The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) was the mass rape and murder, between December 1937 and March 1938, of Chinese civilians, noncombatants, and prisoners of war by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China. It took place immediately after the Battle of Nanjing and retreat of the National Revolutionary Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After the outbreak of the war in July 1937, the Japanese had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November. As the Japanese marched on Nanjing, they committed violent atrocities in a terror campaign, including killing contests and massacres of entire villages. By early December, the Japanese Central China Area Army under the command of General Iwane Matsui reached the outskirts of the city. The Japanese had also planned to use mustard gas and incendiary bombs to annihilate the capital and its population should the fighting have grown too intense. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was installed as temporary commander in the campaign, and he issued an order to "kill all captives" before the city's capture. Matsui and Asaka took no action to stop the massacre after it began. The massacre began on December 13 after Japanese troops entered the city after days of intense fighting and continued to rampage through it unchecked. Japanese soldiers murdered civilians, including children, women, and the elderly. Japanese units also summarily executed thousands of captured Chinese soldiers in violation of the laws of war, as well as male civilians falsely accused of being soldiers. They raped women and girls, their ages ranging from infants to the elderly, and destroyed one third of the city with arson. Rape victims were often murdered afterward. In addition to civilians, Japanese units indiscriminately murdered tens of thousands of Chinese POWs and men who looked of military age. Many scholars support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), which estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed, while newer estimates adhere to a death toll between 100,000 and 200,000. Other estimates of the death toll vary from a low of 40,000 (confined just to the city itself) to a high of over 340,000 (encompassing the entire Shanghai-Nanjing region), and estimates of rapes range from 4,000 to over 80,000 (with estimates around 20,000 being most common). Other crimes included torture, looting, and arson. The massacre is considered one of the worst wartime atrocities in history. Traditional historiography dates the massacre as unfolding over a period of six weeks beginning on December 13, 1937, following the city's capture, and as being spatially confined to within Nanjing and its immediate vicinity. However, the Nanjing Massacre was far from an isolated case, and fit into a pattern of Japanese atrocities along the Lower Yangtze River, with Japanese forces routinely committing massacres since the Battle of Shanghai. Furthermore, Japanese atrocities in the Nanjing area did not end in January 1938, but instead persisted in the region until late March 1938. An International Committee of Westerners, including Nazi German citizen John Rabe, created the Nanking Safety Zone in an attempt to protect civilians. The Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. After the war, Matsui and several other commanders at Nanjing were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried only because by the time of the tribunals they had either already been killed or committed ritual suicide. Asaka was granted immunity as a member of the imperial family and never tried. The massacre remains a contentious topic in Sino-Japanese relations, as Japanese nationalists and historical revisionists, including top government officials, have either denied or minimized the massacre.
Military situation
The Second Sino-Japanese War commenced on July 7, 1937, following the Marco Polo Bridge incident, and rapidly escalated into a full-scale war in northern China between the Chinese and Japanese armies. The National Revolutionary Army, however, wanted to avoid a decisive conflict in the northern region and instead opened a second front by launching offensives against Japanese forces in Shanghai. In response, Japan deployed an army led by General Iwane Matsui, to fight the Chinese forces in Shanghai. In August 1937, the Japanese army invaded Shanghai, where they met strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties. The battle was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat. Although the Japanese forces succeeded in forcing the Chinese forces into retreat, the General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo initially decided not to expand the war because they wanted the war to end. However, there was a significant disagreement between the Japanese government and its army in China. Matsui had expressed his intention to advance on Nanjing even before departing for Shanghai. He firmly believed that capturing Nanjing, the Chinese capital, would lead to the collapse of the entire Nationalist Government of China, thereby securing a swift and decisive victory for Japan. The General Staff Headquarters in Tokyo eventually relented to the demands of the Imperial Japanese Army in China by approving the operation to attack and capture Nanjing.
=== Strategy for the defense of Nanjing === In a press release to foreign reporters, Tang Shengzhi announced the city would not surrender and would fight to the death. Tang gathered a garrison force of some 81,500 soldiers, many of whom were untrained conscripts, or troops exhausted from the Battle of Shanghai. The Chinese government left for relocation on December 1, and the president left on December 7, leaving the administration of Nanjing to an International Committee led by John Rabe, a German national and Nazi Party member. In an attempt to secure permission for this ceasefire from 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 USS Panay (PR-5) on December 9. On December 11, Rabe found that Chinese soldiers were still residing in areas of the Safety Zone, meaning that it became an intended target for Japanese attacks despite the majority being innocent civilians. Rabe commented on how efforts to remove these Chinese troops failed and Japanese soldiers began to lob grenades into the refugee zone.
March to Nanjing and atrocities
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. Numerous atrocities were committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing, including rape, torture, arson, and murder. Many were committed as part of a systemic terror campaign meant to undermine the will to resist amongst the Chinese population.
Japanese war crimes in the countryside
Japanese commanders ordered their troops to treat all Chinese outside Shanghai as belligerents, to kill them, and to destroy their homes. Advancing Japanese forces transformed the 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing into "a nightmarish zone of death and destruction". Japanese aircraft frequently strafed unarmed farmers and refugees "for fun". Civilians were subjected to extreme violence and brutality in a foreshadowing of the upcoming massacre. In one example on November 23, the Nanqiantou hamlet near Wuxi was set on fire, with many of its inhabitants locked within the burning houses. Two women, one a 17-year-old girl and the other pregnant, were raped repeatedly until they could not walk. Afterwards, the soldiers rammed a broom into the teenager's vagina and stabbed her with a bayonet, then "cut open the belly of the pregnant woman and gouged out the fetus". A crying two-year-old boy was wrestled from his mother's arms and thrown into the flames, while the hysterically sobbing mother was bayoneted and thrown into a creek. The remaining thirty villagers were bayoneted, disemboweled, and also thrown into the creek. In another case on November 29, the Japanese 3rd Battalion from the 16th Division rounded up eighty civilians in the village of Changzhou. The Japanese then massacred the villagers with heavy machine guns. According to army doctor Hosaka Akira, "The people were all gathered in one place. They were all praying, crying, and begging for help. I just couldn't bear watching such a pitiful spectacle. Soon the heavy machine guns opened fire and the sight of those people screaming and falling to the ground is one I could not face even if I had had the heart of a monster."
According to Kurosu Tadanobu of the 13th Division: "We'd take all the men behind the houses and kill them with bayonets and knives. Then we'd lock up the women and children in a single house and rape them at night... Then, before we left the next morning, we'd kill all the women and children, and to top it off, we'd set fire to the houses, so that even if anyone came back, they wouldn't have a place to live."Chinese civilians often committed suicide, such as two girls who deliberately drowned themselves near Pinghu, an event witnessed by Japanese First Lieutenant Nishizawa Benkichi.
=== Japanese war crimes in urban areas === As early as November, Japanese forces had been committing atrocities against urban regions and cities. Jiading was shelled by Japanese forces, then 8,000 of its civilian residents murdered. Half of Taicang was razed to the ground, and then half the salt and grain stores looted. On December 8, the Japanese Shanghai Expeditionary Army captured the city of Zhenjiang between Shanghai and Nanjing. They then set Zhenjiang on fire and executed anyone attempting to douse the flames. Zhenjiang burned for ten days. The Japanese also burned wounded Chinese soldiers alive and raped women and children. According to a city resident who survived the blaze, the city was burned as a deliberate attempt to destroy civilian property.
According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:The reason that the [10th Army] is advancing to Nanjing quite rapidly is due to the tacit consent among the officers and men that they could loot and rape as they wish.In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuzō Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing. The novel itself was based on interviews that Ishikawa conducted with troops in Nanjing in January 1938.
Massacre contest
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. The contest—a race between the two officers to see who could kill 100 people first using only a sword—was covered much like a sporting event with regular updates on the score over a series of days. In Japan, the veracity of the newspaper article about the contest was the subject of ferocious debate for several decades starting in 1967. In 1937, the Osaka Mainichi Shimbun and its sister newspaper, the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun, covered a contest between two Japanese officers, Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda of the Japanese 16th Division. The two men were described as vying to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword before the capture of Nanjing. From Jurong, Jiangsu to Tangshan, Mukai had killed 89 people while Noda had killed 78. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. By the time they had arrived at Purple Mountain, Noda had killed 105 people while Mukai had killed 106 people. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. 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. In 2000, historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi concurred with certain Japanese scholars who had argued that the contest was a concocted story by the Japanese army, with the collusion of the soldiers themselves for the purpose of raising their national fighting spirit. 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. The judge also ruled against the civil claim of the plaintiffs because the original article was more than 60 years old. The historicity of the event remains disputed in Japan.
=== Chinese scorched-earth policy === The Nanjing garrison set fire to buildings and houses in the areas close to Xiaguan to the north as well as in the environs of the eastern and southern city gates. Targets within and outside of the city walls—such as military barracks, private homes, the Ministry of Communication, forests, and entire villages—were completely burnt down, at an estimated value of US$20–30 million (1937).
Establishment of the Nanking Safety Zone
Many Westerners were living in the city at that time, conducting trade or on missionary trips. As the Japanese army approached Nanjing, most of them fled the city, leaving 27 foreigners. Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. Fifteen of the remaining 22 foreigners formed a committee, called the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone in the western quarter of the city. German businessman John Rabe was elected as its leader, in part because of his status as a member of the Nazi Party and the existence of the German-Japanese bilateral Anti-Comintern Pact. 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. The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags. Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanjing, which was within the established Safety Zone. During the massacre, she worked tirelessly in welcoming thousands of female refugees to stay in the college campus, sheltering up to 10,000 women.
Bernhard Sindberg's refugee camp
At the age of 26, a Dane named Bernhard Arp Sindberg began his role as a guard at a cement factory in Nanjing in December 1937, days before the Japanese invasion of Nanjing. As the massacre began, Sindberg and Karl Gunther, a German colleague, converted the cement factory into a makeshift refugee camp where they offered refuge and medical assistance to approximately 6,000 to 10,000 Chinese civilians. Knowing that Imperial Japan was not hostile towards Denmark or Nazi Germany, thus showing respect for their flags, Sindberg painted a large Danish flag on the cement factory roof to deter the Japanese army from bombing the factory. To keep Japanese troops away from the factory, he and Gunther strategically placed the Danish flag and the German swastika around the site. Whenever the Japanese approached the gate, Sindberg would display the Danish flag and step out to converse with them, and eventually, they would leave.
Prince Asaka appointment as commander and the order to "kill all captives"
In a memorandum for the palace rolls, Hirohito singled Prince Yasuhiko Asaka out for censure as the one imperial kinsman whose attitude was "not good". He assigned Asaka to Nanjing as an opportunity to make amends. On December 5, Asaka left Tokyo by plane and arrived at the front three days later. He met with division commanders, lieutenant-generals Kesago Nakajima and Heisuke Yanagawa, who informed him that the Japanese troops had almost completely surrounded 300,000 Chinese troops in the vicinity of Nanjing and that preliminary negotiations suggested that the Chinese were ready to surrender. Prince Asaka issued an order to "kill all captives", thus providing official sanction for the crimes which took place during and after the battle. Some authors record that Prince Asaka signed the order for Japanese soldiers in Nanjing to "kill all captives". Others assert that lieutenant colonel Isamu Chō, Asaka's aide-de-camp, sent this order under the Prince's sign-manual without the Prince's knowledge or assent. Nevertheless, even if Chō took the initiative, Asaka was nominally the officer in charge and gave no orders to stop the carnage. While the extent of Prince Asaka's responsibility for the massacre remains a matter of debate, the ultimate sanction for the massacre and the crimes committed during the invasion of China were issued in Emperor Hirohito's ratification of the Japanese army's proposition to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners on August 5, 1937. A detailed analysis of wartime materials and documents by Japanese researcher Ono Kenji has directly implicated Prince Asaka in issuing the order to illegally execute Chinese captives in the Nanjing Area.
== Civilian population and evacuation == With the relocation of the capital of China, constant bombing raids, and reports of Japanese brutality, much of Nanjing's civilian population had fled out of fear. Wealthy families were the first to flee, leaving Nanjing in automobiles, followed by the evacuation of the middle class and then the poor. Those that remained were mainly the destitute lowest class such as the ethnic Tanka boat people, and those with assets that could not be easily moved, like shopkeepers. Of Nanjing's population, estimated to be over one million before the Japanese invasion, a large proportion had already fled Nanjing before the Japanese advance, estimated to be between half (500,000) to three-quarters (750,000) of the pre-war population.
== "Plan B": the intended use of poison gas and incendiary bombing in Nanjing == On November 30, the Japanese Tenth Army drew up two plans for attacking Nanjing. Plan A outlined a headlong rush for the city. Should this have failed, Plan B outlined the use of incendiary bombs and mustard gas canisters to "reduce the city to rubble". Specifically, Plan B read:
Surround Nanking completely and bomb it from the air thoroughly for about a week—with special attention to incendiary bombs and mustard-gas canisters—to reduce the city to rubble. Should the enemy resist and defend the walled fortress to the bitter end, the Tenth Army will use the smallest force possible to maintain the siege; 2.5 divisions should do. It will keep up air attacks to destroy the enemy while refusing to storm the city by force ... Poison gas is imperative in this assault. It is totally unacceptable to sustain the same losses we did at Shanghai owing to qualms about poison gas here. Had the fighting approached the intensity of the Battle of Shanghai, Japanese commanders had planned to use mustard gas and incendiaries on the Chinese capital. The implementation of such a plan would have resulted in "a holocaust for one city", as historian Bob Wakabayashi comments.
Battle of Nanjing
The Japanese military continued to move forward, breaching several lines of Chinese resistance, and arrived outside the city gates of Nanjing on December 9. Despite resisting the assault fiercely, the Chinese defenders were hampered by rising casualties and Japanese strengths in firepower and numbers. Combined with fatigue and a breakdown in communications, the garrison was gradually overwhelmed in the four day battle for the city, and finally collapsed on the night of December 12.
On December 12, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Sheng-chi ordered his men to retreat. Conflicting orders and a breakdown in discipline turned the events that followed into a disaster. While some Chinese units managed to escape across the river, many more were caught up in the general chaos erupting across the city. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in a desperate attempt to blend in, and many others were shot by the Chinese supervisory unit as they tried to flee. Other Chinese units dissipated into the countryside, often colliding with Japanese units. On December 13, the 6th and the 114th Divisions of the Japanese Army were the first to enter the city. Simultaneously, the 9th Division entered nearby Guanghua Gate, and the 16th Division entered the Zhongshan and Taiping gates. That same afternoon, two small Japanese Navy fleets arrived on both sides of the Yangtze River.
The Nanjing Massacre
As early as December 4, the Japanese Army had been engaging in random murder, torture, wartime rape, looting, arson, and other war crimes in the Nanjing area. These crimes skyrocketed after the Nanjing's capture on December 13, and continued for several weeks depending on the types of crime. The first three weeks were the most intense. Atrocities persisted in the Nanjing area for several months, both within the walled city and in the surrounding countryside, until the establishment of the new ruling government on March 28, 1938. 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.
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. 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. In our South Hill House Japanese broke the panel of the storeroom and took out some old fruit juice and a few other things.
Organized massacres of Chinese prisoners of war and male civilians
==== "Mopping-up operations" ==== The fighting in Nanjing continued beyond the night of December 12–13, following the Japanese Army's capture of the remaining gates and entrance into the city. The Japanese army continued to encounter sporadic resistance from the remaining Chinese forces for several days, as many units were attempting to break out of the Japanese lines. The Japanese military determined that they needed to eliminate any remaining Chinese soldiers hidden within the city. However, the search process used an arbitrary criteria for identifying former Chinese soldiers. Chinese males who were deemed to be in good health were automatically presumed to be a soldier. During this operation, Japanese forces committed atrocities against the Chinese population.
The criteria used in identifying former soldiers was often arbitrary, as was the case with one Japanese company which apprehended all men with "shoe sores, callouses on the face, extremely good posture, and/or sharp-looking eyes". For this reason many civilians were taken at the same time.
According to George Fitch, head of Nanjing's YMCA, "rickshaw coolies, carpenters, and other laborers are frequently taken". Chinese police officers and firefighters were also targeted, with even street sweepers and Buddhist burial workers from the Red Swastika Society being marched away on suspicion of being soldiers. Those who fled at the approach of any Japanese soldiers risked being shot.The rounding-up and mass killings of male civilians and captured POWs were referred to euphemistically as "mopping-up operations" in Japanese communiqués, in a manner "just like the Germans were to talk about 'processing' or 'handling' Jews".
==== Mass executions ==== The massacres were organized to kill as many people within a short timeframe, which usually meant rows of unarmed prisoners being mowed down by machine gun fire before being finished off with bayonets or revolvers. The massacres were usually conducted on the banks of the Yangtze River to facilitate the mass disposal of corpses. In one of the largest massacres, on December 15–17, Japanese troops from the Yamada Detachment including the 65th Infantry Regiment systemically led 17,000 to 20,000 Chinese prisoners to the banks of the Yangtze River near Mufushan and machine-gunned them to death. They then disposed of the corpses by burning or flushing them downstream. Recent research by Ono Kenji has found that the mass killings were pre-planned and executed in a systemic manner in accordance with orders issued directly by Prince Asaka. A soldier from the IJA's 13th Division described killing wounded survivors of the Mufushan massacre in his diary:
I figured that I'd never get another chance like this, so I stabbed thirty of the damned Chinks. Climbing atop the mountain of corpses, I felt like a real devil-slayer, stabbing again and again, with all my might. 'Ugh, ugh,' the Chinks groaned. There were old folks as well as kids, but we killed them lock, stock, and barrel. I also borrowed a buddy's sword and tried to decapitate some. I've never experienced anything so unusual. The Straw String Gorge Massacre occurred along the banks of the Yangtze River on December 18. For most of the morning, Japanese soldiers tied the POWs' hands together. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash desperately. It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop and even longer for the Japanese to bayonet each individual. The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. In many other instances, prisoners were decapitated, used for bayonet practice, or tied together, doused in gasoline and set on fire. Wounded Chinese soldiers who remained in the city were killed in their hospital beds, bayonetted, clubbed, or dragged outside and burned alive.
The Japanese also extended their "search-and-destroy" operations to the Nanjing countryside. During the Battle of Nanjing, one of the Cantonese (Guangdong) armies had broken out of the Japanese encirclement and formed guerrilla bands that harassed Japanese forces whilst retreating south. In retaliation, Japanese units systemically wiped out towns and villages spread out in the outlying regions, perpetrating rapes, arson and indiscriminate massacres which "added up to an enormous number" of deaths. Japanese troops gathered 1,300 Chinese soldiers and civilians at Taiping Gate and murdered them. The victims were blown up with landmines, then doused with petrol and set on fire. The survivors were killed with bayonets. 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. Durdin, who worked for The New York Times, toured Nanjing before his departure from the city. He heard waves of machine-gun fire and witnessed the Japanese soldiers gun down some two hundred Chinese within ten minutes. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers. Two days later, in his report to The New York Times, Durdin stated that the alleys and streets were filled with the dead, among them women and children. 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".
Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disemboweled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them". Just after Christmas, the Japanese set up public stages where they called upon former Chinese soldiers to confess, claiming they would not be harmed. When over 200 former soldiers did come forward, they were promptly executed. When former soldiers stopped identifying themselves, the Japanese began rounding up groups of young men who "aroused suspicion".
==== Death toll ==== Based on the dutiful records of the Safety Zone committee, the post-war International Military Tribunal found that some 20,000 civilian men were killed on false accusations of being soldiers, while 30,000 former combatants were executed, and their bodies thrown into the river. Durdin, who had left Nanjing on December 17 on the USS Oahu, had borne witness to the mass execution of captured Nationalist soldiers and suspected soldiers. He reported in early January that the Japanese had admitted to rounding up around 15,000 Chinese men in the first three days, and that they had captured another 25,000 Chinese soldiers who were systemically rounded up and executed. Canadian historian Bob Wakabayashi's analysis of Japanese wartime records implicates Japanese forces in the illegal and "unjustifiable" mass murder of 46,215 men whom they considered Chinese military personnel, including men they had rounded up in civilian clothing. Of these numbers, the IJA 16th Division executed between 4,000 and 12,000 prisoners near Xiaguan, then shoved the corpses into the Yangtze to transform it into a "river of dead bodies". The Mufu Mountains massacre, the deadliest of these mass killing incidents, saw the execution of between 17,000 and 20,000 male prisoners by the 65th Infantry Regiment of the IJA 13th Division. The 9th Division reported executing around 6,700 Chinese prisoners of war during their "mopping up operations".
=== Mass rape === The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that in the first month of the occupation, Japanese soldiers committed approximately 20,000 cases of rape in the city. Some estimates conclude there were 80,000 rapes. According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, rapes of all ages, including children and elderly women, were commonplace, and there were many instances of sadistic and violent behavior related to these rapes. Following the rapes, many women were killed and their bodies were mutilated. A large number of rapes were done systematically by the Japanese soldiers as they went from door to door, searching for girls, with many women being captured and gang-raped. Japanese soldier Takokoro Kozo recalled:
