nanking massacre death toll

"[142], On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first formal apology for Japanese actions during the war. [94] Wakabayashi concludes that estimates of over 200,000 are not credible. American vice consul James Espy arrived in Nanjing on January 6, 1938, to reopen the American embassy. [67], Soon after the fall of the city, Japanese troops made a thorough search for Chinese soldiers and summarily arrested thousands of young Chinese men. [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. They also murdered hundreds of thousands . 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. 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. At the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals, the Nanking Massacre death toll was presented either as "more than . [21] By contrast Bob Wakabayashi sets the bar higher and believes that the estimate of 40,000 victims put forward by Ikuhiko Hata is the lowest reasonable estimate of the total death toll and considers numbers below this to be attempts at minimizing the atrocity. 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". Dublin Core. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. 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. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital. The Truth about the Nanjing Massacre. 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. Answer (1 of 16): 1. Iwanami Shinsho, Fujiwara Akira (editor). . The first type of source is oral history, but he calls this "the most problematic methodology in researching the incident" due in part to large discrepancies between the testimony of Japanese and Chinese eyewitnesses. Following the outbreak of the Second SinoJapanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese P The Nanjing massacre has also been described as one of the most barbaric episodes in the history of World War II although it officially began on September 1, 1939. . The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanki. 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. However, most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 cases of rape. The Chinese scholars of the committee maintained that at least 300,000 were killed. These figures also do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, drowning or other means, or whose bodies were interred in mass graves. [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. [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. [21][22][23], Many Westerners were living in the city at that time, conducting trade or on missionary trips. All we are asking in our protest is that you restore order among your troops and get the normal city life going as soon as possible. Outside of . "[1], One-third of the city was destroyed as a result of arson. The prosecution began the Nanjing phase of its case in July 1946. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass rape and murder committed by the Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking, then the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War. Historical revisionists and nationalists in Japan have been accused of minimizing or denying the massacre. [36], From December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army engaged in random murder, wartime rape, looting, arson, and other war crimes. 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 . The Nanjing Massacre, commonly known as "The Rape of Nanking," was an infamous war crime committed by the Japanese military in and around the then capital of . The survivors were killed with bayonets.[69]. THE NANKING MASSACRE - Page 4: Defining the victims. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanking, then the capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937 - 1945). At noon on December 9, the Japanese military dropped leaflets into the city, urging the city of Nanjing to surrender within 24 hours, promising "no mercy" if the offer was refused. 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. Hui volunteers and imams buried over a hundred of their dead following Muslim ritual. All three men were found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. [84], In late January 1938, the Japanese army forced all refugees in the Safety Zone to return home, immediately claiming to have "restored order". Mrs. Ha asked them why they killed her husband and they shot her. It was worse. The total death toll of the Nanking Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. [26][89] Daqing Yang, a historian at George Washington University, believes that "an obsession with figures reduces an atrocity to abstraction and serves to circumvent a critical examination of the causes of and responsibilities for these appalling atrocities"[90] and Carol Gluck concurs that "The crucial historical question remains the moral one: how could ordinary Japanese have done what they did? Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness Yoshida argues that "Nanjing crystallizes a much larger conflict over what should constitute the ideal perception of the nation: Japan, as a nation, acknowledges its past and apologizes for its wartime wrongdoings; or stands firm against foreign pressures and teaches Japanese youth about the benevolent and courageous martyrs who fought a just war to save Asia from Western aggression. 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. On 17 December, chairman John Rabe wrote a complaint to Kiyoshi Fukui, second secretary of the Japanese Embassy. Prosecution's Witnesses. While the books' take on Nanjing is stilted and feels like the product of a committee, in various versions they acknowledge the deaths of thousands of Chinese including women and children, as well as looting, arson and assaults by Japanese soldiers. They do not mention sexual assaults. The second telegram was sent through Shanghai to Japanese military leaders, advocating for a three-day ceasefire so that the Chinese could withdraw from the city. Hopefully when you being unarmed yourself tried to protect an unarmed crowd from a bunch of inhuman robbers you could speak truth every time and stay alive which I am . Rabe commented on how efforts to remove these Chinese troops failed and Japanese soldiers began to lob grenades into the refugee zone.[10]. On the other side of the city, the 11th Company of the 45th Regiment encountered some 20,000 Chinese soldiers who were making their way from Xiakuan. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. 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 . [51] In her book, she estimated that the number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling Collegealone. [155], The memory of the Nanjing Massacre has been a point of contention in Sino-Japanese relations since the early 1970s. 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.[21]. A lesser debate rests on who among the dead to be included as "massacre victims". The capacity of the hospital was normally one hundred and eighty beds, and this was kept full to overflowing during this entire period. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. New York Times (New York), January 9, 1938; accessed March 12, 2016. There was no belt. This orthodox victimhood narrative has become entwined with the Chinese national identity and is very sensitive to the revisionist sentiments from the far-right in Japan, which makes the memory of the massacre a recurring point of tension in Sino-Japanese relations after 1982. Both officers supposedly surpassed their goal during the heat of battle, making it impossible to determine which officer had actually won the contest. Hata discounts estimates of the death toll which range into the hundreds of thousands on the basis that, according to Smythe, Nanking's civilian population was only between 200,000 and 250,000. . 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 [12] Consequently, Askew estimates that the true number of corpses buried in and around Nanking was 17,500,[21] whereas military historian Masahiro Yamamoto puts the number at 43,000. [61], On 5 February 2009, the Japanese Supreme Court ordered Shd Higashinakano and the publisher Tendensha to pay four million yen in damages to Mrs. Shuqin Xia, who claims to be the 7- or 8-year-old girl who appears in Magee's film. [153], On February 3, 2014, Naoki Hyakuta, a member of the board of governors of Japan's public broadcasting company, NHK, was quoted as saying the massacre never occurred. Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 112. Photo in the album taken in Nanjing by Itou Kaneo of the Kisarazu Air Unit of the Imperial Japanese Navy, A picture of a dead child. "[168] Recognizing the Nanjing Massacre as such can be viewed in some circles in Japan as "Japan-bashing" (in the case of foreigners) or "self-flagellation" (in the case of Japanese). In 1986 Ikuhiko Hata became the first historian to call this definition into question. [69] She found that Chinese historians favor estimates between 40,000 and 150,000 and that they "speculated that reducing the official Chinese estimate of victims would pave the way for greater reconciliation between Japan and China". Because dead bodies don't talk. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. Destruction of Nanking. Moreover, many troops of captured Chinese soldiers were led out of the city and down to the Yangtze, where they were summarily executed. In 2005, John Rabe's former residence in Nanjing was renovated and now accommodates the ". 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. There are no official numbers for the death toll . China's Rising COVID-19 Death Toll Satellite images suggest a higher number of deaths as China suspends short-term visas for South Korean and Japanese travelers in a retaliatory measure. Chinese teacher sacked for questioning death toll in Nanjing massacre. 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. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. Since records were not kept, estimates regarding the number of victims buried in the ditch range from 4,000 to 20,000. "[70][71], Ralph L. Phillips, a missionary, testified to the U.S. State Assembly Investigating Committee, that he was "forced to watch while the Japs disembowled a Chinese soldier" and "roasted his heart and liver and ate them. [citation needed], In February 1938, both Prince Asaka and General Matsui were recalled to Japan. The last murders in the house were of Ha's two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. The war, still undeclared, had no clear-cut goal or purpose. [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. [20], Today many mainstream historians concur that this estimate is exaggerated. Chinese soldiers were summarily executed in violation of the laws of war. Honda believes all those atrocities that were committed on "the road to Nanking" were part of the massacre. [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. I watched with my own eyes as they looted the caf of our German baker Herr Kiessling. . The four horsemen of denial. On December 13, 2014, China held its first, Askew, David. Soon after the end of the war, Matsui and his lieutenant Tani Hisao, were tried and convicted for war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and were executed. This district encompassed not only the city of Nanking proper, occupied by the Japanese from December 13, but also the six rural counties surrounding it, namely Jiangning, Lishui, Jurong, Jiangpu, Luhe, and Gaochun. "[91] However, Masahiro Yamamoto printed a rebuttal of Gluck's statement in his book Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity, arguing that "To determine the extent and nature of [Japan's] responsibility, the 'numerological arguments about the death count and distinctions of comparative atrocities,' which [Gluck] termed as irrelevant to the moral question, are essential. For most of the morning, Japanese soldiers tied the POWs' hands together. Higashinakano had claimed in his book, Thorough Review of Nanjing Massacre, that she and the girl were different persons, and that she was not a witness of the Nanjing massacre, but he was unable to prove this at trial. Everybody learns that 300,000 people died in the Nanking Massacre when the Japanese occupied the city and massively killed civilians. Now, in the winter, the season gives time to reflect. The Nanjing Massacre (simplified Chinese: ; traditional Chinese: ; pinyin: Nnjng Dtsh, Japanese: , romanized:Nankin Daigyakusatsu) or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking[note 2]) was the mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino-Japanese War, by the Imperial Japanese Army. Besides, we count more than 150,000 victims of barbarian acts buried by the charity organizations. Kasahara notes that Smythe's survey proves that a bare minimum of 12,000 ordinary civilians were massacred within Nanking, though other contemporary sources gives figures between 50,000 and 100,000, plus at least another 26,870 outside Nanking. As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . [58], The official stance of the People's Republic of China is that 300,000 or more Chinese were massacred in Nanking. [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. On May 1, 1946, SCAP officials interrogated Prince Asaka, who was the ranking officer in the city at the height of the atrocities, about his involvement in the Nanjing Massacre and the deposition was submitted to the International Prosecution Section of the Tokyo tribunal. English Articles. Friday December 17 2021, 10.25am, The Times. What happened within the city limits was even more humiliating for humanity. Didi Tang, Beijing. 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." 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. On trial with them was Gunkichi Tanaka, a captain from the 6th Division who personally killed over 300 Chinese POWs and civilians with his sword during the massacre. [T]here is no obvious explanation for this grim event, nor can one be found. [21], The first academic accounts of the Nanking Massacre included as massacre victims all Chinese who were killed by the Japanese Army in and around Nanking, including Chinese soldiers who were killed in action. [35] Three quarters of the population had fled Nanjing before the Japanese arrived. 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. Nankin Daigyakusatsu (Nanjing Massacre), "Six weeks long" is a convenient figure but far from precise. Physical evidences are almost everywhere to the killing of men, women and children, of the breaking into and looting of property and of the burning and destruction of houses and buildings. [148][149], On February 20, 2012, Takashi Kawamura, mayor of Nagoya, told a visiting delegation from Nanjing that the massacre "probably never happened". [70], By the year 2000 very little research had been done by Western scholars concerning the death toll of the Nanking Massacre, and instead most Western sources simply repeated the early death toll estimates, including those proposed in the 1930s and 1940s by the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, which put the toll at 100,000 or more, and by Miner Searle Bates, who said roughly 40,000. [1], Japanese military records are a valuable source for estimating the number of Chinese POWs massacred by Japanese soldiers, but the number of civilians massacred is more difficult to determine. [24], 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. An official from South Korea said they would summon the Tokyo ambassador to protest. The two men were described as vying to be the first to kill 100 people with a sword before the capture of Nanjing. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. It would be all right if we only raped them. [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. Title. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. Zhang Xianwen, editor-in-chief of the report, states that the information collected was based on "a combination of Chinese, Japanese and Western raw materials, which is objective and just and is able to stand the trial of history". 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 . 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. [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. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. During the chaos following the attack of the city, some were killed in the Safety Zone, but the crimes that occurred in the rest of the city were far greater by all accounts. [2] In reviewing this survey, Askew concluded that all of its "centrists" were effectively deniers of the atrocity except for Hara. Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanking, which was within the established Safety Zone. The compound is located in a neutral zone in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, which is the reason why a group of prostitutes also end up there. Documents on the Rape of Nanking, p. 254. Even with such a huge death toll, some even deny the existence of this massacre. [18], Another early estimate was that of China's state-run Central News Agency, which reported in February 1938 that the Japanese had slaughtered 60,000 to 70,000 POWs in Nanking. [44] The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation,[45] such as by penetrating vaginas with bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, or other objects. A year before that a series of "smaller courts" held in China, including in Nanjing, put the death toll at 300,000. As the Japanese approached, the Chinese army withdrew the bulk of its forces since Nanjing was not a defensible position. These estimates are borne out by the figures of burial societies and other organizations, which testify to over 155,000 buried bodies. [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. The Chinese women were undefended, their menfolk powerless or absent. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. 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 number 300,000 is displayed prominently at memorials and is the higher end of commonly accepted estimates. The Flowers of War by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman. According to the archives research "The telegrams sent by the U.S. diplomats [in Berlin] pointed to the massacre of an estimated half a million people in Shanghai, Suzhou, Jiaxing, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Wuxi and Changzhou". [108][109], According to documents in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, at least 300,000 Chinese were killed. [citation needed], To many Japanese scholars, post-war estimations were distorted by "victor's justice", when Japan was condemned as the sole aggressor. It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women. [21], The second type of source is the burial records written down by Chinese charitable associations. [42] For instance, after routing the Chinese in Nanking, Japanese soldiers fired upon and killed a large number of Chinese soldiers who were attempting to escape the battlefield by swimming across the Yangtze River. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. According to Yang Daqing, professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University: While it is standard practice for governments to destroy evidence in times of defeat, in the two weeks before the Allies arrived in Japan, various Japanese agenciesthe military in particularsystematically destroyed sensitive documents to a degree perhaps unprecedented in history. [31] However, some historians have variously argued that Smythe's figures are either underestimates or exaggerations of the true civilian death toll. He further added that aspersions were cast regarding the authenticity and accuracy of burial records and photographs presented in the Tokyo War Crime Court, which the Japanese government claimed were fabrications by the Chinese government, artificially manipulated or incorrectly attributed to the Nanjing Massacre. [11] However, Timperley's source for this number was the French humanitarian Father Jacquinot, who was in Shanghai at the time of the massacre,[12] and it might also have included civilian casualties of the Battle of Shanghai. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash desperately. Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. [7] By mid-November, the Japanese had captured Shanghai with the help of naval and aerial bombardment. ", "Case 16 A Chinese girl named Loh, who, with her mother and brother, was living in one of the Refugee Centers in the Refugee Zone, was shot through the head and killed by a Japanese soldier. Yoshida contended that over time the event has acquired different meanings to different people. Many remember the atrocities that occurred to the Jews in the Holocaust, but few remember what is called, "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," where 300,000 people were murdered, and 20,000 women were raped (Rivera 2). Just better. Updated on March 06, 2017. The women and children are crying all nights. All of them were hanged on 23 December 1948. Simultaneously, the 9th Division entered nearby Guanghua Gate, and the 16th Division entered the Zhongshan and Taiping gates. 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