Honda believes all those atrocities that were committed on "the road to Nanking" were part of the massacre. This created panic in the area and hundreds of women moved into the Ginling College campus yesterday. Notably, the novelist Hotta Yoshie[ja] wrote a novel, Time (Jikan) in 1953, portraying the massacre from the point of view of a Chinese intellectual watching it happen. George A. Fitch, Lewis S. C. Smythe, and James McCallum filed affidavits with their diaries and letters. They believed the 300,000 toll typified a "Chinese-style exaggeration" with disregard for evidence. Friday December 17 2021, 10.25am, The Times. 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. The horrific events are known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing, as tens of thousands of women and girls were sexually assaulted. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. [56][57] Robert O. Wilson, a physician, testified that cases of gun wounds "continued to come in [to the hospital of University of Nanjing] for a matter of some six or seven weeks following the fall of the city on December 13, 1937. [124], In 1947, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, the two officers responsible for the contest to kill 100 people, were both arrested and extradited to China. Another piece of evidence that was submitted to the tribunal was Harold Timperley's telegram regarding the Nanjing Massacre which had been intercepted and decoded by the Americans on January 17, 1938. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. Killings were most intense in the first five days from December 13 and remained moderately intense until December 31, 1937, according to the Japanese military records. [125][126], Moritake Tanabe, the Chief of Staff of the Japanese 10th Army at the time of the massacre, was tried for unrelated for war crimes in the Dutch East Indies. Updated on March 06, 2017. [67] Joshua A. Fogel, a historian of China at York University, has decried the efforts of many Chinese to exaggerate the death toll of the atrocity and then "silence anyone who disagrees". General Matsui was indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "deliberately and recklessly" ignoring his legal duty "to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches" of the Hague Convention. [99][100] An estimate death toll of 300,000 has also been cited. [47][48], The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that the massacre took place in the parts of Nanking captured on December 13, 1937, and after and lasted until early February 1938. 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. One of the books by Hs, Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, was also adduced in court. Yoshida has argued that the Nanjing Massacre has figured in the attempts of all three nations as they work to preserve and redefine national and ethnic pride and identity, assuming different kinds of significance based on each country's changing internal and external enemies. [49] Though many still support the IMTFE's geographic scope for the massacre, in 1984 the journalist Katsuichi Honda became the first individual to voice disapproval of this definition. 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. Although the death toll exceeds the immediate number of deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (140,000 and 70,000 respectively, by the end of 1945) and even the total civilian . One thousand disarmed Chinese soldiers, whom the International Committee hoped to save, were taken from them and by this time are probably shot or bayoneted. The most accurate and widely accepted estimates place the total number of massacre victims in the entire Nanking Special Administrative District between the range of 40,000 and 200,000, although figures even smaller or larger than this have been proposed by Japanese revisionists and the government of China . Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. [56], 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 Nanjing and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. [105], John Rabe, Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 (civilians) were killed. [1] Ikuhiko Hata considers the number of 300,000 to be a "symbolic figure" representative of China's wartime suffering and not a figure to be taken literally. [5] Instead they threw away their uniforms and weapons and hid among the city's civilian population. [84], In late January 1938, the Japanese army forced all refugees in the Safety Zone to return home, immediately claiming to have "restored order". Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), p. 193. The Chinese women were undefended, their menfolk powerless or absent. On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. The massacre has remained a wedge issue between modern China and Japan. According to Xinhua News Agency, it is the most complete record to date. Historians who define the Nanjing Massacre as having started from the time that the Japanese Army entered Jiangsu province push the beginning of the massacre to around mid-November to early December (Suzhou fell on November 19), and extended the end of the massacre to late March 1938. [20], The Nanjing garrison force set fire to buildings and houses in the areas close to Xiakuan to the north as well as in the environs of the eastern and southern city gates. [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]. For Japan, it was a question they needed to answer but were reluctant to do so because they too identified themselves as victims after the A-bombs. David Askew, "The Scale of Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing: An Examination of the Burial Records," Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, June 2004, 710. [61] [50] Honda argued that the Japanese Army's atrocities had not suddenly started when the Japanese reached the city of Nanking proper on December 13, but rather were part of a continuous process which started soon after the Japanese Army left Shanghai early in November. The older girl was stabbed afterwards and a cane was rammed in her vagina. Eyewitness accounts include testimonies of expatriates engaged in humanitarian work (mostly physicians, professors, missionary and businessmen), journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. [61], On 5 February 2009, the Japanese Supreme Court ordered Shd Higashinakano and the publisher Tendensha to pay four million yen in damages to Mrs. Shuqin Xia, who claims to be the 7- or 8-year-old girl who appears in Magee's film. All of them were hanged on 23 December 1948. Physical evidences are almost everywhere to the killing of men, women and children, of the breaking into and looting of property and of the burning and destruction of houses and buildings. The number 300,000 is displayed prominently at memorials and is the higher end of commonly accepted estimates. The women and children are crying all nights. [179] Modern Chinese (including most citizens of the PRC, partially in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and overseas) will refer to the Nanjing Massacre to explain certain stances they hold or ideas they have; this "national unifying event" holds true to middle-school educated peasants and to senior government officials alike. After a while we would say something like, "It's my day to take a bath," and we took turns raping them. We thus have a total of more than 300,000 victims. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 112. From Jurong to Tangshan (two cities in Jiangshu Province, China), Mukai had killed 89 people while Noda had killed 78. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. [16][17] The 1944 film, The Battle of China, stated that 40,000 were killed in the Nanking Massacre. They were also tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. There are no official numbers for the death toll . THE RAPE OF NANKING OR NANJING MASSACRE 5 The judges of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (also known as the Tokyo War Crimes Trials) were prepared to accept that at least 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered by the Japanese in the six weeks after Nanking fell.The judges were also prepared to accept that the death toll would be much higher if . On the other hand, they fail to include corpses that were destroyed rather than buried and thus underestimate the death toll. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass rape and murder committed by the Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. [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". Description. 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. [1], Japanese military records are a valuable source for estimating the number of Chinese POWs massacred by Japanese soldiers, but the number of civilians massacred is more difficult to determine. The girl was 14 years old. [citation needed], Some conspiracy theories claim that the whole event was entirely made up by the CCP and Chinese Nationalists as a weapon to attack Japan, deny the truth and facts of the war, and to indirectly justify China's discriminatory policies against minority groups in Xinjiang and Tibet. 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. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered messages to field commands throughout the Pacific and East Asia ordering units to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes, Quite the same Wikipedia. They were about to rape the girls when the grandmother tried to protect them. Jones, Paul. However, most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 cases of rape. Currently, the most reliable and widely agreed upon figures place the massacre victims within Nanjing City Walls to be around 40,000, mostly massacred in the first five days from December 13, 1937; while the total victims massacred as of the end of March 1938 in both Nanjing and its surrounding six rural counties far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000. [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). Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia's parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14 [were]. [56], In the early 1970s, Japanese historian Hora's estimate of 200,000 massacre victims was challenged for the first time by the journalist Akira Suzuki, who suggested that "several tens of thousands" had been killed. [19] The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanking Massacre. government archives, much of which was from the period 19421945. According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:[12]. John Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. Matsui returned to retirement, but Prince Asaka remained on the Supreme War Council until the end of the war in August 1945. On December 11, Rabe found that Chinese soldiers were still residing in areas of the Safety Zone, meaning that it became an intended target for Japanese attacks despite the majority being innocent civilians. 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