75 years ago, on Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of the Chinese republic led by Chiang Kai-shek and went on a six-week campaign of carnage and slaughter that would be forever remembered as the “Rape of Nanjing.” Reports document widespread rape and the indiscriminate killing of civilians; some death tolls estimate over a quarter of a million people were killed. The incident, though,still rankles Sino-Japanese relations. Japanese nationalists contend that the death tolls are inflated and the majority killed were resisting Japanese occupation. To this day, pages in Japanese school history textbooks can incite heated protests on the streets in China. Then and now, the Nanjing massacre remains one of the darkest events of the last century.—Ishaan Tharoor
Numerous atrocities were committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing, including rape, torture, arson and murder. The 170 miles between Shanghai and Nanjing were transformed into "a nightmarish zone of death and destruction." Japanese planes frequently strafed unarmed farmers and refugees "for fun."
Described within Japan as the Illusion School (maboroshi-ha), they deny the massacre and argue that only a few POWs and civilians were killed by the Japanese military in Nanjing. More moderate denialists argue that between several thousand and 38,000–42,000 were massacred.
Hisao Tani: A commander of Japanese units that committed the Nanjing Massacre. Sentenced to death and executed in 1947. Lieutenants Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda: The two main participants in the "Contest to kill 100 people using a sword": Both sentenced to death and executed in 1948.
An estimated 20,000 women were raped by the Japanese soldiers during the six weeks of the Nanking Massacre, most were brutally killed afterwards. The Japanese soldiers even raped girls less than ten years old, women over seventy years old, pregnant women, and nuns.
There are clear and unquestionable facts that the Japanese government, since the defeat of WW2, did not sincerely apologize to the victims of its act during the war.
In January 1938, the Japanese declared that order had been restored in the city, and dismantled the safety zone—but killings continued until the first week of February. A puppet government was installed, which would rule Nanjing until the end of World War II.
The Holocaust, the German attack on the Soviet Union and the German occupation of much of Europe, the Japanese invasion and occupation of Manchuria, the Japanese invasion of China and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines all contributed to well over half of all of the civilian deaths in World War II as well as ...
Conflict in Asia began well before the official start of World War II. Seeking raw materials to fuel its growing industries, Japan invaded the Chinese province of Manchuria in 1931. By 1937 Japan controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace.
In fact, the Asian countries victimized by the Japanese war machine tried far more Japanese -- an estimated five thousand, executing as many as 900 and sentencing more than half to life in prison.
In English, the spelling Nanking was traditional until pinyin, developed in the 1950s and internationally adopted in the 1980s, standardized the spelling as "Nanjing". During the Qing dynasty, the city was called Jiangning (江寧; Kiang-ning), whose first character jiang (Chinese: 江; pinyin: jiāng; lit.
Nanking whose meaning is a city in eastern China situated on the Yangtze river. Nanking is the former capital of China and is the location of a Japanese massacre in the 1930s. The name means “Southern Capital”, which officially was the capital during the Ming dynasty period.
In addition, the book, "Fabrication of Nanking Massacre," by Massaki Tanaka, also denied the massacre and blamed the Chinese for the war (Zhang). In 1990, Japanese government officials formally denied the Nanking Massacre by stating that it was a lie.
After the Nanjing Massacre, China's capital was in complete ruins. The Japanese quickly set up their own puppet government and ruled the territory until the end of World War II.
Rich in history, it served seven times as the capital of regional empires, twice as the seat of revolutionary government, once (during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45) as the site of a puppet regime, and twice as the capital of a united China (the second time ending with the Japanese conquest of the city in 1937).
The Nanjing Massacre, also called Rape of Nanjing (December 1937–January 1938), was the mass killing and the ravaging of Chinese citizens and capitulated soldiers by soldiers of the Japanese Imperial Army after its seizure of Nanjing, China, on December 13, 1937, during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II.
Japanese WWII atrocities included mass rape, sexual slavery, the slaughter and starvation of prisoners of war, cannibalism, biological warfare experiments, and the killings of scores of civilians.
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