nanking massacre death toll
Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. 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 . government archives, much of which was from the period 19421945. [94] Wakabayashi concludes that estimates of over 200,000 are not credible. 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. [85] [3] After capturing Shanghai the Japanese Army decided on December 1 to continue its military campaign to the capital city of the Nationalist government of China, Nanking, which is roughly 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. He assigned Asaka to Nanjing as an opportunity to make amends. and Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira put the final toll closer to 200,000. . The death toll reckoned at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, 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" in Nanjing. Originally titled 13 Flowers of Nanjing, this is the story of a group of schoolgirls that find refuge in a church compound run by an American priest.The year is 1937. (1939), Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (reprinted in, Kajimoto, Masato "Mistranslations in Honda Katsuichi's the Nanjing Massacre". Live Statistics. [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 man is now at the University Hospital and is not expected to live. [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]. [21], After the end of the war between China and Japan in 1945, these estimates were in turn supplanted by the findings of two war crime trials, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal. [155], The memory of the Nanjing Massacre has been a point of contention in Sino-Japanese relations since the early 1970s. THE NANKING MASSACRE - Page 4: Defining the victims. Recent. The Japanese awaited an answer to their demand for surrender but no response was received from the Chinese by the deadline on December 10. On December 13, about 30 soldiers came to a Chinese house at No. Files. [58] B. Campbell described the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide, given the fact that residents were still slaughtered en masse during the aftermath, despite the successful and certain outcome in battle. [T]here is no obvious explanation for this grim event, nor can one be found. Other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried. Chiang planned to fight a protracted war of attrition to wear down the Japanese in the hinterland of China.[9]. The U.S., which served as the melting pot of cultures and is home to descendants of members of both Chinese and Japanese cultures, took up the mantle of investigator for the victimized Chinese. Improved in 24 Hours. Destruction of Nanking. [88], In early 1980s, after interviewing Chinese survivors and reviewing Japanese records, Japanese journalist Honda Katsuichi claimed that the Nanjing Massacre was not an isolated case, and that Japanese atrocities against the Chinese were common throughout the Lower Yangtze River since the battle of Shanghai. [135], Mei Xiao-ao, the son of Mei Ju-ao, a Chinese justice who was present at the Tokyo war crime tribunal, published an essay claiming that in the early 1960s, Mei's father, inspired by the recent publication of a Japanese study on the destruction caused by the atomic bombs, tried calling for greater study of the massacre by Chinese historians of the time, but his ideas received a cold reception; he was reportedly accused of "stirring up national hatred and revenge" against the Japanese, and some others felt that writing about "the Chinese defeat and misery in Nanjing amounted to hidden praise for the strength of the Japanese troops. He was sentenced to death and executed in 1949. "[65] Thousands were led away and mass-executed in an excavation known as the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch", a trench measuring about 300m long and 5m wide. Many fled the city on December 7, and the International Committee took over as the de facto government of Nanjing. War crimes during the Internal conflict in Peru: 61,007 [see notes] [29], The Japanese either destroyed or concealed important documents, severely reducing the amount of evidence available for confiscation. [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. The capacity of the hospital was normally one hundred and eighty beds, and this was kept full to overflowing during this entire period. Despite this, many Chinese people still have a strong sense of mistrust due to the memory of the atrocity and failure of reconciliation measures. David Askew, "The Scale of Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing: An Examination of the Burial Records," Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, June 2004, 710. [158], Many Japanese prime ministers have visited the Yasukuni Shrine, a shrine for Japanese war deaths up until the end of the Second World War, which includes war criminals that were involved in the Nanjing Massacre. [133] In her book Rape of Nanjing, Iris Chang asserted that the politics of the Cold War encouraged Chairman Mao to stay relatively silent about Nanjing in order to keep a trade relationship with Japan. 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 . Everybody learns that 300,000 people died in the Nanking Massacre when the Japanese occupied the city and massively killed civilians. On New Year's Day, over a toast he confided to a Japanese diplomat: "My men have done something very wrong and extremely regrettable. 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. The massacre occurred over a six-week period starting on December 13, 1937, the day the Japanese captured Nanking. [13], 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. [50] Honda argued that the Japanese Army's atrocities had not suddenly started when the Japanese reached the city of Nanking proper on December 13, but rather were part of a continuous process which started soon after the Japanese Army left Shanghai early in November. "[30] However, both Kasahara and Yamamoto have noted that burial records can be problematic in ways that can exaggerate or underestimate the true death toll of the massacre. [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. [60] On 13 December 1937, John Rabe wrote in his diary: It is not until we tour the city that we learn the extent of destruction. Death Toll Estimates. [21], However, when Shokun! [63], Pregnant women were targeted for murder, as their stomachs were often bayoneted, sometimes after rape. 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. You hear nothing but rape. 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 December 13, 1937, the precise number remains unknown. [59] However, Jean-Louis Margolin does not believe that the Nanjing atrocities should be considered a genocide because only prisoners of war were executed in a systematic manner and the targeting of civilians was sporadic and done without orders by individual actors. [29] By contrast, Kasahara generally supports the higher burial estimates presented at the IMTFE, though he concedes that not all of the Chongshantang's figures can be accepted "at face value. Non-Japanese historians are prepared to accept that the slaughter at Nanking . 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. 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. However, they feared that speaking out openly "would be detrimental to their careers. 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 . [87] In 1994, nearly 20 diaries in his collection were published, which became an important source of evidence for the massacre. Table of Content Show Japan's invasion of Chinese . "[85] Overseas troops in the Pacific and East Asia were ordered to destroy incriminating evidence of war crimes. John Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. It also lists the Japanese army units that were responsible for each of the deaths and states the way in which the victims were killed. [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. Until 1982, mentioning of the massacre was suppressed in China because ideologically the communists would rather promote the "martyrs of class struggles" than wartime victims, especially when there were no communist heroes or any communists at all in Nanjing when the massacre happened. Honda believes all those atrocities that were committed on "the road to Nanking" were part of the massacre. 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. 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. On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. [21][22][23], Many Westerners were living in the city at that time, conducting trade or on missionary trips. [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. I think he will live. Hata takes Smythe's figure of 12,000 civilians killed, but notes that perhaps only 8,000 were confirmed massacre victims. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. [71] In The Cambridge History of China, historian Lloyd Eastman asserted that the death toll was "at least 42,000",[72] whereas military officer Frank Dorn wrote in his book The Sino-Japanese War, 1937-41 that the death toll was "over 200,000 civilians". Following the end of World War II, some circles of civil society in Japan reflected on the extent of the massacre and the participation of ordinary soldiers. It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women. However, according to historian Tokushi Kasahara, the evidence used to convict Hisao Tani was not convincing. Chinese teacher sacked for questioning death toll in Nanjing massacre. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. From February 7, 1938, killings were no longer in mass fashion as the senior Japanese officers came to restore discipline of their troops, according to the testimony of, Quote: "The Japanese Army, one million strong, has already conquered. Myth: The Nanjing Massacre has always been important to China. [176], Another history textbook prepared by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, which had been approved by the government in 2001, attempts to whitewash Japan's war record during the 1930s and early 1940s. . As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . [36], From December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson, and other war crimes. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers. In regards to the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese authorities deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American authorities. General Iwane Matsui waited another hour before issuing the command to take Nanjing by force. [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]. [51] In her book, she estimated that the number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. [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. . A lesser debate rests on who among the dead to be included as "massacre victims". She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. He agrees with Hata that Chinese soldiers actively engaged in combat were not massacre victims, but he also includes in his definition of the massacre any Chinese soldiers who were killed on the battlefield but not actively resisting, noting that many confrontations between the Chinese and Japanese Armies were more like one-sided slaughters than battles. 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. 200,000 (consensus), estimates range from 40,000 to over 300,000. The survivors were killed with bayonets.[69]. [12][63][64] Bob Wakabayashi concludes from this that estimates over 200,000 are not credible. [86] Some of the concealed information was made public a few decades later. They killed him immediately with a revolver and also Mrs. Ha, who knelt before them after Ha's death, begging them not to kill anyone else. I personally feel sorry for the tragedies to the people, but the Army must continue unless China repents. ", 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. The slaughter at Nanking army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing 200,000 ( consensus ), range. This grim event, nor can one be found to their demand for surrender but no was... Assigned Asaka to Nanjing was made public a few decades later wear down the Japanese awaited an answer to demand. Deliberately concealed wartime records, eluding confiscation from American authorities fight a protracted war of attrition to down! 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