Atrocious tortures were also inflicted on the captive men. "The
Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered
victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture.
Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran
over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts,
carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet
practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged
out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire.
Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were
stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then
stabbed by zhuizi -- special needles with handles on them -- in
hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths,
throats, and eyes. ... The Japanese subjected large crowds of
victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakwan [along the Yangtze] a
Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time,
and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline
and ignited." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 87-88.)
How many died?
After the war, the International Military Tribunal of the Far cited
"indicat[ions] that the total number of civilians and
prisoners-of-war murdered in Nanking and its immediate vicinity
during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over
200,000. That these estimates are not exaggerated is borne out by
the fact that burial societies and other organizations counted more
than 155,000 bodies which they buried ... these figures do not take
into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning
or by throwing them into the Yangtze River or otherwise disposed of
by [the] Japanese." As well, "According to Japanese Lieutenant
colonel Toshio Ohta's statement, between December 14 and December
18 the Japanese commanding headquarters of Nanjing Port disposed of
100,000 bodies while other troops disposed of 50,000." (Yin and
Young, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 78, 90.) With the sole exception of
the Nazi gendercide against Soviet POWs, this was the most
concentrated massacre of prisoners-of-war in recorded history. The
rapes and rape-murders of women were also of staggering
proportions. "Certainly it was one of the greatest mass rapes in
world history," writes Iris Chang. She notes that "it is impossible
to determine the exact number of women raped in Nanking. Estimates
range from as low as twenty thousand to as high as eighty
thousand." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 89)
Who was responsible?
Senior members of the Japanese high command bearing direct
responsibility for the mass atrocities in China included the
Emperor Hirohito, who made all major military decisions, including
the one to invade China in 1937; Hirohito's uncle, Prince Asaka,
who issued the order to "Kill all captives" and was thus the main
architect of the gendercide against Nanjing's men; General Yanagawa
Heisuke; and Lieut. General Nakajima Kesago, commander of the 16th
division, who "supervised the beheading of two prisoners-of-war to
test his new sword, thus setting an example for his troops in
mass-scale killing in Nanking" (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking,
p. 284).
The aftermath
The massacres and mass rapes in Nanjing continued for a full six
weeks, extending into January 1938. Eventually the genocidal
rampage was replaced by a brutal occupation conducted under a
puppet authority, the "Nanking Self-Government Committee." Life
began to return to the city, and its population eventually
re-stabilized at around 700,000, two-thirds of the prewar
population. In August 1945, after atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, the Japanese surrendered to the United States and
other allies. The Second World War was over.
In 1946-47, war-crimes trials were held in Nanjing. "Only a handful
of Japanese war criminals were tried in Nanking," notes Chang, "but
they gave the local Chinese citizens a chance to air their
grievances and participate in mass catharsis." (Chang, The Rape of
Nanking, p. 170.) Tani Hisao, a commander of the 6th Division which
had committed many atrocities in Nanjing and elsewhere, was
sentenced to death in March 1947 and executed the following month.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East tried nearly
30 key Japanese commanders, including Matsui Iwane, commander of
the Central China Expeditionary Force. Iwane, however -- according
to Chang -- "may have served as the scapegoat for the Rape of
Nanking. A sickly and frail man suffering from tuberculosis, Matsui
was not even in Nanking when the city fell" (Chang, The Rape of
Nanking, p. 174). He was nonetheless executed along with six other
"class A" war criminals in this Japanese equivalent of the
Nuremberg trials. General Yanagawa Heisuke and Lieut. General
Nakajima Kesago, two of the main Japanese field commanders in
charge of the occupation of Nanjing, died of natural causes in
1945, and thus could not be prosecuted. Controversially, the
Japanese imperial family, including Emperor Hirohito and Prince
Asaka, received immunity.
A conscious attempt has been made by "revisionists" in Japan to
deny or downplay the involvement of the Japanese military in
massive atrocities during World War II. In September 1986, the
Japanese education minister, Fujio Masayuki, referred to the Rape
of Nanking as "just a part of war." In 1988, a 30-second scene
depicting the Rape of Nanking was removed from Bernardo
Bertolucci's The Last Emperor by the film's Japanese distributor.
In 1991, censors at the Ministry of Education "ordered textbook
authorities to eliminate all reference to the numbers of Chinese
killed during the Rape of Nanking because authorities believed
there was insufficient evidence to verify those numbers" (Chang,
The Rape of Nanking, p. 20
. And General Nagano Shigeto, a Second World War veteran
appointed justice minister in Spring 1994, told a Japanese
newspaper that "the Nanking Massacre and the rest was a
fabrication."
Until the recent resurgence of interest in the Nanjing Massacre,
the atrocities and their survivors had been largely forgotten.
"After the war some of the survivors had clung to the hope that
their government would vindicate them by pushing for Japanese
reparations and an official apology. This hope, however, was
swiftly shattered when the People's Republic of China (PRC), eager
to forge an alliance with the Japanese to gain international
legitimacy, announced at various times that it had forgiven the
Japanese." Despite the fact that "the PRC has never signed a treaty
with the Japanese relinquishing its right to seek national
reparations for wartime crimes," no such reparations have been
sought -- or offered. Overseas Chinese have, however, mounted
increasing activist efforts. "The 1990s saw a proliferation of
novels, historical books, and newspaper articles about the Rape of
Nanking ... The San Francisco school district plans to include the
history of the Rape of Nanking in its curriculum, and prints have
even been drawn up among Chinese real estate developers to build a
Chinese holocaust museum." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp.
223-24.) Chang concludes her book, itself an important contribution
to the revival of interest in these ghastly events, with a call for
justice, however delayed:
Japan carries not only the legal burden but the moral obligation to
acknowledge the evil it perpetrated at Nanjing. At a minimum, the
Japanese government needs to issue an official apology to the
victims, pay reparations to the people whose lives were destroyed
in the rampage, and, most important, educate future generations of
Japanese citizens about the true facts of the massacre. These
long-overdue steps are crucial for Japan if it expects to deserve
respect from the international community -- and to achieve closure
on a dark chapter that stained its history. (Chang, The Rape of
Nanking, p. 225.)
