the geographic scope, an empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range is from over 40,000 to under 200,000.[1]. On May 1, 1946, SCAP officials interrogated Prince Asaka, who was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities, about his involvement in the Nanjing Massacre and the deposition was submitted to the International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo tribunal. 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