[75], Rabe wrote that, from time to time, the Japanese would enter the Safety Zone at will, carry off a few hundred men and women, and either summarily execute them or rape and then kill them. 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]. The perpetrators also committed other war crimes such as mass rape, looting, and arson. We looked. Photo in the album taken in Nanjing by Itou Kaneo of the Kisarazu Air Unit of the Imperial Japanese Navy, A picture of a dead child. By the time they had arrived at Zijin Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. [127], On October 9, 2015, Documents of the Nanjing Massacre have been listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. Tanaka Hiromi, a professor at Japans National Defense Academy who has conducted extensive research into remaining Imperial Japanese Army and Navy documents in Japan and overseas, claims that less than 0.1 percent of the material ordered for destruction survived. Estimates of the impact of the destruction vary. On New Year's Day, over a toast he confided to a Japanese diplomat: "My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable. Just better. [7] By mid-November, the Japanese had captured Shanghai with the help of naval and aerial bombardment. The survivors were killed with bayonets.[69]. However, death toll estimates vary widely with some ranging as low as 40,000 . 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. [16][17] The 1944 film, The Battle of China, stated that 40,000 were killed in the Nanking Massacre. The death toll has been actively contested among scholars since the 1980s, with typical estimates ranging from 40,000 to over 300,000. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. [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. 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. [56] By this definition the "Nanking Massacre" can symbolically be said to have lasted from 1931 to 1945, extended over the whole of China, and included ten million victims. Many fled the city on December 7, and the International Committee took over as the de facto government of Nanjing. 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 . Outside of . [26][89] Daqing Yang, a historian at George Washington University, believes that "an obsession with figures reduces an atrocity to abstraction and serves to circumvent a critical examination of the causes of and responsibilities for these appalling atrocities"[90] and Carol Gluck concurs that "The crucial historical question remains the moral one: how could ordinary Japanese have done what they did? [134] Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's biography of Mao claims Mao never made any comment either contemporaneously or later in his life about the massacre, but did frequently remark with enduring bitterness about a political struggle between himself and Wang Ming which also occurred in December 1937. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. During the post-war period, China . [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. This resulted in widespread looting and burglary.[73]. [citation needed], To many Japanese scholars, post-war estimations were distorted by "victor's justice", when Japan was condemned as the sole aggressor. The Truth about the Nanjing Massacre. [15], Between then and the late 1940s these two estimates were commonly cited by reporters and the media. That's how they get their nationalism and pride, that Japan never made any mistake to other countries during the WW, instead, they're a victim of the US, they nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. [34], With the relocation of the capital of China and the reports of Japanese brutality, most of the civilian population fled Nanjing out of fear. 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. [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. 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. Japan Advertiser, 7 December 1937 (an American-owned and edited English-language daily paper in Tokyo), harvnb error: no target: CITEREFKingston2008 (. Iris Chang, author of the Rape of Nanjing (book), wrote one of the most comprehensive accounts of Japanese war atrocities in China. 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. The subject is the notorious Japanese occupation of Nanjing, China, in 1937. Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried. [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. The debate on the death toll has gone on for many decades to the point where some historians have begun to question its usefulness on the grounds that excessive quibbling over the precise death toll has distracted from the study of other more important facets of the massacre. After a while we would say something like, "It's my day to take a bath," and we took turns raping them. [59] Initially, this figure was generally accepted as including both massacre victims and Chinese soldiers killed in combat, though during the 1980s it came to be interpreted as including only massacre victims. This is caused by the Army's misbehaviors after the fall of Nanjing and failure to proceed with the autonomous government and other political plans. From Judgment of the International Military Tribunal, On November 12, 1948, Matsui and Hirota, along with five other convicted Class-A war criminals, were sentenced to death by hanging. The website has quoted a Japanese Twitter user who apparently said, "why the death toll increases every year". The battle was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat. "[70][71], Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disembowled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them. 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 . 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. 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. The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was a war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. 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. [citation needed], The remembrance of the massacre has evolved drastically in China. The following is an excerpt: In other words, on the 13th when your troops entered the city, we had nearly all the civilian population gathered in a Zone in which there had been very little destruction by stray shells and no looting by Chinese soldiers even in full retreat. All 27 Occidentals in the city at that time and our Chinese population were totally surprised by the reign of robbery, raping and killing initiated by your soldiers on the 14th. However, Askew notes that Japanese units often exaggerated their body counts. [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. According to Navy veteran Sho Mitani, "The Army used a trumpet sound that meant 'Kill all Chinese who run away'. Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness The soldier thought he might as well rape her before killing her, so he pulled her out of the group to a spot about ten meters away. 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 . It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 197175", Yang, Daqing. Rape! [38][39], In his final analysis, Tokushi Kasahara looks at documents and diaries recorded by soldiers of the Japanese Army and concludes that at least 80,000 Chinese soldiers and POWs, or possibly over 100,000, were massacred by the Japanese, which was most of the estimated total force of 150,000 soldiers. [9] The number of Chinese soldiers in plain clothes that were executed is estimated to be around 4,000. Women and girls were raped en masse and looting was widespread. Again, one . Few numbers have caused such scholarly debate as the death toll estimates of the Nanking Massacre. [155], The memory of the Nanjing Massacre has been a point of contention in Sino-Japanese relations since the early 1970s. The soldiers of . The soldier abruptly stabbed her in the belly with a bayonet. The total death toll of the Nanking Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. George A. Fitch, Lewis S. C. Smythe, and James McCallum filed affidavits with their diaries and letters. As those who are related to the prewar military, we simply apologize deeply to the people of China. Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. ", Harold Timperley, a journalist in China during the Japanese invasion, reported that at least 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed in Nanjing and elsewhere, and tried to send a telegram but was censored by the Japanese military in Shanghai. English Articles. 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. One mosque was found destroyed and others found to be "filled with dead bodies." In an attempt to secure permission for this cease-fire from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, Rabe, who was living in Nanjing and had been acting as the Chairman of the Nanking International Safety Zone Committee, boarded the USSPanay(PR-5) on December 9. Many innocent men were misidentified and killed.[1]. These estimates are borne out by the figures of burial societies and other organizations, which testify to over 155,000 buried bodies. In July 1937 war broke out in northern China between China and Japan, and by August the fighting had spread to the city of Shanghai. I am born in China. According to Yang Daqing, professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University: While it is standard practice for governments to destroy evidence in times of defeat, in the two weeks before the Allies arrived in Japan, various Japanese agenciesthe military in particularsystematically destroyed sensitive documents to a degree perhaps unprecedented in history. He further argued that he had directed his army division commanders to discipline their troops for criminal acts, and was not responsible for their failure to carry out his directives. Numerological arguments about the death count and distinctions of comparative atrocities do not address this point. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. On 13 December, the 6th and the 116th Divisions of the Japanese Army were the first to enter the city, facing little military resistance. During the chaos following the attack of the city, some were killed in the Safety Zone, but the crimes that occurred in the rest of the city were far greater by all accounts. "[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. [42] He argued that Chinese soldiers who had thrown away their uniforms were legally executed because the laws of war at the time did not apply to them, though this line of reasoning is hotly disputed by other historians. 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. Pi means "hip," kankan means "look." On December 5, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was installed as Japanese commander in the campaign. It remains, however, the Japanese soldiers swarmed over the city in thousands and committed untold depredations and atrocities. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. As the Japanese army approached Nanjing, most of them fled the city, leaving 27 foreigners. What was probably the single largest massacre of Chinese troops, the Straw String Gorge Massacre, occurred along the banks of the Yangtze River on December 18. Destruction of Nanking. [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. Robert Sabella, Fei Fei Li and David Liu, eds. [184] This report formed part of a 55-volume series about the massacre, the Collection of Historical Materials of Nanjing Massacre (). Numbers smaller or larger than the empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range have been put forward by Japanese revisionists and the China Communist Party. Chang also states that not all rape victims were women. Various Japanese officials and historians have disputed the death toll since the war, angering China. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. 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. Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. [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". magazine surveyed members of each "school" for their opinions on the massacre, many of the so-called "centrists" advocated extremely low figures for the total number of victims, including Dokkyo University professor Akira Nakamura, journalist Yoshiko Sakurai, and researcher Toshio Tanabe, who each counted about 10,000 massacred, and military historian Takeshi Hara who selected 20,000. [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. Description. [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 the other hand, they fail to include corpses that were destroyed rather than buried and thus underestimate the death toll. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. He assigned Asaka to Nanjing as an opportunity to make amends. [42] For instance, after routing the Chinese in Nanking, Japanese soldiers fired upon and killed a large number of Chinese soldiers who were attempting to escape the battlefield by swimming across the Yangtze River. 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. The death toll of 300,000 is the official estimate engraved on the stone wall at the entrance of the "Memorial Hall for Compatriot Victims of the Japanese Military's Nanking Massacre . The Japanese Army had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937. "Case 5 On the night of December 14th, there were many cases of Japanese soldiers entering houses and raping women or taking them away. 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. [164][165][166], Yoshida asserts that "Nanjing has figured in the attempts of all three nations [China, Japan and the United States] 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."[167]. Rabe says that the ambassador also "sent us a separate confidential telegram telling us that he has been officially informed by the Foreign Ministry in Hankow that our understanding that General Tang agreed to a three-day armistice and the withdrawal of his troops from Nanjing is mistaken, and moreover that Chiang Kai-shek has announced that he is not in a position to accept such an offer." The extent of the atrocities is hotly debated, with numbers ranging from Japanese ultra-nationalist claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000. For 17 December:[49]. [66], The Hui people, a minority Chinese group, the majority of them Muslim, suffered as well during the massacre. The prosecution began the Nanjing phase of its case in July 1946. Nanjing Massacre, conventional Nanking Massacre, also called Rape of Nanjing, (December 1937-January 1938), mass killing and ravaging of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing, China, on December 13, 1937, during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II. Asaka denied the existence of any massacre and claimed never to have received complaints about the conduct of his troops.[119]. In 1948, the case of the Nanjing massacre was considered by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which handed down two death sentences. Death Toll Estimates. [36], From December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson, and other war crimes. The visitor is left to assume they did. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1-year-old baby. The Nanjing Massacre (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Nnjng Dtsh, Japanese: , romanized:Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking[note 2]) 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-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. [31] His more specific range of figures is roughly 160,000 to 170,000. . What followed was nothing short of chaos. [18] John Rabe, the German head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese were killed in Nanking, though this estimate included both military casualties and massacred civilians. [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. [11] Here Australian journalist Harold Timperley was quoted as stating that 300,000 civilians had been killed. and Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira put the final toll closer to 200,000. . [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. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. 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. [51] This definition, though considerably larger than the IMTFE's, keeps the massacre contained to "Nanking" without including cities on the outskirts of Shanghai like Suzhou and Wuxi which Honda does include. [131], Yanziji Nanjing Massacre Memorial in 2004, A statue titled "Family Ruined" in front of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, John Rabe's former residence, now the "John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall", in Nanjing, September 2010, China and Japan have both acknowledged the occurrence of wartime atrocities. In December 2007, newly declassified U.S. government archive documents revealed that a telegraph by the U.S. ambassador to Germany in Berlin sent one day after the Japanese army occupied Nanjing, stated that he heard the Japanese ambassador in Germany boasting that the Japanese army had killed 500,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. Prince Asaka was granted immunity because of his status as a member of the imperial family. Between the announcement of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of small advance parties of American troops in Japan on August 28, Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives, much of which was from the period 19421945. "The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone: An Introduction", Askew, David, "The Nanjing Incident: An Examination of the Civilian Population". In what is known as the Nanking Massacre, Japanese soldiers systematically raped thousands of Chinese women and girls of all ages.
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