Rape of Nanking: Japan's Forgotten WWII Atrocities

Babies are snatched from their mothers' arms and bayonetted. Young girls and women are raped over and over, the attacks ceasing only when the girl dies or feigns death. Girls as young as eleven or twelve are carried away from homes and schools to act as sex slaves to soldiers. Forced incestuous rape is used to amuse soldiers, and civilian men are forced to rape dead bodies.

Captured soldiers are summarily executed, the commanders of the invaders having determined that the term "prisoner of war" will no longer be used. Thousands are executed, their bodies buried in the Ten Thousand Corpse Ditch. Young men thought to be soldiers are burned or buried alive, nailed to trees, even hung by the tongue until they die. Pregnant women and babies are treated the worst, mutilated to death in unimaginable ways.

Today the survivors of the Nanking Massacre, now in their seventies and eighties, still recount the terrible things that happened over six weeks in 1937. Their voices tremble as they recount their memories, repeating over and over how they hate the Japanese. The Rape of Nanking was one of the most terrible atrocities ever recorded in history, and it happened only in the last century, between two countries we think of today as among the most civilized in the world. Yet it seems we have mostly forgotten about it, the Chinese government covering it to protect their trading status with Japan and Japan mostly denying it ever happened.

But it happened.

Statistics of the Nanking Massacre

The Japanese army, determined to take China and use its vast resources to fuel their defeat of the Oriental half of the world, marched through China in 1937, laying waste to everything they marched through. As the Chinese realized what they were facing, they burned and destroyed fuel, food, and anything else that might help the Japanese as they approached Nanking. Soldiers, knowing they would be executed if caught in or out of uniform, donned civilian clothing in hopes of hiding and resisting instead. And civilians resisted the invaders as much as they could, once it became clear that the Japanese were interested in looting, burning, and raping their way through.

As a result, the invaders reaching Nanking were primed for creating horror. Civilians were killed if the Japanese even slightly suspected they might be soldiers, and even the smallest insult would get anyone bayonetted. At the time, Japan considered China to be its imperial holding, and they intended to crush the Chinese into submission. They behaved accordingly.

Because of the habit Chinese soldiers had of switching to civilian clothing (even forcibly stripping passers-by naked), it's impossible to determine how many of the subsequent dead were civilians, but chances are it was most of them. The Chinese soldiers mostly fled, offering little resistance to the Japanese forces. Historians don't agree on all the statistics, but we know that over 100,000 people and perhaps as many as 300,000 were slaughtered in the 6 weeks of the massacre after the city was occupied by the Japanese.

Statistics on rape are harder to find, but the Chinese claim that 80,000 women between the ages of 7 and 70 were raped, often multiple times. One American missionary at the time recorded that they estimated about 1000 rapes were occurring every night. Many woman, mostly teenaged schoolgirls, were carried off to either be gang-raped and murdered or to become comfort women, sex slaves to Japanese troops.

In addition to the horrors visited on the civilian population, a third of Nanking was burned as Japanese soldiers set fire to new government buildings as well as civilian homes. It is unknown how much of the area around Nanking was destroyed or who by (as many civilians destroyed their own possessions rather than have the Japanese take them), but the countryside was laid waste for miles. Because there was no effective policing or Chinese military presence, the Japanese soldiers were free to loot houses and businesses - and they did. When Nanking finally settled down, there was little left.

One of the Japanese soldiers who was in Nanking at the time, Shiro Azuma, later became an activist for the memory of the victims of Nanking, writing My Nanking Platoon based on his diary. He said, in explaining why the Japanese did what they did, "We were taught that we were a superior race since we lived only for the sake of a human god-our emperor. But the Chinese were not. So we held nothing but contempt for them." In another section, he said, "There were many rapes, and the women were always killed. When they were being raped, the women were human. But once the rape was finished, they became pig's flesh."

Little was done to prevent the massacre, but a few foreigners, mostly missionaries with a few businessmen, developed a demilitarized zone, the Nanjing Safety Zone, allowing hundreds of thousands of refugees inside. John Rabe, John Magee (who took the only known film documenting the horror), and the American Angel of Nanking Minnie Vautrin have been mostly forgotten by history - but not by the Chinese of Nanking.

Modern Treatment of the Rape of Nanking

The West is not the only part of the world involved in deep denial of the real atrocities that occurred during World War II; a large right-wing segment of Japan also denied that the Rape of Nanking ever happened, or insist that the number of dead was much smaller than it actually is.

There's more evidence that Japan has a real problem with facing its historical responsibility for what happened in 1937:

- In the film The Last Emperor, the first Japanese release had the stock footage of the Nanking massacre removed by the distributor.

- The Japanese Education Ministry censored any mention of the Nanking Massacre from their main high school history text book, a decision overturned after great outcry and a lawsuit by the professor who authored the text.

- Many Japanese government officials deny that the Nanking Massacre ever happened, most of them being forced to leave office after their public denials.

- Japanese writers of books such as Shiro Azuma detailing Nanking Massacre history are demonized and sued for libel by others named in the terrible occurrences.

- Japanese newspapers still deny that the massacre was as widespread as claimed, often even saying that most of the dead were out-of-uniform Chinese soldiers and thus subject to execution on sight.

China is rediscovering its terrible World War II legacies, opening museums and memorials dedicated to them, and since the 1998 publication of Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking many books and documentaries have come out as well. Several American and international major motion pictures are also in the works documenting the Rape of Nanking as well as the many heroes who, like Schindler, did everything they could to save lives.