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. [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". The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags.[25]. And based on a clear definition of the responsibility there can be an answer to the 'moral' question. The website has quoted a Japanese Twitter user who apparently said, "why the death toll increases every year". [85] [2] In reviewing this survey, Askew concluded that all of its "centrists" were effectively deniers of the atrocity except for Hara. [clarification needed], In 1984, in an attempt to refute the allegations of war crimes in Nanjing, the Japanese Army Veterans Association (Kaikosha) interviewed former Japanese soldiers who had served in the Nanjing area from 1937 to 1938. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. [19] The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanking Massacre. On December 13, 2009, both the Chinese and Japanese monks held a religious assembly to mourn Chinese civilians killed by invading Japanese troops. "[53], Apart from geographical scope, some historians including Kasahara deny that the massacre ended in early February and instead put the end date at March 28, though such a long time range is disputed by other historians. On March 7, 1938, Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital in the Safety Zone administrated by the United States, wrote in a letter to his family, "a conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000, including of course thousands of soldiers that had thrown down their arms. As per Sina, Oberver.com verified that Twitter froze the . 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. 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. Hempel's hotel was broken into as well, as [was] almost every shop on Chung Shang and Taiping Road.[61]. The victims were blown up with landmines, then doused with petrol and set on fire. The girl was 14 years old. 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. The Nanking Massacre was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing (then spelled Nanking), then the capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino-Japanese War.The massacre occurred over a period of six weeks starting on December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanjing. [52][53] There are also accounts of Japanese troops coercing families to commit incestuous acts. On 17 December, chairman John Rabe wrote a complaint to Kiyoshi Fukui, second secretary of the Japanese Embassy. [74], The Japanese troops did respect the Zone to an extent; until the Japanese occupation, no shells entered that part of the city except a few stray shots. Historical revisionists and nationalists in Japan have been accused of minimizing or denying the massacre. Death toll of the Nanjing Massacre Last updated May 04, 2022. The younger girl was bayoneted also but was spared the horrible treatment that had been meted out to her sister and mother. 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 majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. The massacre began the same day, with Japanese troops running entirely unchecked. Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness Women and girls were raped en masse and looting was widespread. The argument in favor of this made by Katsuichi Honda in 1984 was seen by some scholars involved in the debate on the massacre as a "partial admission of defeat" by Honda. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1-year-old baby. The Shanghai Aurora College on Thursday said the teacher, surnamed Song, made "wrong comments" during class. 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 [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. Due to multiple factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. [12][23][24], The first historian to make an academic estimate of the death toll of the Nanking Massacre was Tomio Hora in his 1967 book Kindai Senshi no Nazo ("Riddles of Modern War History"), who argued in favor of 200,000. He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939, though he held no further military commands. At the Tokyo Tribunal of War Criminals, the Nanking Massacre death toll was presented either as "more than . Recent. [93], In 2003, the director of Japan's Military History Archives of National Institute for Defense Studies said that as much 70 percent of Japan's wartime records were destroyed. 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. The Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing (formerly romanized as Nanking) 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. I know not where to end. You hear nothing but rape. The "Great Massacre School" group supports the validity of the findings at the Tokyo Trials, and concludes that there were at least 200,000 casualties and at least 20,000 rape cases; whereas "The Illusion School" group rejects tribunal findings as "victor's justice". [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. [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. He assigned Asaka to Nanjing as an opportunity to make amends. 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. He reportedly told one of his civilian aides: I now realize that we have unknowingly wrought a most grievous effect on this city. . This 300,000 number is constantly hammered to us, being on gigantic signs on events related to remembering the massacre, and a must-mention whenever a textbook/TV program mentions the massacre. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. People are hysterical Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. After decades of struggle, the Nanking Massacre had become a recognized piece of Japanese history. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "Leftover Problems," in The Nanking Atrocity, 193738: Complicating the Picture, ed. [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. [66], The Hui people, a minority Chinese group, the majority of them Muslim, suffered as well during the massacre. Notably, the novelist Hotta Yoshie[ja] wrote a novel, Time (Jikan) in 1953, portraying the massacre from the point of view of a Chinese intellectual watching it happen. The Japanese army leadership assigned sections of the safety zone to some units to separate alleged plain-clothed soldiers from the civilians. Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi "The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate: War Guilt Amid Fabricated Illusions, 197175", Yang, Daqing. . English Articles. [56][57] Robert O. Wilson, a physician, testified that cases of gun wounds "continued to come in [to the hospital of University of Nanjing] for a matter of some six or seven weeks following the fall of the city on December 13, 1937. [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. Prince Yasuhiko Asaka told a war correspondent later that he was in a very perilous position when his headquarters was ambushed by Chinese forces that were in the midst of fleeing from Nanjing east of the city. [67] Joshua A. Fogel, a historian of China at York University, has decried the efforts of many Chinese to exaggerate the death toll of the atrocity and then "silence anyone who disagrees". 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". . Minnie Vautrin was a Christian missionary who established Ginling Girls College in Nanking, which was within the established Safety Zone. [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. On 19 December 1937, the Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:[46]. The report consists of eight volumes and was released to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the massacre. [citation needed], Some conspiracy theories claim that the whole event was entirely made up by the CCP and Chinese Nationalists as a weapon to attack Japan, deny the truth and facts of the war, and to indirectly justify China's discriminatory policies against minority groups in Xinjiang and Tibet. [99][100] An estimate death toll of 300,000 has also been cited. The following day, on December 10, Rabe got his answer from the Generalissimo. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. During the massacre, she worked tirelessly in welcoming thousands of female refugees to stay in the college campus, sheltering up to 10,000 women. There was considerable destruction to areas outside the city walls. Killings were most intense in the first five days from December 13 and remained moderately intense until December 31, 1937, according to the Japanese military records. The number of Chinese killed in the massacre has been . [20], Today many mainstream historians concur that this estimate is exaggerated. [18] John Rabe, the German head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese were killed in Nanking, though this estimate included both military casualties and massacred civilians. In 1948, the case of the Nanjing massacre was considered by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which handed down two death sentences. According to the Mainichi Shinbun, this is a photo of Nanking citizens wearing armbands of the flag of Japan and giving cheers to the Japanese military on the day of its Ceremonial Entry into Nanking on December 17, 1937.. Takashi Yoshida asserts that, "Nanjing has figured in the attempts of all three nations [China, Japan and the . Hata takes Smythe's figure of 12,000 civilians killed, but notes that perhaps only 8,000 were confirmed massacre victims. [127], On October 9, 2015, Documents of the Nanjing Massacre have been listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. At dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. A Japanese hotelier's denial of a 1937 massacre by Japanese troops in the Chinese city of Nanjing has prompted Chinese social media calls for a boycott of travel to Japan, threatening tourist . 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