[98] Tomio Hora supports the information found in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which estimates a death toll of at least 200,000. Tang gathered about 100,000 soldiers, largely untrained, including Chinese troops who had participated in the Battle of Shanghai. Wealthy families were the first to flee, leaving Nanjing in automobiles, followed by the evacuation of the middle class and then the poor, while only the destitute lowest class such as the ethnic Tanka boat people remained behind. The Battle of Nanking ended on December 13, when the divisions of the Japanese Army entered the walled city of Nanjing. [89] His claims have been corroborated with the diaries of other Japanese combatants and medics who fought in China. [13] Timperley included a second estimate in his book published later the same year, Japanese Terror In China, which quoted "a foreign member of the University faculty" as stating that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking". [21] By contrast Bob Wakabayashi sets the bar higher and believes that the estimate of 40,000 victims put forward by Ikuhiko Hata is the lowest reasonable estimate of the total death toll and considers numbers below this to be attempts at minimizing the atrocity. Improved in 24 Hours. The Nanking Massacre or Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking or Rape of Nanjing, was an episode during the Second Sino-Japanese War of mass murder and mass rape by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (then spelled Nanking), then capital of the Republic of China.. [148][149], On February 20, 2012, Takashi Kawamura, mayor of Nagoya, told a visiting delegation from Nanjing that the massacre "probably never happened". He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939, though he held no further military commands. 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. U.S. news correspondents F. Tillman Durdin and Archibald Steele reported seeing corpses of massacred Chinese soldiers forming mounds six feet high at the Nanjing Yijiang gate in the north. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. The Nanking Massacre as a component of national identity. 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, Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as [was] almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road.[61]. English Articles. [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. [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. Targets within and outside of the city wallssuch as military barracks, private homes, the Chinese Ministry of Communication, forests and even entire villageswere completely burnt down, at an estimated value of US$2030 million (1937). Tokyo Nichi Nichi, 13 December 1937 article on the killing contest. The Nanjing Massacre (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Nnjng Dtsh, Japanese: , romanized: Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino . Hui volunteers and imams buried over a hundred of their dead following Muslim ritual. They were also tried by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. In a diary entry from Minnie Vautrin on December 15, 1937, she wrote about her experiences in the Safety Zone: The Japanese have looted widely yesterday and today, have destroyed schools, have killed citizens, and raped women. This definition was supported by Hora and other early scholars. 5 Hsing Lu Koo in the southeastern part of Nanjing and demanded entrance. The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937. 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. [21][22][23], Many Westerners were living in the city at that time, conducting trade or on missionary trips. The Tokyo War Crime Tribunal defined the period of the massacre to the ensuing six weeks. Nanjing had been constantly bombed for days and the Chinese troops that remained there were disheartened and had taken to drinking before the city's inevitable fall. The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. 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. [21] Historians Haruo Tohmatsu and HP Willmott think that Japanese scholars generally consider the estimate of roughly 40,000 massacre victims to be "the most academically reliable estimate". The perpetrators also committed other war crimes such as mass . As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . Such crime continued from three to six weeks depending on the types of crime. At noon on December 9, the Japanese military dropped leaflets into the city, urging the city of Nanjing to surrender within 24 hours, promising "no mercy" if the offer was refused. This article is part of . Many historians including Kasahara view incidents like these where the Japanese fired upon retreating troops to be atrocities, whereas Hata sees them as extensions of combat and not massacres. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. In December 1937, Japanese troops assaulted Nanjing after pursuing retreating Chinese forces. [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. American missionary John Magee stayed behind to provide a 16mm film documentary and first-hand photographs of the Nanjing Massacre. [18], Another early estimate was that of China's state-run Central News Agency, which reported in February 1938 that the Japanese had slaughtered 60,000 to 70,000 POWs in Nanking. [94][96], Historian Tokushi Kasahara states "more than 100,000 and close to 200,000, or maybe more. There are no official numbers for the death toll . [33][note 3]. [12][63][64] Bob Wakabayashi concludes from this that estimates over 200,000 are not credible. 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. Some of the lowest estimates have counted only 10,000 deaths,[2] while the government of China maintains that approximately 300,000 people were killed. On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital in the Safety Zone administrated by the United States, wrote in a letter to his family, "a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms. It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. [86] Some of the concealed information was made public a few decades later. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 112. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. Hata discounts estimates of the death toll which range into the hundreds of thousands on the basis that, according to Smythe, Nanking's civilian population was only between 200,000 and 250,000. Akira Fujiwara, "Nitch Sens ni Okeru Horyo Gyakusatsu2, John G. Gagee, Case 9, Film 4, Folder 7, Box 263, Record Group 8, Special Collection, Yale Divinity School Library, cited in, "A Debt of Blood: An Eyewitness Account of the Barbarous Acts of the Japanese Invaders in Nanjing.". On 17 December, chairman John Rabe wrote a complaint to Kiyoshi Fukui, second secretary of the Japanese Embassy. [15], Between then and the late 1940s these two estimates were commonly cited by reporters and the media. In our South Hill House Japanese broke the panel of the storeroom and took out some old fruit juice and a few other things. "[65] Thousands were led away and mass-executed in an excavation known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch", a trench measuring about 300m long and 5m wide. [1] "[T]here was no burning until the Japanese troops had been in the city five or six days. What followed was nothing short of chaos. [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). These estimates are borne out by the figures of burial societies and other organizations, which testify to over 155,000 buried bodies. [66], The Hui people, a minority Chinese group, the majority of them Muslim, suffered as well during the massacre. "[91], Chinese soldiers and POWs as massacre victims, F. Tillman Durdin, "Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking,", David Askew, "Part of the Numbers Issue: Demography and Civilian Victims," in, Ikuhiko Hata, "The Nanking Atrocities: Fact and Fable,", Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Messiness of Historical Reality," in, Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity As History,", Tokushi Kasahara, "," in, Tokushi Kasahara, "Massacres outside Nanking City," in, David Askew, "The Nanjing Incident: An Examination of the Civilian Population,", David Askew, "Defending Nanking: An Examination of the Capital Garrison Forces,", Daqing Yang, "Convergence or Divergence? Chinese women didn't wear under-pants. The civilian government of Nanjing fled, leaving the city under the de facto control of German citizen John Rabe, who had founded the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. The Japanese Army had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937. A vocational college teacher was fired after a video of her questioning the true death toll of the Nanjing Massacre surfaced online, triggering a wave of backlash on social media platforms over the statement. The poems capture all perspectives of the tragedyfrom the weary, casually cruel Japanese soldiers to the uncomprehending child victims, and from the desperate helpless parents and the brutalized comfort women to the bloodless yet vicious bureaucrats of death. [20], Today many mainstream historians concur that this estimate is exaggerated. [4] Although the Japanese succeeded in surrounding Nanking and defeating the Chinese garrison stationed there by December 13, few of the Chinese soldiers within the city formally surrendered. Due to multiple factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. [50] In their view Honda, who had previously put forward the idea that more than 100,000 people were murdered in the city of Nanking alone, was failing to prove his argument and therefore sought to extend the boundaries of the massacre until a larger figure for the death toll could be achieved. All the new books mentioned the massacre and five of them printed the death count as estimated by the Chinese government (300,000 deaths), the remaining two books estimated the death toll at 200,000. From February 7, 1938, killings were no longer in mass fashion as the senior Japanese officers came to restore discipline of their troops, according to the testimony of, Quote: "The Japanese Army, one million strong, has already conquered. Following the outbreak of the Second SinoJapanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese P The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 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. In what is known as the Nanking Massacre, Japanese soldiers systematically raped thousands of Chinese women and girls of all ages. The Nanjing Massacre was a massacre (an unjust killing of many people) that happened in Nanjing, China, in December of 1937 and January of 1938.It was part of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was the part of World War II between China and Japan.At the time, Japan was trying to take over China and Nanjing was the Chinese capital.The Japanese Army reached Nanjing on 13 December 1937 and began . Matsui was convicted by a majority of the judges at the Tokyo tribunal who ruled that he bore ultimate responsibility for the "orgy of crime" at Nanjing because, "He did nothing, or nothing effective, to abate these horrors. Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. [26][36] For instance, Tokushi Kasahara claims that Nanking's population in 1937 included 400,000 to 500,000 civilians and 150,000 soldiers,[37] whereas David Askew believes it was 200,000 to 250,000 civilians and 73,790 to 81,500 soldiers. The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags.[25]. The women and children are crying all nights. There are no official numbers for the death toll in the Nanking Massacre, though estimates range from 200,000 to 300,000 people. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. [176], Another history textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001, attempts to whitewash Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s. [121], Kki Hirota, Prime Minister of Japan at an earlier stage of the war, and a diplomat during the atrocities at Nanjing, was convicted of participating in "the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy" (count 1), waging "a war of aggression and a war in violation of international laws, treaties, agreements and assurances against the Republic of China" (count 27) and count 55. According to American historian Edward J. Drea: While the Germans, beginning in 1943, did engage in substantial efforts to obliterate evidence of such crimes as mass murder, and they destroyed a great deal of potentially incriminating records in 1945, a great deal survived, in part because not each one of the multiple copies had been burned. What many people don't know is that the emperor had largely lost control of the army and Japan, which was a flourishing democracy before was taken over by the military (basically) following . . At the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals, the Nanking Massacre death toll was presented either as "more than . Although most sources suggest that the final phase of the battle consisted of a one-sided slaughter of Chinese troops by the Japanese, some Japanese historians maintain that the remaining Chinese military still posed a serious threat to the Japanese. Yoshida argues that "Nanjing crystallizes a much larger conflict over what should constitute the ideal perception of the nation: Japan, as a nation, acknowledges its past and apologizes for its wartime wrongdoings; or stands firm against foreign pressures and teaches Japanese youth about the benevolent and courageous martyrs who fought a just war to save Asia from Western aggression. The argument in favor of this made by Katsuichi Honda in 1984 was seen by some scholars involved in the debate on the massacre as a "partial admission of defeat" by Honda. After losing the Battle of Shanghai, Chiang Kai-shek knew that the fall of Nanjing was a matter of time. government archives, much of which was from the period 19421945. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. [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. [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. Currently, the most reliable and widely agreed upon figures place the total death toll of the massacre between the broad range of 40,000 to 200,000 massacre victims in the entire Nanking Special Administrative District. However, death toll estimates vary widely with some ranging as low as 40,000 . [57] The most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the tribunal and its findings. There are no official numbers for the death toll . [153], On February 3, 2014, Naoki Hyakuta, a member of the board of governors of Japan's public broadcasting company, NHK, was quoted as saying the massacre never occurred. "[75] According to historian Jonathan Fenby, the most recent research places the death toll at 100,000 or less, though he only cites one recent estimate as evidence for this claim.[76]. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers. 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