On December 13, 1937, the Japanese captured China’s capital Nanking, thus marking the inception of mass murder and rape that continues to haunt Sino-Japanese relations today.1 Nanking stood as China’s capital from the third to the sixth century but fell just five months into the war under the leadership of General Iwane Matsui.2 For Japan, this victory established their nation as a viable imperialist power and reinforced nationalist ideologies that fueled the nations’ wartime aggression. For China, however, the loss devastated the livelihood of its citizens. In the six weeks that followed, roughly 300,000 people died and an estimated 20,000 to 80,000 people were raped.3 The violent manner in which the Japanese committed these crimes justifies the recollection of the event as the Nanking Massacre and the Rape of Nanking.

I first heard of the Nanking Massacre in my history class at the Boston Japanese Language school. My teacher’s lesson that Saturday revolved around the Nanking Massacre and how the claims of rape and mass murder were fabricated by the Chinese government. Despite having no previous knowledge of this event, listening to someone I trusted casually deny the experiences of hundreds of thousands of people elicited a guttural reaction of disgust. Sitting in a classroom in the modern United States where, in my experience, massacres are not explained away, I also felt unsettled. I told my mother, who was born and raised in China, about what I was taught earlier that day and without so much as producing a negative expression she told me that my teacher was wrong and that the massacre was not a myth. I asked her how she knew this and she revealed that her mother is from Nanking. Standing at the crossroads of three historical narratives, I wondered how my teacher, my mother, and I developed such contrasting views of the same event.

In an attempt to answer this question, I consulted two Social Science professors at the College of General Studies who both recommended The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by the journalist Iris Chang. Chang researched the Nanking massacre after hearing stories from her grandmother who survived the invasion. Her book suggests that the inception of the Japanese imperialist movement created a relationship between Japan, China, and the United States that is more interlaced than the starkly different perspectives I experienced.

In 1852, the United States was frustrated that Japan was unwilling to open its ports to trade and President Fillmore enlisted Commander Matthew Perry to end Japan’s isolation.4 Faced with steam-powered ships and artillery, the Japanese were intimidated into opening their ports and, thus, began trading with Western countries, an act that many Japanese perceived as national humiliation. In addition, the resources of the small island nation were strained by rapid population growth with the Japanese population growing from 30 million people in the Meiji restoration period to nearly 65 million people by the 1930s. The urge to restore national pride and the need to satisfy its citizens’ demands prompted Japan to become an imperial power.

As the title The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II suggests, Japan becoming an imperialist power devastated Nanking. On August 15, 1937, Japan began air raids against China and in December of the same year began horrific forms of murder, torture, and rape.5 Chang describes how the Japanese army “fired at anyone in sight as soon as they entered the capital” and killed regardless of a person’s civilian or military status.6 Japanese soldiers eventually turned killing into a sport and competed with one another to see who could kill the most and the quickest. The most infamous killing contest was that between Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi who competed to see who could kill 100 Chinese the fastest, regardless of their status as an enemy soldier or unarmed citizen. When both exceeded their mark of 100 people, the contest was extended and avidly covered by the newspaper Japan Advertiser.7

Chinese died by systematic torture. Chang asserts that the “Japanese directed burial operations with the precision and efficiency of an assembly line” and operated the procession so that the Chinese captives were forced to kill each other.8 After being captured, the Chinese were divided into groups and forced to dig their own graves. Then another group would bury the first group and this group would in turn dig their own grave and be buried by the next. Mutilation occurred as well by use of bayonet and needles to gouge out eyes and stab victims “in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes.” 9 Other forms of torture included dousing Chinese captives with gasoline and igniting a fire by shooting them as well as having victims bleed to death after German Shepherds rip out their entrails.10

Rape, however, stood above the rest as the most common form of violence in Japanese military culture. The nomenclature “The Rape of Nanking” alone references the rampant sexual violence that plagued the capital. Although the rape of enemy women had been outlawed by the Japanese government, soldiers ignored the rule and the act became routine, putting women of all ages at danger of being kidnapped for sex slavery or being violated in their homes.11 The state of pregnancy failed to halt the advances of Japanese soldiers who “violated many who were about to go into labor, were in labor, or who had given birth only a few days earlier.”12 Rather than a fulfillment of sexual desires, rape became a brutal form of entertainment for Japanese soldiers as shown by the unnecessary impalement of vaginas with “wooden rods, twigs, and weeds.”13 Although the majority of rape victims were women, Chinese men were sodomized or forced to participate in humiliating sexual acts as well. Chang cites an account where Japanese soldiers tried to coerce a Buddhist monk, who had taken a vow of celibacy, into having sex with a woman they had just gang raped. When he refused, he was castrated and bled to death.14

Many of these accounts are now available to us due to the establishment of the Nanking Safety zone by twenty-seven westerners who were aware of the invasion and chose to remain in the city. In his 1999 edited collection Documents on the Rape of Nanking, History and East Asian Languages expert Timothy Brook compiles journal entries by these westerners and letters they exchanged with the Japanese consulate. According to Brook, there were reported to be seventeen Americans, six Germans, two Russians, one Australian, and one British person included in that group.15 These men and women discussed creating an International Committee that would provide relief for refugees and civilians in November, even before the fall of Nanking. On November 22, the committee held its first meeting and elected John Rabe, a German businessman and member of the Nazi party, as chair.16 On December 14, the day after Nanking was seized, Rabe penned a letter to the Japanese commander of Nanking establishing the committee as an intermediary in the conflict between Japan and China.17 The committee communicated with the Japanese consulate for the entirety of the massacre and documented atrocities in the “memoranda,” in which a portion of an entry reads “December 20, 4 p.m., four Japanese soldiers raped three women in the house next door to our headquarters, 23 Kiangsu Road, after forcing the men into another room with a gun.”18 By harboring Chinese citizens in the Nanking Safety zone, the committee saved “hundreds of thousands of refugees from almost certain extermination” and helped preserve accounts of what occurred in Nanking.19

While the actions of the International Committee seem undeniably commendable, Timothy Brook questions the intentions behind the documentation of events. Brooks examines whether “the Westerners play[ed] up their own role in the work of securing the safety of citizens of the capital, to the neglect of Chinese efforts.”20 The documents written by the International Committee contribute to the minimization of Chinese efforts as “only Westerners had the luxury of speaking.”21 Chinese informants no longer had their name credited by the committee even as the massacre ensued.22 The Westerners redacted names as a safety precaution, but due to this blatant omission, the story of Nanking has been dictated through a Western perspective. It is also interesting to notice that John Rabe is commemorated as the “Nazi Hero of Nanking,” but the courageous rebellions of Chinese civilians are reduced to mere mentions.23

Perhaps one of the most decisive events in determining how the Nanking Massacre is remembered is the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, more commonly known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trial. The trial began on May 3, 1946 after U.S Army General Douglas MacArthur issued a charter following the conclusion of World War II. Lasting two and a half years, the longest war crimes trial in history ended with the conviction of 25 Japanese military officers.24 The lengthy hearing suggests that the United States remained stringent with Japan, but in fact many exemptions were granted to the Japanese. The most crucial exception occurred when the American government allowed Emperor Hirohito to be exempt from trial in exchange for Japan’s surrender in the war.25 This evidence of quid pro quo undermines the credibility of the trials and enabled revisionism of the Nanking Massacre. According to Chang, “[t]he decision to give Hirohito immunity from war responsibility and, still worse, the decision to keep him on the throne, later impeded the Japanese people’s own historical awareness of their World War II Crimes”.26 By pardoning the Japanese leader who was worshipped as the son of God and in whose name the war had been carried out, the U.S permitted Japanese citizens to disregard the gravity of the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and remain faithful to their Emperor.

Censorship also played an extremely active role in the revision of the Nanking Massacre. In “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzo and Japan’s War in Asia,” Professor Haruko Taya Cook explores the role of censorship in Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s novel Living Soldiers.27 Ishikawa was a Japanese writer who covered the war in China and documented the massacre. However, his work faced censorship from the government, the publisher, and himself. Ishikawa first encountered the government’s harsh censorship. 28 Government censorship of writers was so prevalent that chuo koron, the publisher of Living Soldiers, felt pressure to censor their content. Although the chuo koron was a known liberal organization, the publisher redacted Ishikawa’s work and relegated it to the back of the publication. However, the particular form of censorship used by chuo koronmay have been an act of rebellion as traces of the omitted words were seen in the “[l]ines of periods, ellipses—empty circles—and sometimes completely blank spaces,” and the readers could fill in the blanks.29 In terms of self-censorship, Cook suggests that “Ishikawa did not set his protagonists in scenes of massacre within Nanjing, although he presented them engaging in brutal murders of Chinese civilians and captives” in anticipation of the trouble he would face if he implicated Japanese soldiers.30 Due to the pressure of censorship from the government, a trickle down effect demonstrated “how insidious and multilayered censorship can be.”31

Deeply rooted censorship continued suppression of the massacre and Japan’s failure to recognize their role as an imperialist aggressor during the war. Unlike the German people, who “incorporated into their postwar political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, [were] guilty of war crimes,” the Japanese government has not addressed the crimes committed during the massacre.32 The massacre is not taught to Japanese students, as members of the government continue to dismiss the event as an inevitable consequence of war. In 1986, Masayuki Fujio, the Japanese minister of education, asserted that what conspired in Nanking was ‘“just a part of war”’ and that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was ‘“racial revenge” meant to “rob Japan of her power.”’33 The emphasis on Japan’s power from a man in such a position suggests that national pride drives this motivated blindness. My Japanese teacher may have vehemently defended his home country from the shame of the war crimes committed in Nanking due to this shared national pride and explains how the Japanese government’s failure to apologize for the massacre remains a point of contention in Sino-Japanese relations. The impact of the nanking Massacre on individuals, however, is evident in the fact that Iris Chang published her book more than half a century after the event occurred in 1991. She learned of the event as a child after her family fled China and immigrated to the United States due to the Sino-Japanese war. Chang painfully comments that the massacre “remained buried in the back of [her] mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.”34 Although Chang is Chinese-American and did not experience the massacre first-hand, her narration illustrates how painful her parents’ memories were, given that her perception of the event was so negative and long-held. Chang’s negative perspective is shared by Li Yongzheng in his essay titled “Thoughts on the 50th Anniversary of the Victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan.” Yongzheng senses that many Chinese view the end of the Sino-Japanese war as a victory for their nation but disagrees with this perspective as he believes that the Chinese “have deceived [themselves] and others by considering [themselves] to be the victors” as this absolves the Japanese government from having to apologize.35

The West remembers the Nanking Massacre in a distant fashion that minimizes the role of America. In the scholarly research article “The Nanking Atrocity: Still and Moving Images 1937-1944,” Gary Evans, a member of the Department of Communications at the University of Ottawa, examined the use of images of the Rape of Nanking published in LIFE and LOOK magazines, two competing popular periodicals in the United States. Many Americans were exposed to the atrocities of Nanking through images in these magazines, creating an inherent separation between the event and the audience as the images were specifically chosen and improved by the magazines before they reached the public. The bombing of the American ship Panay by the Japanese, which carried Americans fleeing Nanking, particularly caught the attention of the American audience.36 Newsreel footage and photographs shocked the American public and instilled the notion that America now had a stake in the distant war. However, “few knew that President Roosevelt had asked that the most damning footage showing Japanese planes coming at the Panay at deck level be censored” as to not jeopardize negotiations with Japan to indemnify the United States.37 The concealment of Japanese actions for American political gains may explain why many Americans are unaware of the Nanking Massacre.

Although America is not directly guilty of war crimes during the Nanking Massacre like the Japanese soldiers, they were complicit in the resulting revisionism. President Fillmore’s decision to intimidate the Japanese into ending economic isolationist policies pushed Japan to become an imperialist power and start the second Sino-Japanese War. The lack of awareness of the massacre in the United States also illustrates that our education system values Eurocentric historical narratives. Similarly, the Japanese and Chinese perspectives of the massacre are both heavily biased. The Sino-Japanese wars have created a schism in the relationship between the two Asian superpowers which, in the past, could have been solved by the Japanese government acknowledging the severity of their actions during the war. Now, however, the relations seem irreparable. In the course of my research about the Nanking Massacre It became apparent that historical narratives are constructed by politics and socio-cultural factors. This explains how Japanese, Chinese, and Americans view the same events completely differently. Perhaps this could be remedied with education. If each nation could put aside national pride and study how revisionism modifies how history is remembered, we might be able to see events in a more accurate manner and prevent the occurrence of another massacre.

Bibliography

Notes

1. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking:The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 4.

2. Ibid., 61.

3. Ibid., 89.

4. Ibid. 2.

5. Ibid., 64.

6. Ibid., 82.

7. Ibid., 171.

8. Ibid., 87.

9. Ibid., 87.

10. Ibid., 87.

11. Ibid., 49.

12. Ibid., 91.

13. Ibid., 94.

14. Ibid., 95.

15. Timothy Brooks, “Introduction,” in Documents on the Rape of Nanking, ed. Timothy Brooks (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), 3.

16. Ibid., 3.

17. Timothy Brooks, “Introduction,” 2.

18. Ibid., 47.

19. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking, 106.

20. Brook, Timothy, “Introduction,” 12.

21. Ibid., 12.

22. Ibid., 12.

23. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, caption under the photographs following page 146.

24. “Nanjing Massacre,” Britanica Academic, academic-eb-com.ezproxy.bu.edu/levels/collegiate/article/Nanjing-Massacre/54784.

25. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking, 176.

26. Ibid., 176.

27. Taya Haruko Cook, “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers: Ishikawa Tatsuzo and Japan’s War in Asia,” in War, Occupation, and Creativity: Japan and East Asia 1920-1960, ed. Marlene J. Mayo, Thomas J. Rimer, and Eleanor H. Kerkham (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 150.

28. Taya Haruko Cook, “The Many Lives of Living Soldiers,” 150.

29.Ibid., 154-155.

30. Ibid., 160.

31. Ibid., 160.

32. Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking, 200.

33. Ibid., 203.

34. Ibid., 8.

35. Xingzu Gao, Shimin Wu, Yungong Hu, and Ruizhen Cha, “Special Issue on Nanjing Massacre (Part 1),” tr. Robert P. Gray, The Nanjing Massacre, Feb. 1996. Epilogue. http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/njm-ch14.htm

36. Gary Evans, “The Nanking Atrocity: Still and Moving Images 1937–1944,” Media and Communication 1.1 (2013), 52.

37. Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking, 54.