nanking massacre death toll

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 . [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". and Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira put the final toll closer to 200,000. . Five of these were journalists who remained in the city a few days after it was captured, leaving the city on December 16. Instead of refuting the allegations, the interviewed veterans confirmed that a massacre had taken place and openly described and admitted to taking part in the atrocities. The safety zone, an area of 3.85 square kilometres, was packed with the remaining population of Nanjing. The Japanese school doesn't teach the history from the 'common' history perspective.. 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. 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 . 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. 616621. Beginning on December 13, 1937, the massacre lasted six weeks. The Nanking Massacre, commonly known as the Rape of Nanking, was a war crime committed by the Japanese military in Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China, after it fell to the Imperial Japanese Army on December 13, 1937. [112], The duration of the incident is naturally defined by its geography: the earlier the Japanese entered the area, the longer the duration. [108][109], According to documents in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register, at least 300,000 Chinese were killed. [98] Tomio Hora supports the information found in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which estimates a death toll of at least 200,000. The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. The total death toll of the Nanking Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. "[178], The Nanjing massacre has emerged as one fundamental keystone in the construction of the modern Chinese national identity. Photographs of victims are displayed at the Nanking massacre memorial. From this gunboat, Rabe sent two telegrams. [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. What many people don't know is that the emperor had largely lost control of the army and Japan, which was a flourishing democracy before was taken over by the military (basically) following . 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. Soldiers pillaged from the poor and the wealthy alike. Chiang planned to fight a protracted war of attrition to wear down the Japanese in the hinterland of China.[9]. The battle was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat. 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. [14][15] In Japan, the veracity of the newspaper article about the contest was the subject of ferocious debate for several decades starting in 1967. They believed the 300,000 toll typified a "Chinese-style exaggeration" with disregard for evidence. Such crime continued from three to six weeks depending on the types of crime. [112][170] The range of the death toll estimated by Japanese historians is from tens of thousands to 200,000. 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. Prince Asaka, as part of the Imperial Family, was granted immunity and never tried. ", "Case 13 December 18, 4 p.m., at No. 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. [8] These events are collectively known as the Nanking Massacre. 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. [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. I shouldn't say all right. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. 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. 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. The contest continued because neither had killed 100 people. [18] However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians". 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. Anger over the events at Nanking . The following day, on December 10, Rabe got his answer from the Generalissimo. That same afternoon, two small Japanese Navy fleets arrived on both sides of the Yangtze River. "[101] However, this estimate includes an accusation that the Japanese Army murdered 57,418 Chinese POWs at Mufushan, though the latest research indicates that between 4,000 and 20,000 were massacred,[102][103] and it also includes the 112,266 corpses allegedly buried by the Chongshantang, a charitable association, though today mainstream historians agree that the Chongshantang's records were at least greatly exaggerated if not entirely fabricated. 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. I am born in China. 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. Kasahara generally concludes that the death toll must have been well over 100,000, and possibly around 200,000. David Askew, "The Scale of Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing: An Examination of the Burial Records," Ritsumeikan Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, June 2004, 710. Some soldiers then went to the next room, where Mrs. Hsia's parents, aged 76 and 74, and her two daughters aged 16 and 14 [were]. [104][105][106] According to Bob Wakabayashi, he estimates the death toll within Nanjing City Wall to be around 40,000, mostly massacred in the first five days; while the total victims after a 3-month period in Nanjing and its surrounding six rural counties "far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000". [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? Nanjing had been constantly bombed for days and the Chinese troops that remained there were disheartened and had taken to drinking before the city's inevitable fall. General Iwane Matsui waited another hour before issuing the command to take Nanjing by force. Practically every building in the city was entered many, many times by these roving gangs of soldiers throughout the first six or seven weeks of the occupation". During the post-war period, China . [85] He was sentenced to death and executed in 1949. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 85. In what is known as the Nanking Massacre, Japanese soldiers systematically raped thousands of Chinese women and girls of all ages. [86], Ono Kenji, a chemical worker in Japan, curated a collection of wartime diaries from Japanese veterans who fought in the Battle of Nanking in 1937. "[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. Eyewitness accounts include testimonies of expatriates engaged in humanitarian work (mostly physicians, professors, missionary and businessmen), journalists (both Western and Japanese), as well as the field diaries of military personnel. [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". "Case 5 On the night of December 14th, there were many cases of Japanese soldiers entering houses and raping women or taking them away. [21], However, when Shokun! "[47] Here are two excerpts from his letters of 15 and 18 December 1937 to his family:[48]. [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. [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. By early December, it was on the outskirts of Nanjing. [citation needed], On 18 February 1938, the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was forcibly renamed the Nanjing International Rescue Committee, and the Safety Zone effectively ceased to function. ", "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. 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 . The first was to Chiang through an American ambassador in Hankow, asking that Chinese forces "undertake no military operations" within Nanjing. [31] His more specific range of figures is roughly 160,000 to 170,000. 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. [86] Some of the concealed information was made public a few decades later. Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned to death. He alleged it would have been impossible to kill so many people in such a short period of time. Two days later he defended his remarks, saying, "Even since I was a national Diet representative, I have said [repeatedly] there was no [Nanjing] massacre that resulted in murders of several hundred thousands of people. 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. [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. [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. [173][174][175], "During this period, when the Japanese Army occupied Nanjing it killed a large number of Chinese and carried out looting, arson and assaults. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers. He was promoted to the rank of general in August 1939, though he held no further military commands. Nanjing Death Toll Graph. [6] Over the course of its subsequent occupation of Nanking the Japanese Army hunted down the former Chinese soldiers within the city and in a large number of cases summarily executed them. Essay On The Nanking Massacre. "[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. 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. [12] Furthermore, this estimate includes an accusation that the Japanese Army murdered 57,418 Chinese POWs at Mufushan, though the latest research indicates that between 4,000 and 20,000 were massacred,[61][62] and it also includes the 112,266 corpses allegedly buried by the Chongshantang, though today many historians agree that the Chongshantang's records were at least exaggerated if not entirely fabricated. [1] Ikuhiko Hata considers the number of 300,000 to be a "symbolic figure" representative of China's wartime suffering and not a figure to be taken literally. [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. [47][48], The International Military Tribunal for the Far East stated that the massacre took place in the parts of Nanking captured on December 13, 1937, and after and lasted until early February 1938. [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. "Hundred believed Dead - Panay Death . There was no belt. Durdin, who worked for The New York Times, toured Nanjing before his departure from the city. Chiang's strategy was to follow the suggestion of his German advisers to draw the Japanese army deep into China and use China's vast territory as a defensive strength. As the Japanese army approached Nanjing, most of them fled the city, leaving 27 foreigners. In a press release to foreign reporters, Tang Shengzhi announced the city would not surrender and would fight to the death. Rape! I think he will live. The Flowers of War by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. [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. Nanjing Death Toll Graph. [138], During the 1970s, Katsuichi Honda wrote a series of articles for the Asahi Shimbun on war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II (such as the Nanjing Massacre). The majority of the bodies were dumped directly into the Yangtze River. [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. The four horsemen of denial. "Nakamura Akira shi no 'Nanking Jiken Ichiman Nin Gyakusatsu Setsu' wo Hihan Suru [Critique of 'The Death Toll of Ten Thousand in the Nanjing Incident' by Mr. Akira Nakamura]." Seiron . Moreover, many troops of captured Chinese soldiers were led out of the city and down to the Yangtze, where they were summarily executed. It referred to the Nanjing massacre as an "incident", and glossed over the issue of comfort women. Photographs of victims are displayed at the Nanking massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese Japanese... P. 85 was bloody as both sides faced attrition in urban hand-to-hand combat were who. Leaving 27 foreigners to 170,000 Books, 2008 ), p. 85 fight the... 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