nanking massacre death toll
[2] In reviewing this survey, Askew concluded that all of its "centrists" were effectively deniers of the atrocity except for Hara. The civilian government of Nanjing fled, leaving the city under the de facto control of German citizen John Rabe, who had founded the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. The civilian Chinese population remaining in the city crowded the streets of the so-called "safety zone" as refugees, many of whom are destitute. [17], 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. China on Monday marked the 84th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians and disarmed soldiers were killed by Japanese troops in and around the former Chinese capital. [57] The most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the tribunal and its findings. [112][170] The range of the death toll estimated by Japanese historians is from tens of thousands to 200,000. As the Japanese approached, the Chinese army withdrew the bulk of its forces since Nanjing was not a defensible position. Some of the lowest estimates have counted only 10,000 deaths,[2] while the government of China maintains that approximately 300,000 people were killed. Rape! Hs Shuhsi, ed. 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. The death toll of 300,000 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 . According to Xinhua News Agency, it is the most complete record to date. Anger over the events at Nanking . A year before that a series of "smaller courts" held in China, including in Nanjing, put the death toll at 300,000. Nanjing Death Toll Graph. She gave a final scream as her intestines spilled out. 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 seppuku (ritual suicide). Quite the same Wikipedia. In a documentary film about the Nanjing Massacre, In the Name of the Emperor, a former Japanese soldier named Shiro Azuma spoke candidly about the process of rape and murder in Nanjing.[50]. However, according to historian Tokushi Kasahara, the evidence used to convict Hisao Tani was not convincing. [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. Chang also states that not all rape victims were women. [54][55] On the other hand, at least one historian has noted that the atrocity in Nanking could be equated with the entire war waged by Japan on China. . 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. ", "Case 15 There are about 540 refugees crowded in No. Tang gathered about 100,000 soldiers, largely untrained, including Chinese troops who had participated in the Battle of Shanghai. Pikankan means, "Let's see a woman open up her legs." 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. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. In 1947 at the Nanking War Crimes Tribunal, the verdict of Lieutenant General Tani Hisao , the commander of the 6th Division quoted the figure of more . [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". The Nanking Safety Zone was demarcated through the use of Red Cross Flags.[25]. 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. [20], The Nanjing garrison force set fire to buildings and houses in the areas close to Xiakuan to the north as well as in the environs of the eastern and southern city gates. [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. Two days later, in his report to The New York Times, Durdin stated that the alleys and streets were filled with the dead, amongst them women and children. 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. [31] His more specific range of figures is roughly 160,000 to 170,000. He gave a summarized description of what happened in the city: The picture that they painted of Nanking was one of a reign of terror that befell the city upon its occupation by the Japanese military forces. The results of the survey were published in the association's magazine, Kaiko, in 1985 along with an admission and apology that read, "Whatever the severity of war or special circumstances of war psychology, we just lose words faced with this mass illegal killing. The American ambassador in Hankow replied that although he supported Rabe's proposal for a ceasefire, Chiang did not. We thus have a total of more than 300,000 victims. The soldiers then bayoneted another sister of between 78, who was also in the room. As Nanking fell to the Japanese, and their troops entered the city on the 13th of December, the streets were already crowded with a large number of . [41], Since then Kasahara has proposed a definition between these two. "[72], "In the first days of the occupation the soldiers [] took a great deal of bedding, cooking utensils and food from the refugees. [9], On December 12, under heavy artillery fire and aerial bombardment, General Tang Sheng-chi ordered his men to retreat. The incident occurred near the Kuling Ssu, a noted temple on the border of the Refugee zone". [21][31][34] According to Smythe's survey, as many as 12,000 civilians were killed within the city of Nanking plus another 26,870 in the rural counties outside Nanking. [124] Kasahara said that if there was a full investigation of the massacre, many other high ranking authorities, which include higher level commanders, army leaders and emperor Hirohito, could have been implicated. The Battle of Nanking ended on December 13, when the divisions of the Japanese Army entered the walled city of Nanjing. [11] Here Australian journalist Harold Timperley was quoted as stating that 300,000 civilians had been killed. 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." . 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. The man is now at the University Hospital and is not expected to live. Other eyewitnesses to the massacre also expressed their opinions in Japanese magazines in the 1950s and 1960s, but political shifts slowly eroded this tide of confessions. We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. 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. [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. [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". ", 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. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. Various Japanese officials and historians have disputed the death toll since the war, angering China. [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. [145][146], In May 1994, Justice Minister Shigeto Nagano called the Nanjing Massacre a "fabrication". The girl was 14 years old. [121], Kki Hirota, Prime Minister of Japan at an earlier stage of the war, and a diplomat during the atrocities at Nanjing, was convicted of participating in "the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy" (count 1), waging "a war of aggression and a war in violation of international laws, treaties, agreements and assurances against the Republic of China" (count 27) and count 55. By contrast, Minoru Kitamura argues that Smythe's links to the Nationalist Government of China may have led him to skew his figures upwards. . The number of Chinese killed in the massacre has been . 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. Outside of . His decision to visit the shrine regardless sparked international outrage. It was truly a regrettable act of barbarity. 19471218: pp. Currently, the most reliable and widely agreed upon figures place the total death toll of the massacre between the broad range of 40,000 to 200,000 massacre victims in the entire Nanking Special Administrative District. [18] The judge also ruled against the civil claim of the plaintiffs because the original article was more than 60 years old. [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. 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". Only after firmly establishing 'historical particularities' can one clearly define Japans responsibility. 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). General Matsui was indicted before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East for "deliberately and recklessly" ignoring his legal duty "to take adequate steps to secure the observance and prevent breaches" of the Hague Convention. [18] However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians". [29][31], The third type of source is Japanese military records, which recorded the number of POWs the Japanese Army executed. 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. [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. [127], On October 9, 2015, Documents of the Nanjing Massacre have been listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. A People's Liberation Army honour guard bearing large funeral wreaths marched slowly past a memorial showing the figure 3,00,000, China's official death toll in the events of December 1937, as . But we always stabbed and killed them. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 85. [66], The Hui people, a minority Chinese group, the majority of them Muslim, suffered as well during the massacre. The Nanking Massacre as a component of national identity. Beginning, I believe, on the 19th or 20th of December, burning was carried on regularly for six weeks. 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 . At trial, Matsui went out of his way to protect Prince Asaka by shifting blame to lower-ranking division commanders. Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the primary officers in charge of the Japanese troops at Nanjing were put on trial. I am born in China. For example, Edgar Snow stated in his 1941 book, The Battle for Asia, that 42,000 were massacred in Nanking and 300,000 in total between Nanking and Shanghai, figures which were apparently based on these estimates. He would later state that he had seen tank guns used on bound soldiers. Scarred by history: The Rape of Nanjing China and Japan: Seven decades of bitterness 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. The older was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword. [169] In the 2010 Japan-China Joint History Research Committee meeting, scholars from the Japanese side set the maximum possible number of civilian victims at 200,000, with estimates of around 40,000 or 20,000. [131], Yanziji Nanjing Massacre Memorial in 2004, A statue titled "Family Ruined" in front of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, John Rabe's former residence, now the "John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall", in Nanjing, September 2010, China and Japan have both acknowledged the occurrence of wartime atrocities. Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. [157], Takashi Yoshida described how changing political concerns and perceptions of the "national interest" in Japan, China, and the U.S. have shaped the collective memory of the Nanjing massacre. [21], Then in 1997 Kasahara formulated a definition between the two. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases. [21], However, when Shokun! [85] Because dead bodies don't talk. 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. [147], On June 19, 2007, a group of around 100 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers again denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication, arguing that there was no evidence to prove the allegations of mass killings by Japanese soldiers. especially offenses against prisoners of war.[91]. In the meantime, members of the Committee contacted Tang and proposed a plan for three-day cease-fire, during which the Chinese troops could withdraw without fighting while the Japanese troops would stay in their present position. In light of the 40,000 corpses which Hata believes were buried in and around Nanking, he estimates the total death toll at between 38,000 and 42,000 POWs and civilians. 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. [35] Three quarters of the population had fled Nanjing before the Japanese arrived. According to one Japanese journalist embedded with Imperial forces at the time:[12]. A bar graph comparing four different claims for the number of non-military victims of the Nanjing Massacre, as well as the death toll claims of six different groups. For example, a two-volume collection of military documents related to the Nanjing operations was published in 1989; and disturbing excerpts from Kesago Nakajima's diary, a commander at Nanjing, was published in the early 1980s. 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". They were bored, angry, frustrated, tired. By early December, it was on the outskirts of Nanjing. The museum notes only that "Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothes, which numbered around 4000[34] were severely prosecuted". 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". [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". [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. [112], The duration of the incident is naturally defined by its geography: the earlier the Japanese entered the area, the longer the duration. The first was to Chiang through an American ambassador in Hankow, asking that Chinese forces "undertake no military operations" within Nanjing. Matsui returned to retirement, but Prince Asaka remained on the Supreme War Council until the end of the war in August 1945. In his novel Ikiteiru Heitai ('Living Soldiers'), Tatsuz Ishikawa vividly describes how the 16th Division of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force committed atrocities on the march between Shanghai and Nanjing. John Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. In December 2007, newly declassified U.S. government archive documents revealed that a telegraph by the U.S. ambassador to Germany in Berlin sent one day after the Japanese army occupied Nanjing, stated that he heard the Japanese ambassador in Germany boasting that the Japanese army had killed 500,000 Chinese soldiers and civilians as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. 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. Wilson, Dr. Robert O. Yet, in China, this figure has come to symbolize the justice, legality, and authority of the post-war trials condemning Japan as the aggressor.[113]. On December 13, 1937, after seizing Nanjing, the Japanese army carried out a bloody slaughter of unparalleled savagery in violation of international law. [30] Others assert that lieutenant colonel Isamu Ch, Asaka's aide-de-camp, sent this order under the Prince's sign-manual without the Prince's knowledge or assent. 2. [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 door was open by the landlord, a Mohammedan named Ha. [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. [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. Nankin Daigyakusatsu (Nanjing Massacre), "Six weeks long" is a convenient figure but far from precise. 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