[35], In addition, the total civilian population of Nanking in December 1937 and the size of the Chinese garrison defending the city are used as a basis for calculating the death toll, though the matter is complicated due to greatly varying estimates for both of these numbers. The Japanese awaited an answer to their demand for surrender but no response was received from the Chinese by the deadline on December 10. Yoshida contended that over time the event has acquired different meanings to different people. 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. This article is part of . The visitor is left to assume they did. [2][3][4][5] Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. 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. The massacre has remained a wedge issue between modern China and Japan. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanjing, criticized Murayama for not providing the written apology that had been expected. 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. Women and girls were raped en masse and looting was widespread. The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried. : Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,", Akira Fujiwara, "The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview," in, David Askew, "The Scale of Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing: An Examination of the Burial Records,", Joshua A. Fogel, "The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory," in, Kaz Ross, "Remembering Nanjing: Patriotism and/or peace in architecture," in, Lloyd Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945," in, Barry Schwartz, "Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking," in, Takashi Yoshida, "Refighting the Nanking Massacre: The Continuing Struggle over Memory," in, International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone, International Military Tribunal for the Far East, International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, International Military Tribunal of the Far East, "The Nanjing Incident: Recent Research and Trends", "The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Controversy in Japan", "The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Death Toll - Current Estimates", "Japanese Crimes in Nanjing, 1937-38: A Reappraisal", "Nanjing Massacre certitude: Toll will elude", "400,000 People Killed in Nanjing Massacre: Expert", Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office, Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, German preWorld War II industrial co-operation, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Death_toll_of_the_Nanjing_Massacre&oldid=1121556661, Short description with empty Wikidata description, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Government of the People's Republic of China, includes all Chinese killed including those killed in action, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between early December 1937 and late January 1938, includes all disarmed POWs; includes soldiers killed on the battlefield but not immediately capable of fighting back, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between December 4, 1937, and March 28, 1938, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between December 1, 1937, and March 1938, the entire area from Shanghai to Nanking between November 1937 to late January 1938, includes all disarmed POWs; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and early February 1938, only includes disarmed POWs buried by the Red Cross, and civilians whose deaths they verified; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and late January 1938, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and early January 1938, does not include approximately 4,000 Chinese soldiers captured out of uniform and executed; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, This page was last edited on 12 November 2022, at 22:54. He said that during this time, the Chinese government's statements about the event were attacked by the Japanese because they were said to rely too heavily on personal testimonies and anecdotal evidence. The Japanese Army had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937. [21], However, when Shokun! Therefore, according to journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, writing in the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun of December 13, they decided to begin another contest to kill 150 people.[40]. 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 . [43], By contrast Yoshiaki Itakura adopted an even stricter standard than Hata, advocating that only Chinese soldiers captured in uniform and then killed be included as massacre victims. The massacre began the same day, with Japanese troops running entirely unchecked. [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". [105], John Rabe, Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 (civilians) were killed. 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. In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuz Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing. Hata takes Smythe's figure of 12,000 civilians killed, but notes that perhaps only 8,000 were confirmed massacre victims. Myth: The Nanjing Massacre has always been important to China. [8] These events are collectively known as the Nanking Massacre. "[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. The first three weeks were more intense. Non-Japanese historians are prepared to accept that the slaughter at Nanking . The Japanese soldiers, who had expected easy victory, instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitely higher casualties than anticipated. [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. [29] Some authors record that Prince Asaka signed the order for Japanese soldiers in Nanjing to "kill all captives". Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. 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. ", "Case 13 December 18, 4 p.m., at No. The massacre camp generally supports the Tokyo War Crimes Trials figure of "upwards of 100,000" deaths; skeptics claim 15,000 to 50,000, while others venture only up to 10,000. 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. At trial, Matsui went out of his way to protect Prince Asaka by shifting blame to lower-ranking division commanders. "[47] Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:[48]. 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. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers. [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. I am born in China. It was truly a regrettable act of barbarity. They also murdered hundreds of thousands . Estimates of the impact of the destruction vary. But even last night between 8 and 9 p.m. when five Occidental members of our staff and Committee toured the Zone to observe conditions, we did not find any single Japanese patrol either in the Zone or at the entrances! Chinese women didn't wear under-pants. "[85] Overseas troops in the Pacific and East Asia were ordered to destroy incriminating evidence of war crimes. The two girls were then stripped, the elder being raped by 23 men and the younger by 3. [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. New York Times (New York), January 9, 1938; accessed March 12, 2016. The results of the survey were published in the association's magazine, Kaiko, in 1985 along with an admission and apology that read, "Whatever the severity of war or special circumstances of war psychology, we just lose words faced with this mass illegal killing. [94], According to the verdict of the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal on 10 March 1947, there are "more than 190,000 mass slaughtered civilians and Chinese soldiers killed by machine gun by the Japanese army, whose corpses have been burned to destroy proof. [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". In the museum adjacent to the shrine, a panel informs visitors that there was no massacre in Nanjing, but that Chinese soldiers in plain clothes were "dealt with severely". 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. 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. In late December 1937 and early January 1938, the Imperial Japanese Army perpetrated one of the most horrific war crimes of the World War II era. Chinese soldiers were summarily executed in violation of the laws of war. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . However, they feared that speaking out openly "would be detrimental to their careers. 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. Ono Kenji, "Massacre Near Mufushan," in The Nanking Atrocity, 193738: Complicating the Picture, ed. [21] When Yoshiaki Itakura, an independent writer who became one of the leading researchers of the Nanking Incident,[21][32] analyzed the records of the Japanese Army, he multiplied his final tally by 0.6 in order to account for exaggeration and reached the total of 13,000 to 19,000 massacre victims. It was the Japanese Army going nuts. [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. [58], The official stance of the People's Republic of China is that 300,000 or more Chinese were massacred in Nanking. [86], Ono Kenji, a chemical worker in Japan, curated a collection of wartime diaries from Japanese veterans who fought in the Battle of Nanking in 1937. The center of the debate rests on the validity of burial records and oral history. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. 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. Bates, Miner Searle", "International Memory of the World Register Documents of Nanjing Massacre", "New film has Japan vets confessing to Nanjing rape", 1937 Japanese Field Commander's Map of the Battle of Shanghai, China, "Analyzing the "Photographic Evidence" of the Nanking Massacre (originally published as Nankin Jiken: "Shokoshashin" wo Kenshosuru)", The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe, "War and reconciliation: a tale of two countries", "Jurist Paper Chase: Japanese court rules newspaper didn't fabricate 1937 Chinese killing game", "The scars of Nanking: Memories of a Japanese outrage", "Five Western Journalists in the Doomed City", "Chinese Fight Foe Outside Nanking; See Seeks's Stand", "The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone: An Introduction", "Genocide in the 20th Century: The Rape of Nanking 19371938 (300,000 Deaths)", "Special Report: How the Nanjing Massacre became a weapon | GRI", "Basic Facts on the Nanking Massacre and the Toyoko War Crimes Trial", "HyperWar: International Military Tribunal for the Far East [Chapter 8]", "Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing: Chapter X: Widespread Incidents of Rape", American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin, "Why the Past Still Separates China and Japan", "HyperWar: International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Chapter 8) (Paragraph 2, p. 1015, Judgment International Military Tribunal for the Far East)", "25 July 1946. 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. After decades of struggle, the Nanking Massacre had become a recognized piece of Japanese history. The mass murder at the Yangtze river was just one of the tragedies of the Nanking Massacre. 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." 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. Nanjing Death Toll Graph. 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. The baby was killed with a bayonet. [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. [145][146], In May 1994, Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano called the Nanjing Massacre a "fabrication". By contrast, Minoru Kitamura argues that Smythe's links to the Nationalist Government of China may have led him to skew his figures upwards. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. [68], In 2006, Kaz Ross, a historian with the University of Tasmania, anonymously interviewed a number of university researchers in the city of Nanking to learn their private views on the death toll of the Nanking Massacre. THE RAPE OF NANKING OR NANJING MASSACRE (1937) . Everybody learns that 300,000 people died in the Nanking Massacre when the Japanese occupied the city and massively killed civilians. [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. place the death toll on a much wider scale from 40,000 to 300,000. [86] Some of the concealed information was made public a few decades later. This sense of mistrust is strengthened by Japan's unwillingness to admit to and apologize for the atrocities. ", Organized and wholesale murder of male civilians was conducted with the apparent sanction of the commanders on the pretext that Chinese soldiers had removed their uniforms and were mingling with the population. I watched with my own eyes as they looted the caf of our German baker Herr Kiessling. The Japanese army leadership assigned sections of the safety zone to some units to separate alleged plain-clothed soldiers from the civilians. 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 . [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. On the one hand, Kasahara asserts that the survey substantially underestimated the death toll, partly because Smythe only surveyed inhabited homes and thus skipped over the homes of families who had been entirely destroyed or been unable to return. [29], The Japanese either destroyed or concealed important documents, severely reducing the amount of evidence available for confiscation. [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. [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. [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. "Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking After Chinese Command Fled." On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. ", 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. [29][31], The third type of source is Japanese military records, which recorded the number of POWs the Japanese Army executed. A People's Liberation Army honor guard bearing large funeral wreaths marched slowly past a memorial showing the figure 300,000, China's official death toll in the events of December 1937, as . Prince Kan'in Kotohito, chief of staff of the Imperial Japanese Army during the massacre, had died before the end of the war in May 1945. In regard to the number of victims of this Nanjing Massacre the Tokyo (War Crime) Trials later found it in excess of 200,000, and prosecuted Japan's responsibility severely", reads one Japanese textbook. Recent. [33][note 3]. 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. [177] Indeed, there is only one sentence that refers to this event: "they [the Japanese troops] occupied that city in December. Since the late-1960s when the first academic works on the Nanking Massacre were produced, estimating the approximate death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of scholarly debate. [note 1] A group of foreign expatriates headed by Rabe had formed a 15-man International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone on November 22 and mapped out the Nanking Safety Zone in order to safeguard civilians in the city.[38]. John Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. [31] Nevertheless, even if Ch took the initiative, Asaka was nominally the officer in charge and gave no orders to stop the carnage. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases. [1][77] Some individual estimates by scholars and eyewitnesses are included in the following table. The following day, on December 10, Rabe got his answer from the Generalissimo. Asaka denied the existence of any massacre and claimed never to have received complaints about the conduct of his troops.[119]. [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. 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. [171][172], According to a brief reference to Nanjing at the Yasukuni museum in Tokyo, the Japanese general in charge gave his men maps showing foreign settlements and a civilian "safety zone", and ordered them to maintain strict military discipline. In China today most estimates of the Nanking Massacre range from 200,000 to 400,000, with no notable historian going below 100,000. What happened within the city limits was even more humiliating for humanity. The Truth about the Nanjing Massacre. "[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]. Although the massacre is generally described as having occurred over a six-week period after the fall of Nanjing, the crimes committed by the Japanese army were not limited to that period. I know not where to end. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. [169] In the 2010 Japan-China Joint History Research Committee meeting, scholars from the Japanese side set the maximum possible number of civilian victims at 200,000, with estimates of around 40,000 or 20,000. [citation needed], The entry for the same day in Matsui's diary read, "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. Durdin stated "[i]t should be said that certain Japanese units exercised restraint and that certain Japanese officers tempered power with generosity and commission," but continued "the conduct of the Japanese army as a whole in Nanjing was a blot on the reputation of their country". In regards to the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese authorities deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American authorities. I personally feel sorry for the tragedies to the people, but the Army must continue unless China repents. Since the area outside the safety zone had been almost completely evacuated, the mopping-up effort was concentrated in the safety zone. "[120], Matsui asserted that he had never ordered the execution of Chinese POWs. [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]. 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 [159][160], The Massacre is sometimes compared to other disasters in China, which include the Great Chinese famine (195961)[161][162][163] and the Cultural Revolution. After the establishment of the weixin zhengfu (the collaborating government) in 1938, order was gradually restored in Nanjing and atrocities by Japanese troops lessened considerably. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . What followed was nothing short of chaos. There are no official numbers for the death toll . [44] Most Japanese ultranationalists who deny the Nanking Massacre admit that the Japanese Army killed a large number of Chinese POWs, though they consider these to be legal executions,[45][46] an argument denounced by mainstream historians. 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.
Flounder Fishing Poole Harbour,
Articles N
nanking massacre death toll