Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity

There are basically three camps of people with different beliefs about what happened in Nanking/Nanjing in 1937 when the Japanese invaded the city.

First, there are the traditionalists. They believe that 200,000 or more Chinese were murdered by the Japanese soldiers who also did massive looting and raping.

Second, there are the revisionists who are roughly in two groups. The extreme revisionists believe that there was no trouble in Nanking at all and only a very small number of civilians were killed.

Finally, there are the centrists who believe that yes, the Japanese Army did bad things in Nanking, but the numbers of murdered are inflated.

None of them agree on the exact number of civilians who were killed, how much looting was done (if any), and how many rapes there were (if any.) Evidence consists of first-hand accounts from both the survivors and Japanese soldiers of the time, along with documents (many burned at the end of WWII), diaries (like that of John Rabe), and photographs and film (which have been attacked as fake.)

Masahiro Yamamoto seems to be a centrist on the issue. He agrees quite strongly that the Japanese soldier did a lot of horrible things in Nanking, but he also believes the number murdered, etc, was not as high as the traditionists believe.

The main problem I found with the book is with his making so many strong statements about how the Japanese soldiers did wrong things and then somehow saying that they cut back the numbers of things they did while in the city.

At present, I do accept the savage and fiendish nature of Japanese atrocities in Nanking as a fact, but I reject the prevailing traditionalist interpretation of the incident because of some of its question able theses as well as negative ramifications that are already obvious today and may become more serious in the future.

He says wartime propaganda affected how the 'incident' was presented.

He then goes into a history of war atrocities and what causes them. That history can come back to bite him, though. He points out a Japanese massacre that took place at Port Arthur in 1894.

The defenseless and unarmed inhabitants were butchered in their houses, and their bodies were unspeakably mutilated. There was an unrestrained reign of murder which continued for three days.

Basically, he's admitting that there was a precedent for what happened at Nanking. It's not the best way to try to present an image of Japanese soldiers. Japanese officials even admitted the massacre.

In talking about Nanking he says the Chinese did not prepare the defense of the city very well, and the Japanese did not prepare their attack on the city very well. Then he gives more evidence about the behavior of the Japanese troops, this time on the way to Nanking.

Private diaries and even official records reveal that many cases of murder or executions also took place even before the Japanese reached Nanking.

He holds that the Japanese were killing a lot of the Chinese troops because of how strongly they fought against the Japanese. He also cites the Chinese people's negative attitude towards the Japanese as another reason there was so much killing.

Why wouldn't the Chinese have a negative attitude toward the Japanese? Japan invaded China, not the other way around. Japan was bombing civilians, not the other way around.

It is undeniable that Japanese soldiers sometimes killed innocent civilians out of excitement or sheer sadistic pleasure. It is equally beyond doubt that summary execution of prisoners frequently took place.

These killings, I'm sure, did not go totally unnoticed by the Chinese. Such things do not encourage positive feelings towards someone.

He talks about the invasion of the city and the Safety Zone that had been created. He says the looting, at least in relation to the taking of food, was due in large part to the lack of proper supplies for the Japanese Army. He say the reason so many Chinese men were killed is because the Chinese soldiers would take off their clothes and put on peasant clothing to try to pass themselves off as civilians.

He says there were two phases to what happened, the first being the killing of POWs, and the second being the looting, murders and rapings.

Very often frenzied Japanese soldiers killed opponents out of sheer fury even when the latter raised their arms.

In other words, they were brutal murderers.

It appeared to be a common practice for Japanese military and naval personnel to behead prisoners for the sake of testing their swordsmanship.

Yep, brutal.

One Japanese division killed between 4,000 and 12,000 prisoners, another 7,000 and another 6,670. He estimates the total number of POWs murdered was around 34,000.

He has a number of tables he uses to determine just how many were killed. He totals the number killed in 'unlawful ways' as between 15 and 50 thousand.

After that he talks about specific crimes committed such a murders, disorder and looting, rape (5,000 maybe, but also maybe several times that), and executions of POWs and former soldiers wearing civilian clothes.

He blames the Chinese somewhat for what happened, pointing out Chiang Kai-shek's decision to make a stand at Nanking, the evacuation of Chinese troops, and the authorities not embracing the concept of the Safety Zone soon enough. He also blames the Chinese soldiers for their practice of discarding uniforms and trying to pass as civilians.

Local requisition of food further accelerated the Japanese troops' degeneration into an army that conducted itself like a premodern horde.

Then chapter 5 is about the aftermath and reaction until 1945 and how the Chinese and the Japanese treated what happened differently. Then there's a chapter on the War Crimes Trials. After that he goes into the history of the controversy and he has a very valuable chart (7.1) which shows the various schools of thought on what happened and how they see six different things that happened.

Then he moves on to the conclusion, appendices, and references.

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page