Nanjing Massacre
The Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Nanking Massacre) refers to the war crimes perpetrated by Japanese troops during their invasion and occupation of Nanjing, China, from December 1937 to February 1938. These crimes included the execution and murder of more than 200,000 defenseless and unarmed Chinese soldiers and civilians, the widespread rape and torture of reportedly about 20,000 women and girls, the dismembering of human bodies—both male and female—and the widespread slaughter of domestic and farm animals. The massacre was not limited to Nanjing, which was then the capital of the Republic of China, but encompassed the line of march of the Japanese general Matsui Iwane's Tenth Army and the Shanghai Expeditionary Force from Hangzhou—the landing site—through Shanghai and into Nanjing.
The bloodletting was contained only after the establishment of the Japanese puppet government of Nanjing in late March 1938. General Matsui was found guilty of committing crimes against humanity by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and was sentenced to hanging.
Although the massacre was well reported by the English-language press, its memory was obscured for some years by the refusal of the Japanese government to admit to the crimes and by the failure of the Chinese government to raise the issue internationally. It was not until the 1980s that the Chinese began a serious study of the massacre. After painstaking research of burial records, documents, and interviews, it was concluded that the event took the lives of nearly 300,000. This figure is significantly larger than the estimate of 200,000 given by the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
Corroboration of these numbers is important because the nationalist movement in Japan is trying to deny the legitimacy of the tribunal. For them, the war was a patriotic and just struggle against Western domination. The Chinese confirm and exaggerate the tribunal's findings with the political intent of convincing Asians that Japan has been and still is a threat to Asian nations. The massacre has inspired artistic representations by both Chinese and Japanese artists, and the International Committee to Study the Nanjing Massacre has commissioned a symphonic requiem entitled Hun Qiao (The Bridge of Spirits) to honor and memorialize the victims. The search for the truth and meaningfulness of this massacre will be discussed and remembered in various ways for many decades.
Further Reading
Brook, Timothy, ed. (1999) Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Chad, Meira. (1996) A Choice of Evils. London: Orion Publishing.
Chang, Iris. (1997) The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War Two. New York: Penguin.
Honda, Katsuichi. (1999) The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
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