The Rape of Nanking

“Germany is today a better place because Jews have not allowed that country to forget what it did during World War II. The American South is a better place for its acknowledgement of the evil of slavery and the one hundred years of Jim Crowism that followed emancipation. Japanese culture will not move forward until it too admits not only to the world but to itself how improper were its actions during World War II.” 

One of the book’s strongest themes is that attitudes among the Japanese with respect to wartime atrocities differ immensely from those of the Germans following World War II. A proper reckoning of the Nanking massacre and other war crimes would provide healing for the few remaining survivors and the much larger number of their descendants; it would also give the Japanese an opportunity to progress as a culture and mend relations with its neighbors in Asia. That said, the recent reemergence of Nazis in Germany and white supremacists in the United States may suggest these nations are not the best models for making honest assessments of one’s past.

“As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.” 

This quote from Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reflects his belief that the consequences of forgetting a tragedy go beyond the danger of repeating the sins of history. In Wiesel’s telling, the experiences of survivors belong to a collective memory that is sacred and must therefore be preserved. Meanwhile, the author’s characterization of the Nanking massacre as a “holocaust”—both here and in the book’s subtitle—has drawn a small amount of controversy, given the ultimate death toll of the Nazis’ efforts to exterminate European Jews and others. Yet the concentrated nature of the killing at Nanking over a short period of time, and the utter brutality with which these acts were carried out, supports the author’s characterization.

“Although that view did not prevail, the words would prove prophetic, for they described not only the strategy the Japanese would follow but the long-term horizons of those who think of life in terms of the state and not of individuals.” 

A recurring theme throughout the book is the importance of state power in initiating and perpetuating genocide. While a shallow reading of the Nanking massacre may cause some to view it as an individual moment of insanity caused by soldiers run amok, the author traces the roots of the slaughter to powerful instruments of the state. These include the rigid hierarchy imposed by the spiritual cult of the emperor and the anti-Chinese propaganda administered in Japanese schools and military academies.

“To a man who came from a military culture in which pilots were given swords instead of parachutes, and in which suicide was infinitely preferable to capture, it was incomprehensible that the Chinese would not fight an enemy to the death.” 

Here, the author describes Azuma’s reaction upon encountering the surrendered Chinese soldiers at Nanking. In addition to illustrating the vast divides between Chinese and Japanese military cultures, this quote reflects the utter contempt with which Japanese soldiers viewed their Chinese counterparts. It should be noted that these soldiers were merely following the orders of their superiors—orders that, in the author’s view, were deeply misguided and ultimately suicidal.

“‘Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman,’ Azuma wrote, ‘but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.’” 

According to Azuma and the very few other Japanese participants in the Nanking massacre willing to talk openly about it, the perpetrators felt virtually no guilt over their actions, at least not until much later in life. In the minds of the Japanese, the victims were utterly dehumanized, aside from the feminine qualities of the women whom they proceeded to defile with great violence and cruelty through rape. Again, this dehumanization largely grew from a series of cultural factors, including anti-Chinese indoctrination and abuse at the hands of superior officers, which was then transferred to the victims of Nanking

“To use the word comfort in regard to either the women or the ‘houses’ in which they lived is ludicrous, for it conjures up spa images of beautiful geisha girls strumming lutes, washing men, and giving them shiatsu massages. In reality, the conditions of these brothels were sordid beyond the imagination of most civilized people.” 

During the war and throughout the 20th century, Japanese denialists described rape victims—including those forced into sexual slavery—euphemistically and dishonestly to absolve the nation of a widespread policy of sexual violence. In some ways, the legacy of “comfort women” implicates the Japanese government even more so than the Rape of Nanking, given that it was a coordinated effort to abduct hundreds of thousands of foreign women in occupied lands for the purpose of Japanese soldiers’ sexual gratification. Like the victims of the Nanking massacre, the comfort women’s silent shame after the war created a vacuum that the Japanese government filled with its own sanitized propaganda narrative.

“Confucianism—particularly Korean Confucianism—upheld female purity as a virtue greater than life and perpetuated the belief that any woman who could live through such a degrading experience and not commit suicide was herself an affront to society.”

Given Korean Confucianism’s emphasis on rigid gender roles within family units, for a Korean woman to be subject to rape shattered cultural norms and mores. In this way, the Korean woman who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Japanese suffered three traumas. The first was the rape itself, the second was the historical erasure of her suffering, and third was her cultural and religious shame at having her sense of her own virtue destroyed.

“‘Loyalty is heavier than a mountain, and our life is lighter than a feather.’ He recalled that the highest honor a soldier could achieve during war was to come back dead: to die for the emperor was the greatest glory, to be caught alive by the enemy the greatest shame. ‘If my life was not important,’ Azuma wrote to me, ‘an enemy’s life became inevitably much less important.’” 

Azuma expresses how the Japanese hierarchy centered around Shinto and the emperor led lowly soldiers to dehumanize foreigners. By raising these and other cultural factors, the author does not seek to justify the actions of individual soldiers. Rather, she merely seeks to explain how such incomprehensible brutality emerged among young soldiers who were not prone to violence in their everyday lives.

“‘Every day, twenty-four hours a day,’ the Dagong Daily newspaper testified of the great Rape of Nanking, ‘there was not one hour when an innocent woman was not being dragged off somewhere by a Japanese soldier.’“ 

Upon first glance, this may sound like one of the sensational exaggerations not uncommon to 20th-century journalism. Yet when one considers estimates of Nanking rape victims totaling between 20,000 and 80,000, this is in fact an extreme underestimation. Given the worst of the massacre occurred over a six-week period, that means up to 79 women were raped every hour.

“Head-to-head combat would certainly not have worked. The Japanese were much better armed and trained and would surely have overcome the Chinese forces sooner or later. But a lengthy, drawn-out struggle using guerrilla-style tactics might have demoralized the Japanese and elevated the Chinese. If nothing else, many more Japanese soldiers would have died fighting the Chinese and their arrogance toward the Chinese soldier would have been muted by a fierce resistance.” 

When faced with such immense inhumanity, one of the questions the author asks is if there was any way the massacre could have been averted. Given the behavior of Japanese troops on the road to Nanking, she argues that had Matsui remained in command as opposed to the less disciplined Asaka, the slaughter would have still transpired, albeit possibly in an abbreviated form. Yet the chief factor on which the fates of the Nanking people hinge is Chiang’s decision to abort the defense of the city in the middle of pitched fighting. This abrupt surrender left the civilians unprotected, and it led the Japanese to hold their adversary in great contempt, a major psychological factor that enabled the wholesale slaughter of surrendered soldiers and noncombatants alike.

“Dark times paralyze most people, but some very few, for reasons most of us will never understand, are able to set aside all caution and do things even they could not imagine themselves doing in ordinary times.” 

The author cannot overestimate the courage of the Americans and Europeans on the Safety Zone Committee. In some ways, their valor and bravery are as surprising as the Japanese soldiers’ barbarity and cruelty. While war primarily involves inflicting great suffering on others, the Safety Zone Committee members exemplify that dire moments also offer a small subset of the human population an opportunity to perform valiant humanitarian deeds.

“We were more prepared for excesses from the fleeing Chinese…but never, never from the Japanese. On the contrary, we had expected that with the appearance of the Japanese the return of peace, quiet, and prosperity would occur.”

This quote reflects just how unprepared Nanking residents were for the coming massacre. With this in mind, perhaps Chiang’s order to abandon the city becomes marginally more understandable—he could not have predicted the incomprehensible violence the Japanese would inflict on the people of Nanking. This sanguine attitude toward the Japanese also underscores the almost naive understanding of power and geopolitics possessed by men like Rabe, who sincerely believed Hitler would take pity on the women and men of Nanking.

“Amazingly, when the massacre began, Japanese newspapers ran photographs of Chinese men being rounded up for execution, heaps of bodies waiting for disposal by the riverside, the killing contests among the Japanese soldiers, and even the shocked commentary of the reporters themselves.”

Perhaps more than anything else, the Japanese government’s refusal to censor the shocking early reports coming out of Nanking reflects its complicity in the massacre. Rather than view the mass killings and rapes as atrocities, Japan’s military and political leaders considered it a point of great national pride reflecting the dominance of the Japanese army. It was only when international condemnation rolled in that Japan began to hide its army’s actions in Nanking.

“Finally, the missionaries had an additional advantage the Japanese did not foresee: they had spent their entire lives contemplating the true meaning of hell. Having found one in Nanking, they wasted no time in describing it for the world public.” 

The scene in Nanking devolved to such a great degree that missionaries—who don’t use the word “hell” lightly—could think of no other comparison for the massacre unfolding before their eyes. Indeed, this motif emerges not only in the missionaries’ testimonies but in the recollections of Japanese soldiers, one of whom writes that he and his comrades were turned into literal devils upon entering the city of Nanking. At the same time, such religious and supernatural imagery almost works to obscure the more disturbing reality—that these were human beings, sons and fathers, doling out such unspeakable violence.

“The Rape of Nanking was not the kind of isolated incident common to all wars. It was deliberate. It was policy. It was known in Tokyo.” 

This quote from journalist Arnold Brackman supports one of the author’s broader theses: that the Nanking massacre, while singular in its destructiveness, is hardly an outlier when it comes to Imperial Japan’s brutal treatment of noncombatants during World War II. From the Bataan Death March to the Manila Massacre, Japanese soldiers’ ruthlessness in contravention of international law is frighteningly consistent. While the absence of detailed documentation—like Nazi Germany’s Commissar Order or its Barbarossa decree—makes it more difficult to determine precisely how involved Japan’s political leadership was in directing the violence against noncombatants, the author makes a compelling case that leaders at least knew about the army’s treatment of civilians and POWs but did virtually nothing to stop it.

“While many of the Japanese who tormented the Nanking citizens received full military pensions and benefits from the Japanese government, thousands of their victims suffered (and continue to suffer) lives of silent poverty, shame, or chronic physical and mental pain.”

The author again presents a consequence of the Nanking cover-up that is far from abstract. The hypocrisy of mass rapists and murderers being afforded comfortable lives while their victims’ lives were effectively shattered is perhaps most infuriating for the author. That such an injustice occurred even though Japan lost the war, not China, makes the hypocrisy all the more difficult to swallow.

“Therefore, while the Nazi regime was overhauled and replaced and numerous Nazi war criminals were hunted down and brought to trial, many high-ranking wartime Japanese officials returned to power and prospered. In 1957 Japan even elected as prime minister a man who had been imprisoned as a class A war criminal.” 

The restrictions the Allies placed on postwar Germany were infinitely more draconian than the ones placed on Japan. The primary objective of such measures against Germany was not necessarily punitive in nature—although certainly such restrictions may have had a deterrent effect. Rather, it was to rid the country of the individuals and philosophies that led it on a campaign of unprecedented terror and destruction. By contrast, Japan’s postwar government was full of the same individuals responsible for enabling and perpetuating similar crimes against humanity. It is therefore dispiriting, though not surprising to the author, that the Japanese people have yet to make a full accounting of their homeland’s atrocities during the war.

“By writing this book, I forced myself to delve into not only history but historiography—to examine the forces of history and the process by which history is made. What keeps certain events in history and assigns the rest to oblivion? Exactly how does an event like the Rape of Nanking vanish from Japan’s (and even the world’s) collective memory?” 

The author explicitly addresses that her book is as much a work of history as it an exercise in historiography. To her, the events and causes of the Rape of Nanking are no more important than the reasons why the massacre is so deemphasized in the historical record, both in the West and the East. Exploring this issue thus reveals a series of worthwhile conclusions about Cold War geopolitics and the cultural attitudes of 20th-century Japan that are bigger than the facts of the massacre itself.

“In the early 1990s a newspaper article quoted a Japanese high school teacher who claimed that his students were surprised to learn that Japan had been at war with the United States. The first thing they wanted to know was who won.” 

While this is highly anecdotal—and frankly, there may be American high school students who are equally oblivious to World War II history—it reflects very real efforts on the part of Japanese politicians and scholars to suppress the facts around Japan’s wartime activities. Although the leaders and soldiers involved in atrocities like the Nanking massacre are generally long dead, these suppression tactics persist, leading to continually frayed relations between Japan and neighboring Asian countries. That a Japanese high school student is unaware of the existence of a conflict that ended with the destruction of two major Japanese cities by atomic bomb speaks to the effectiveness of this suppression.

“The final death count was almost incredible, between 1,578,000 and 6,325,000 people. R. J. Rummel gives a prudent estimate of 3,949,000 killed, of which all but 400,000 were civilians. But he points out that millions more perished from starvation and disease caused in large part by Japanese looting, bombing, and medical experimentation. If those deaths are added to the final count, then one can say that the Japanese killed more than 19 million Chinese people in its war against China.” 

In some ways the erasure of the Nanking massacre represents a broader minimization of both China’s suffering and its achievements during World War II. Although books like The Rape of Nanking and Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally have brought these subjects into the public eye, a disproportionate number of books and films are still devoted to Nazi atrocities and American or British heroism during the war. This is true even though China is second only to the Soviet Union in terms of World War II fatalities.

“In China even the lowliest Japanese private was considered superior to the most powerful and distinguished native, and it is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking. The Japanese soldier had endured in silence whatever his superiors had chosen to deal out to him, and now the Chinese had to take whatever he chose to deal out to them.” 

The author explores the transfer of oppression from abused Japanese soldiers, stuck in a rigid social and military hierarchy, to the Chinese civilians of Nanking. True, the abuse carried out against soldiers by their superiors was miniscule compared to what the Chinese suffered. Yet the author argues that this anger built up for months and years prior to the massacre—and when it finally burst, the people of Nanking paid the consequences.

“Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.” 

This is a variation on a famous quote by 19th-century English historian Lord Acton. Acton’s quote reads, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” For the author’s purposes, this quote serves as a model for her exploration of the relationship between power and genocide. Genocide, she argues, does not emerge in a vacuum. Rather, such large-scale killing requires a measure of cultural and tactical coordination that stems from authoritarian power structures, like the ones in Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany.

“Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.” 

The author comments on the relative lack of outrage from everyday citizens in the West over the Nanking massacre. This reads less as a judgment and more like a grim observation of cultural attitudes toward patterns of atrocities that feel too durable and too distant for average individuals or political apparatuses to take action against them. As that sense of malaise sets in, the atrocities themselves become, in the author’s words, “banal.” These attitudes sadly persist to this day, particularly in regards to the Syrian Civil War, which as of 2020 has lasted for nine years, caused the estimated deaths of over a half a million people, and shows little sign of slowing.