The following is a review of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. It is the third book review I've ever written and it turned into my longest piece of writing altogether. My knowledge of Asian history/histories being virtually nil I found it necessary to reference Herbert Bix's Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan and Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong: A Life to fill in or confirm various details.
Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) manages to touch upon virtually every conceivable aspect of the Japanese invasion of Nanking in December 1937 in only 225 pages, from the origins of Japanese militarism to the postwar fate of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone to the controversy over the presentation of the Rape of Nanking in Japanese textbooks, and much more. The inevitable consequence of such an approach is that most topics receive only a cursory discussion. For instance, the occupation of Nanking, beginning with "the Rape" in December 1937 and lasting until the Japanese withdrawal following their surrender to the Allies in 1945, occupies less than nine pages. More germane to the book's topic, the war crimes trials in Nanking and Tokyo--the latter being "the longest war crimes trial in history"--occupy less than twelve pages. (172) The discussion of the presentation of Japanese war crimes in textbooks occupies about four pages.
While the breadth of the book's subject matter renders it difficult to summarize without simply listing the topics discussed, this is not really a point of criticism, for Chang's purpose is to restore the event to popular consciousness (which she seems to have contributed to doing based on the success of her book). The readability of Chang's account can only be counted as an advantage in this respect; and as a perhaps unique achievement considering the gruesome nature of the events that form the heart of her narrative.
The Context of the Second Sino-Japanese War
In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry paid his momentous visit to Japan, awing the Japanese with a display of American military might and ending the island's isolation from world trade and cultural exchange. (21) "The humiliation of this proud people left a residue of fierce resentment." Out of frustration at the Shogun's appeasement of the West, in 1868 rebels restored the Meiji emperor to power and Japan embarked on a process of modernization and national unification in a period known as the Meiji Restoration. Japan was "Determined to achieve eventual victory over the West...". (22-3)
Several events signaled Japan's ascendancy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1876 the Japanese compelled the Koreans to sign a commerce treaty in an incident not unlike the affair of 1853 to which Japan had been subjected. Next, Japan clashed with China over Korea in 1894, quickly emerging victorious in the First Sino-Japanese War. Jonathan Spence writes, "For over thirty years the Qing rulers had been trying to reorganize their land and naval forces, and to equip them with modern Western weapons, but in 1894 their proud new navy was obliterated in a short, bloody war...". (23; Spence, 1) While Western powers forced Japan to give up territory China had surrendered during this war, Japan could soon boast another major military victory, that being its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. (24)
Economic prosperity had accompanied modernization and "the early part of the twentieth century was a euphoric time for Japan." Steel, iron and textiles were in high demand during the First World War. (24) However, this prosperity was not long-lived enough to foment the development of a strong middle class which might have blunted "imperial military influence." With the onset of the Depression and the end of wartime demand for its products, Japan found itself curiously ostracized despite having been on the winning side in the First World War. Western financiers turned to China while the Chinese boycotted Japanese goods. All this facilitated "the popular belief that Japan had once again become the victim of an international conspiracy." This brought to my mind the international conspiracy notions of the German right during this same period. (24-5)
"An increasingly popular argument during the depression was that Japan needed to conquer new territory to ward off mass starvation." (25-6) This is indicative of two other parallels between Germany and Japan during the interwar years. Germany like Japan was dependent upon imported foodstuffs (though Japan appears to have been the more dependent). And like the Nazis, some in Japan became focused on expansion as a solution--the acquiring of lebensraum, or living space.
Chang suggests that a factor in motivating the Japanese to move on China when it did was fear that China might soon become "too powerful to be conquered." (29) Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists he led were succeeding in unifying the country and asserting China's interests internationally, threatening "Japanese interests in Manchuria and Mongolia." (28)
The Japanese Invade Nanking
Regarding the Second World War, Chang reminds us that "...Asians must trace the war's beginnings all the way back to...the occupation of Manchuria in 1931." (3) After fabricating a story about Chinese saboteurs blowing up the tracks of a Japanese-owned railway, the Japanese seized the region, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed Pu Yi as ruler. Pu Yi had ruled as the last Chinese emperor, having been overthrown in 1911. (Chang 3; Bix 247; Bix dates Pu Yi's reign as ending in 1912.)
Japan would become "the first country in Asia to break the taboo and use airpower...as a means of terrorizing civilian populations." (215) The incident that earned them this designation appears to have been the bombing of Shanghai in 1932 after anti-Japanese sentiment culminated in the murder of five Japanese Buddhist priests in that city. The bombing killed "tens of thousands of civilians." (29) That the Japanese had killed so many people through bombing in 1933 struck me as remarkable. In The Third Reich at War (2009) Richard Evans attributes 40,000 deaths to the Allied bombing raids on the Germany city of Hamburg in 1943, a decade after the Japanese bombing of Shanghai. Each of the four raids on Hamburg involved around 700-800 bombers. Was this the scale of the Japanese bombing of Shanghai? Before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, the largest bombing raid on a European city had been the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937. 1,600 people were killed. Interestingly, the Japanese responded to international criticism of its bombings by pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler removed Germany from the League. (Evans, Third Reich in Power, 640, 618)
And yet, the official status of German/Japanese relations during the Rape of Nanking is a matter of some ambiguity in Chang's book. Bix writes of an Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 that does not appear to have pledged either nation to assist the other militarily, only to not assist Moscow in the event of a war between either of them and the USSR. (Bix 308) In September 1940 Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact. This was an official military alliance. (Bix 380-1)
Were Germany and Japan allies in 1937-8, during the Rape of Nanking? According to Chang they were. On pages 109, 118, and 160, for instance, she refers to them as such. The reason this stood out to me is that William Kirby, the Harvard scholar of Chinese history who writes the forward to Chang's book states that Germany and Japan were not allies during the Rape of Nanking, not until the September 1940 Tripartite Pact presumably. "To be sure, Japan and Nazi Germany would only later become allies...". (XI) Kirby's forward also contains a typo of sorts--"Nanking" is spelled with a "k" throughout, but once with a "j", which was serendipitous perhaps in that it confirmed my assumption that the Nanking I was reading about was the "Nanjing" which appeared on the map I used to orient myself--from Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong: A Life (1999).
The war the Japanese evidently were aching for, now called the Second Sino-Japanese War (Chang does not consistently use caps when referring to it), broke out in July 1937 and the Japanese quickly asserted control over the northern region of China around Peking (Beijing). The Japanese next moved on Shanghai, which resisted until November. Having believed themselves vastly superior militarily to the Chinese, the battle for Shanghai frustrated the Japanese. "To the chagrin of the Japanese, the battle of Shanghai proceeded slowly, street by street, barricade by barricade." "When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly...". (33-4)
Having served as China's capital at various times in China's history, Nanking had again been made the nation's capital in 1928. (61-3) After taking Shanghai in November, the Japanese moved toward the capital and captured it in just four days of fighting in early December. Chiang Kai-shek, "leader of the Nationalist government" had moved the capital elsewhere after the fall of Shanghai and left Nanking to be defended by a subordinate. Many factors were aligned against the approximately 90,000 Chinese defenders who faced about 50,000 Japanese. (33, 69, 42) Chinese soldiers were either exhausted from the battle of Shanghai or newly recruited and completely inexperienced. When Chiang Kai-shek, his advisers, and other government officials left the city, they took with them communications equipment that could have benefited the defenders. The problem of communications was compounded by the fact that "the troops did not come from the same regions and literally had trouble speaking to each other." Soldiers demonstrated a lack of fighting spirit and officers distrusted one another. (71-2) In addition, the air force was not made available to the defenders, of dubious significance however considering that at 300 planes it was a tenth of the size of the Japanese air force. (70-1)
The retreat of the Chinese was disastrous. Soldiers, desperate to shed their uniforms and blend in with the civilian population, raided shops, ripped clothing off passersby, or even wandered around in their underwear. Some soldiers, deserted by their officers who did not inform them of the retreat, fired upon their fleeing comrades. A Chinese tank crushed "countless Chinese soldiers in its path". The northwest gate of the walled city--the only escape route--became jammed with thousands of fleeing Chinese troops. When a fire broke out, "terror-mad soldiers surged forward, their momentum pushing hundreds of men into the flames and hundreds more into the tunnel [of the city's wall], where they were trampled underfoot." At the banks of the Yangtze River "soldiers tried to balance tanks on rows of boats bound together." "...some ten thousand men" fought each other over vessels, many resorting to grappling buoyant logs or boards, or floating down the river in bathtubs. Some attempted to swim, "meeting almost certain death." (76-8) The episode marks "one of the worst disasters in Chinese military history." (74)
The Rape of Nanking
The phrase "The Rape of Nanking" refers to the first six to eight weeks following the fall of the city on December 13 when the Japanese army was let loose on a rampage. (x, 159) The Japanese murdered POWs, tortured and murdered civilians, and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women.
Though the circumstances of the issuance of the order to massacre all prisoners of war are not entirely clear, evidently the Japanese army had indeed adopted such a policy. Chang writes that the order had a "ruthless logic" to it. "The captives could not be fed, so they had to be destroyed." Moreover, killing them eliminated the possibility of uprisings or the formation of guerilla units. (40-1) I did not find a reference to the total number of POW deaths at Japanese hands. Chang does mention "the single largest mass execution of prisoners of war during the Rape of Nanking" which "took place near Mufu Mountain." But again, the categories of the victims becomes blurred when she discusses numbers. Referring to this massacre: "an estimated fifty-seven thousand civilians and former soldiers were executed." (44, my emphasis) The most that might be surmised is that all of the tens of thousands of the 90,000 Chinese soldiers who had defended Nanking but were unable to flee were murdered by the Japanese.
For the civilian population of Nanking a Nanking Safety Zone had been established by a handful of Europeans who remained in the city during the invasion. These men and women stand out as heroes in Chang's account, and are all the more intriguing in that some of them were Nazis, including John Rabe, the head of the Safety Zone, whom Chang dubs "the Oskar Schindler of China." (109) They were inspired by the example of a French priest who established a similar zone in Shanghai during the fighting in that city, and they expected that the Japanese would quickly establish order so that the zone would be necessary for only "a few days or weeks". (106) The Safety Zone would ultimately provide refuge for between 200,000 and 300,000 people. This is approximately half the population of 600,000 to 700,000 residents, refugees and soldiers in the city when it fell to the Japanese. (Prior to the war Nanking was home to about a million people.) Because the Japanese are believed to have killed as many as 350,000 or more during the Rape of Nanking, "almost everyone who did not make it to the zone...probably died at the hands of the Japanese." (81, 100, 139)
Nanking had been subjected to 120 air raids. However, the International Safety Zone Committee estimated that the air raids and the four day siege accounted for only a small fraction of the destruction. The cause of most of the property destruction was arson. "By the end of the first few weeks of the Rape of Nanking, the military had incinerated one-third of the entire city and three-fourths of all the stores." (160) Villages outside the city walls, and the peasants' farming implements and livestock, were--evidently systematically--destroyed. And looting was rampant. "In late December the Japanese began to heap stolen goods--jewelry, art, furniture, metal, antiques--on the wharves for transport back to Japan." They even "broke into the Safety Zone repeatedly to steal bedding, cooking utensils, and food from the homeless." (161)
The savagery of the Japanese treatment of the people of Nanking is graphically recounted throughout much of the book. When the Japanese entered the city on December 13 they simply shot everyone in sight. "Using machine guns, revolvers, and rifles, the Japanese fired at the crowds of wounded soldiers, elderly women, and children...". (46) They "systematically killed the city dwellers as they conducted house-to-house searches for Chinese soldiers...". (46) As indicated above, they murdered just about everyone who did not make it to the Safety Zone.
The phrase "Rape of Nanking" has more than a metaphorical meaning. Chang cites Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will, who "believes that the Rape of Nanking was probably the single worst instance of wartime rape inflicted on a civilian population with the sole exception of the treatment of Bengali women by Pakistani soldiers in 1971." Unsurprisingly, it is impossible to determine the exact number of women raped by Japanese soldiers. The estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000 victims. (89, 6)
Chang bombards the reader with a litany of gruesome acts and vivid, disturbing images. The word "rape" seems to appear multiple times on every page. It occurs seven times on page 94 and eight times on page 95. Here's a list of words and phrases that also appear on page 94: "disgusting scene", "mass rape", "babies suffocating", "bayoneted" (twice), "Countless men died", "crying", "kill", "wounds", "human degradation", "sexual perversion", "killing contests", "games of recreational rape", "torture", "glut of sex", "brutal", "impalement of vaginas", "corpses", "orifices pierced", "painful", "torment", "suffered", "almost unendurable ordeals".
Page 95: "sodomized", "repulsive sexual acts", "necrophilia", "gang rape", "castrated", "sexual torture", "sadistic pleasure", incest", "the Japanese ordered sons to rape their mothers", "saber strokes", "suicide", "death", "horrifying", "devastated".
A theme throughout Chang's book is that the world had knowledge of these events as they unfolded. Three American journalists were in Nanking on the 13th, the day the Japanese entered. Two remained until the 15th, the third until the 16th. Their stories "were splashed across the biggest and most prestigious newspapers in the United States...". (144-5) The story that most outraged Americans was the story of the bombing of the US gunboat the USS Panay. This ship was "packed with diplomats, journalists, and Western and Chinese refugees" trying to escape Nanking along the Yangtze River. It was sunk by the Japanese on December 12 "without warning". Incredibly, two American journalists onboard filmed the incident and survived. Their footage was played in movie houses throughout the country, though in a censored format at the request of President Roosevelt. In addition, the US government was intercepting Japanese diplomatic messages and "knew what the Japanese were trying to hide." However, to demonstrate this last point, Chang quotes an intercepted message that simply encouraged preventing the US embassy from returning to Nanking, suspicious perhaps but not exactly proof that the American government "knew what the Japanese were trying to hide." The organizers of the Safety Zone also spread the word of Japanese atrocities. George Fitch, involved with the YMCA, saw his accounts published in "mainstream print outlets" and even in books. (106-7, 146-7, 148-9, 116-7, 155)
What Explains the Atrocities?
Chang begins her discussion of Japanese militarism by pointing to bushido, or the "Way of the Warrior". This was the code of conduct among samurai, the Japanese warrior class that had developed to serve the interests of feudal lords. "...its most notable characteristic was the moral imperative that adherents commit suicide if ever they failed to meet honorably the obligations of military service...". Bushido, over time, "penetrated deep into the Japanese culture and became the model of honorable behavior among all young men." (19-20) During the Meiji Restoration, "the new imperial government adopted the samurai ethic of bushido as the moral code for all citizens." (22-3)
An ambiguity stood out to me regarding Chang's discussion of bushido. On the top of page 20 she writes: "...by the medieval times these armies had evolved into the distinctively Japanese samurai warrior class, whose code of conduct was called bushido...". Yet, on the bottom of the page: "Time did not erode the strength of the bushido ethic, which first emerged in the eighteenth century and was practiced to extremes in the modern age." (my emphasis) Did it emerge in the medieval period or the eighteenth century? The possibility that the term "medieval" means something different in the context of Asian history occurred to me, but her discussion after using the term is about the twelfth century, suggesting it does not.
Militarism was in the ascendant during the Meiji Restoration, and "in the 1930s the martial influence seeped into every aspect of Japanese boyhood." "Toy shops became virtual shrines to war...". And "It was commonplace for teachers to behave like sadistic drill sergeants, slapping children across the cheeks, hitting them with their fists, or bludgeoning them with bamboo or wooden swords." (29-31) Those who became soldiers were treated with brutality and regularly humiliated. Those who became officers were insulated from the outside world and compelled to meet extreme standards.
Chang discusses the processes by which soldiers and officers alike were shocked by the crimes when they first witnessed them but eventually found themselves carrying them out. This required desensitizing soldiers "to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking" by engaging in killing contests and other "games and exercises" that involved murdering unarmed Chinese. (55-7)
Chang mentions a group of theories that have been proffered by others to explain the atrocities. We might call these "theories of Japanese tribalism". The premise underlying them is that individuals in Japanese society have moral obligations to a limited group of people and would therefore have been easily moved to commit atrocities against outsiders. Chang doesn't seem impressed with this notion. (54-5)
In the Epilogue Chang discusses three potential factors in producing the barbarism of the Japanese army during the Rape of Nanking. She notes that "Some Japanese scholars" point to "a phenomenon called 'the transfer of oppression.'" Japanese soldiers, subjected to routine degradation and cruelty, unleashed their pent up rage upon the Chinese. Second, as noted above, the Japanese military cultivated the notion of Chinese racial inferiority. Third, "the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition." (217-8)
After the Rape of Nanking
From December 1937 until August 1945 the Japanese occupied the former Chinese capital, administrated by a puppet regime called the Nanking Self-Government Committee. (167, 162) The people were organized into a baojia system, an elaborate scheme, based on a Chinese practice, by which the Chinese were compelled to police each other's movements. The authorities imposed draconian taxes and rents. They "treated many of the local Chinese laborers worse than slaves, often killing them for the slightest infractions." A hospital was converted into a laboratory known as Unit Ei 1644 at which the Japanese conducted experiments that involved subjecting victims to "a variety poisons, germs, and lethal gases...". Opium addiction became widespread, and Chang suggests that this was encouraged by the Japanese, who "routinely used narcotics as payment for labor and prostitution in Nanking." (162-5)
"Within a few years Nanking pulled itself up from its ruins." By the spring following the invasion people began returning. From a population of 250,000-300,000 in March 1938, Nanking grew to almost 600,000 by the end of 1939, and by 1942 had reached about 700,000, which it remained at until the end of the war. During the occupation "rebellion was sporadic and rare." When news of the Japanese surrender reached Nanking in 1945, residents remained in their homes, afraid the news may prove untrue, so there were few incidents of Chinese taking revenge upon Japanese soldiers. "The evacuation was swift, and there was no mass persecution or imprisonment of Japanese soldiers." (166-7)
Two sets of war crimes trials were conducted by the Allies after the war, one in Nanking itself, the other in Tokyo. During the former, beginning in August 1946 and concluding in February 1947, "more than 1,000 people testified about some 460 cases of murder, rape, arson, and looting." A famous piece of evidence consisted of sixteen photographs taken by the Japanese of their own crimes. The developer of the film preserved a set of duplicates which had spent years being passed from hand to hand. (170) The most notorious of those tried in Nanking was a lieutenant general named Tani Hisao. "The indictment had been long, listing hundreds of stabbings, burnings, drownings, strangulations, rapes, thefts, and destruction commited by Tani's division", and "more than eighty witnesses came to court to recite an endless litany of horrors." (171) He was executed by firing squad in April 1947. (172)
While "Only a handful of Japanese war criminals were tried in Nanking", the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, (officially The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)) "would become the longest war crimes trial in history", "three times as long as the Nuremberg trials", involving the prosecution of "twenty-eight Japanese military and political officials...". (170, 172) At the time, much of the blame for the atrocities committed in Nanking was placed on Matsui Iwane, "commander of Japan's Central China Expeditionary Force". Yet, "historians have suggested that Matsui may have served as the scapegoat for the Rape of Nanking." (174) Chang seems inclined toward this interpretation. She describes him as "guilt-stricken", and notes that "A sickly and frail man suffering from tuberculosis, Matsui was not even in Nanking when the city fell." (174) I was shocked to learn that Matsui, upon becoming aware of the extent of the atrocities committed during the invasion, chided hundreds of Japanese officers during a military funeral. He subsequently stated to the New York Times, "'the Japanese army is probably the most undisciplined army in the world today.'" (51)
Yet, "To this day Matsui's behavior at the IMTFE remains perplexing." (175)
Continued Injustice
Matsui's refusal to allow responsibility for the atrocities in Nanking to fall upon the emperor was indicative of what lie ahead. "Hirohito... never faced a full moral accounting for his activities during the war" and "lived peacefully and in dignity until his death in 1989." (176, 180)
The place of the Rape of Nanking in the Japanese collective consciousness seems to be in evolution at this point. Chang discusses the efforts of a Japanese historian, an author of children's textbooks, to introduce the Rape of Nanking to Japanese schoolchildren, efforts which appear to have met with some success. (206-7) She lists various political figures whose careers have been harmed after making statements dismissing or playing down the seriousness of Japanese war crimes during the Second World War. (202-205)
On the other hand, the notion that the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities were not serious crimes or that they are Chinese fabrications appears widespread still. Academics in Japan avoid the topic. (209) The scholars who do tackle the subject face intense scrutiny and criticism. (211-2) In 1987, when Azumo Shiro, a Japanese soldier during World War II, and whose story is featured in Chang's book, publicly apologized for his role in perpetrating war crimes "The result was an avalanche of criticism and death threats." (213) In 1988, when the mayor of Nagasaki stated that he believed Hirohito--on his deathbed at the time--was responsible for the war, he was the victim of a (failed) assassination attempt. (213-4) Chang provides examples of prominent politic figures dismissing the seriousness of Japanese war crimes into the 1990s. No wonder then that
Chang offers some explanations as to why "An event that sixty years ago made front-page news in American newspapers appears to have vanished, almost without a trace." (200)The first is that the emperor and the imperial family were granted immunity in exchange for Japan's surrender. This "impeded the Japanese people's own historical awareness of their World War II crimes," by facilitating the notion that the emperor had been unaware of any crimes. (176) In addition, documents seized from the Japanese during the surrender were eventually returned and are now unavailable to scholars. "For these reasons it is practically impossible today to prove whether Emperor Hirohito planned, approved of, or even knew of the atrocities in Nanking." (177) The decision to grant the imperial family immunity meant that Prince Asaka, the individual responsible for the order to kill all POWs (though the circumstances of the order are not wholly clear), also never faced a public accounting. (176, 40)
After the war, the USSR "seized Poland and part of Germany", the Communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, came to power in China, and the Korean War broke out. "With China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea as its new postwar enemies, the United States suddenly viewed Japan as a country of strategic importance." Rather than imposing democracy and purging Japan's leadership, which had originally been among US intentions, "Washington decided to maintain a stable government in Japan in order to better challenge communism in Asia." (181-2) Japan has received billions of dollars worth of aid from the US, and the Reagan administration even pressed Japan to "beef up its military power...". (223) All this is to say that the US now had little incentive to pressure Japan to own up to the crimes it committed during the Second World War.
Compounding Japanese evasion of the topic, and US reluctance to undermine its relationship with Japan was the reticence of the Chinese themselves. The Chinese government sought trade with Japan and so neglected to demand reparations. (11) This, coupled with the broader international situation, helps explain why "The Japanese paid close to nothing for their war crimes." (222) As a consequence, "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." (181)
The fates of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone are "Equally sobering...". (184) Robert Wilson, "The Only Surgeon in Nanking" at one point, experienced mental collapse, seizures and nightmares as a result of his extraordinary efforts to care for the victims of Japanese aggression.
The stories of each of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone are filled with moving courageous acts, and each of their fates is saddening. I'll discuss John Rabe, partly because his selflessness is emblematic of the selflessness demonstrated by each of the other organizers, and partly because John Rabe is simply an irresistible figure--a German businessman who became head of the Nanking Safety Zone, Rabe was an ardent National Socialist.
Actually his ideas about "National Socialism" are somewhat unclear. His granddaughter--with whom Chang was in contact during the process of researching the book--"insists that Rabe saw the Nazi Party primarily as a socialist organization and did not support the persecution of Jews and other ethnic groups." Chang adds, "This may well be true" and notes that he often spoke in socialist terms regarding his support for Nazism. (109-110)
The idea that naivety is sufficient to explain Rabe's involvement with Nazism, or that he was part of some left-wing of the party, is difficult for me to accept. As a successful and well-traveled businessman he was likely a well-educated individual, even if he had not received a formally elite education. He had access to a variety of sources of information, indeed sources of information uncensored by the Nazis. Nevertheless, Rabe was not just a party member but the head of the party in Nanking (exactly why there was a Nazi Party of Nanking is never explained). Chang also provides this quotation from 1938: "'I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organizer of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent." Though this statement appears to have been made before Kristallnacht in November of that year, it was made well after the April 1933 boycott of Jewish shops and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. (109-110) On the other hand, the idea that Rabe was naive (choose a more charitable word if you prefer) has credence considering that he attempted to contact Der Fuhrer himself to request that he pressure the Japanese to halt their atrocities, an effort that gets him arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo upon his return to Germany in early 1938. (111, 187, 189-90)
Whatever his politics, Rabe's actions during the Rape of Nanking earned him the title of "'the living Buddha of Nanking'" from the Chinese, and "'the Oskar Schindler of China'" from Chang. (109) Insisting on remaining in the city to organize the Safety Zone while virtually all the other Westerners fled, the organizers attempted to negotiated a cease-fire and even a surrender of the Chinese army. Unsuccessful, Rabe and the others found themselves responsible for the protection of 250,000 refugees by December 13, when the city fell to the Japanese. (110, 112) In order to feed them,
One of the dilemmas the Safety Zone leaders faced after the city fell was what to do with Chinese soldiers who sought refuge. Conflicted, they allowed the soldiers to enter the zone so long as they disarmed. Rabe contacted the Japanese military regarding these men and "a Japanese officer promised him that the lives of the Chinese soldiers would be spared." (115-6) Unfortunately, this promise was not kept. The Japanese began raiding the Safety Zone, removing anyone they suspected of being a solider--because they had calluses that may have been caused by handling a gun, or marks that indicated carrying a heavy backpack--and executing them. (116-7) "Rabe wrote letter after letter to the Japanese embassy." (117) In fact, "The International Committee had made daily visits to representatives at the Japanese Foreign Office and the Japanese embassy to report on the situation, even filing two protests a day for the first six weeks." (174)
Rabe ultimately resorted to "the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself."
Chang is the first researcher to record the events of Rabe's life after the Rape of Nanking. He left Nanking in February 1938 and was back in Germany by April. (187, 189) In June the government responded to his attempts to bring the atrocities of the Japanese to the attention of Hitler by interrogating him and prohibiting him from discussing the issues in public. (190) Rabe's home was bombed during the Russian invasion and his family was reduced to poverty. He was arrested and interrogated for three days by the Soviets, and later was arrested and interrogated for an additional full day by the British. Next, he was compelled to undergo "a long, drawn-out 'de-nazification'" process...". (190-1)
Rabe's story contains a final, uplifting twist. While Rabe was head of the Safety Zone
Little wonder then that, in 1948, when Rabe's difficulties were made known to the people of Nanking, "the response was tremendous." (121, 193)
The Rape of Nanking's Place in Historical Memory and Conclusion
A final aspect of the book that merits mention is the unclear relationship of the massacre to other atrocities, in particular its relationship to other Japanese war crimes committed throughout China during the war and the Holocaust.
Inexplicit yet palpable throughout is an indignation not only at the ignorance of most Americans about Japanese war crimes, but an indignation at that ignorance in light of universal familiarity with the Holocaust and the iconic figures of Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler. This is of course a subjective judgment, but I suspect other readers would sense it as well. "Is there a child today in any part of the United States, and perhaps in many other parts of the world, who has not seen the gruesome pictures of the gas chambers at Auschwitz or read at least part of the haunting tale of the young Anne Frank?" (199) Speaking of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone: "There are no famous books devoted to these forgotten heroes of World War II, and certainly there has been no movie about them that has captured the imagination of the world public as intensely as Schindler's List." (185) Such comments run throughout the entirety of the book. Indeed, the Rape of Nanking is "the forgotten holocaust of World War II."
Speaking of Rabe's granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt, after Reinhardt first read her grandfather's account of Japanese atrocities in Nanking:
This second statement is technically Chang's conveyance of someone else's perspective, but Chang makes a point of drawing our attention to such judgments, such as George Fitch's statement that the Rape of Nanking "'has no parallel in modern history.'" (156) (I should note that this statement was made in the late 1930s, before the Holocaust.)
The relationship of Japanese atrocities in Nanking to Japanese war crimes elsewhere in China also struck me as troublesome. The Rape of Nanking involved the massacring of an extraordinarily large number of people--more people than the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, Chang points out--in a very short amount of time and frequently in manners uniquely appalling. As mentioned above, it was one of the largest mass rapes in history. Moreover, Nanking was the Chinese capital and a place of historical significance to the Chinese. (6)
And yet, "The IMTFE...proved that the massacre was just a tiny fraction of the totality of atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war." (173) Before they even arrived in Nanking, the Japanese army slaughtered the occupants of the villages they passed through, and "entire cities were razed to the ground." (37) In fact, the Japanese carried out "a massive terrorist campaign in 1941 designed to exterminate everyone in the northern Chinese countryside." Chang attributes almost twenty million Chinese deaths--only a fraction of which were of soldiers--to Japan's actions in China. (216-7) (Contemplating the scale of Japanese war crimes perhaps helps explain the reluctance of the Japanese to apologize or pay reparations for the Rape of Nanking, for doing so would seem to clearly entail doing so for the immense number of other crimes.)
If it is the scale or intensity of the Rape of Nanking that renders it unique, why does the city of Suzhou deserve only a paragraph while the Rape of Nanking receives an entire book? The Japanese reduced Suzhou to a population of 500 from 350,000 as they "murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery." Also apparently a walled city, Chang makes no mention of anyone fleeing, suggesting a deathcount comparable to that of the massacre at Nanking. Is it a lack of sources that explains the absence of a book entitled The Rape of Suzhou?
This obviously is not meant to disparage the book, only to make the point that, while The Rape of Nanking succeeds in its mission to rescue "one of the greatest bloodbaths of world history" from obscurity, I do not think it alone fully establishes its place in history--where it fits in relationship to other Japanese war crimes, other atrocities during the Second World War, or indeed, other atrocities throughout history. (149)
Chang closes her book by noting several lessons that ought to be drawn from the Rape of Nanking as well as other atrocities. The massacre is "an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." She warns against the concentration of power. And "perhaps the most distressing of all" the lessons to be drawn, "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 Rape of Nanking, as "the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda", were front page news as they were being carried out. (220-1)
What Chang desires most is for the Japanese government to admit what took place and to provide the survivors with reparations.
Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) manages to touch upon virtually every conceivable aspect of the Japanese invasion of Nanking in December 1937 in only 225 pages, from the origins of Japanese militarism to the postwar fate of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone to the controversy over the presentation of the Rape of Nanking in Japanese textbooks, and much more. The inevitable consequence of such an approach is that most topics receive only a cursory discussion. For instance, the occupation of Nanking, beginning with "the Rape" in December 1937 and lasting until the Japanese withdrawal following their surrender to the Allies in 1945, occupies less than nine pages. More germane to the book's topic, the war crimes trials in Nanking and Tokyo--the latter being "the longest war crimes trial in history"--occupy less than twelve pages. (172) The discussion of the presentation of Japanese war crimes in textbooks occupies about four pages.
While the breadth of the book's subject matter renders it difficult to summarize without simply listing the topics discussed, this is not really a point of criticism, for Chang's purpose is to restore the event to popular consciousness (which she seems to have contributed to doing based on the success of her book). The readability of Chang's account can only be counted as an advantage in this respect; and as a perhaps unique achievement considering the gruesome nature of the events that form the heart of her narrative.
The Context of the Second Sino-Japanese War
In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry paid his momentous visit to Japan, awing the Japanese with a display of American military might and ending the island's isolation from world trade and cultural exchange. (21) "The humiliation of this proud people left a residue of fierce resentment." Out of frustration at the Shogun's appeasement of the West, in 1868 rebels restored the Meiji emperor to power and Japan embarked on a process of modernization and national unification in a period known as the Meiji Restoration. Japan was "Determined to achieve eventual victory over the West...". (22-3)
Several events signaled Japan's ascendancy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1876 the Japanese compelled the Koreans to sign a commerce treaty in an incident not unlike the affair of 1853 to which Japan had been subjected. Next, Japan clashed with China over Korea in 1894, quickly emerging victorious in the First Sino-Japanese War. Jonathan Spence writes, "For over thirty years the Qing rulers had been trying to reorganize their land and naval forces, and to equip them with modern Western weapons, but in 1894 their proud new navy was obliterated in a short, bloody war...". (23; Spence, 1) While Western powers forced Japan to give up territory China had surrendered during this war, Japan could soon boast another major military victory, that being its victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905. (24)
Economic prosperity had accompanied modernization and "the early part of the twentieth century was a euphoric time for Japan." Steel, iron and textiles were in high demand during the First World War. (24) However, this prosperity was not long-lived enough to foment the development of a strong middle class which might have blunted "imperial military influence." With the onset of the Depression and the end of wartime demand for its products, Japan found itself curiously ostracized despite having been on the winning side in the First World War. Western financiers turned to China while the Chinese boycotted Japanese goods. All this facilitated "the popular belief that Japan had once again become the victim of an international conspiracy." This brought to my mind the international conspiracy notions of the German right during this same period. (24-5)
"An increasingly popular argument during the depression was that Japan needed to conquer new territory to ward off mass starvation." (25-6) This is indicative of two other parallels between Germany and Japan during the interwar years. Germany like Japan was dependent upon imported foodstuffs (though Japan appears to have been the more dependent). And like the Nazis, some in Japan became focused on expansion as a solution--the acquiring of lebensraum, or living space.
Chang suggests that a factor in motivating the Japanese to move on China when it did was fear that China might soon become "too powerful to be conquered." (29) Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists he led were succeeding in unifying the country and asserting China's interests internationally, threatening "Japanese interests in Manchuria and Mongolia." (28)
The Japanese Invade Nanking
Regarding the Second World War, Chang reminds us that "...Asians must trace the war's beginnings all the way back to...the occupation of Manchuria in 1931." (3) After fabricating a story about Chinese saboteurs blowing up the tracks of a Japanese-owned railway, the Japanese seized the region, renamed it Manchukuo, and installed Pu Yi as ruler. Pu Yi had ruled as the last Chinese emperor, having been overthrown in 1911. (Chang 3; Bix 247; Bix dates Pu Yi's reign as ending in 1912.)
Japan would become "the first country in Asia to break the taboo and use airpower...as a means of terrorizing civilian populations." (215) The incident that earned them this designation appears to have been the bombing of Shanghai in 1932 after anti-Japanese sentiment culminated in the murder of five Japanese Buddhist priests in that city. The bombing killed "tens of thousands of civilians." (29) That the Japanese had killed so many people through bombing in 1933 struck me as remarkable. In The Third Reich at War (2009) Richard Evans attributes 40,000 deaths to the Allied bombing raids on the Germany city of Hamburg in 1943, a decade after the Japanese bombing of Shanghai. Each of the four raids on Hamburg involved around 700-800 bombers. Was this the scale of the Japanese bombing of Shanghai? Before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe, the largest bombing raid on a European city had been the Nazi bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica in 1937. 1,600 people were killed. Interestingly, the Japanese responded to international criticism of its bombings by pulling out of the League of Nations in 1933, the same year that Adolf Hitler removed Germany from the League. (Evans, Third Reich in Power, 640, 618)
And yet, the official status of German/Japanese relations during the Rape of Nanking is a matter of some ambiguity in Chang's book. Bix writes of an Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 that does not appear to have pledged either nation to assist the other militarily, only to not assist Moscow in the event of a war between either of them and the USSR. (Bix 308) In September 1940 Japan, Germany, and Italy signed the Tripartite Pact. This was an official military alliance. (Bix 380-1)
Were Germany and Japan allies in 1937-8, during the Rape of Nanking? According to Chang they were. On pages 109, 118, and 160, for instance, she refers to them as such. The reason this stood out to me is that William Kirby, the Harvard scholar of Chinese history who writes the forward to Chang's book states that Germany and Japan were not allies during the Rape of Nanking, not until the September 1940 Tripartite Pact presumably. "To be sure, Japan and Nazi Germany would only later become allies...". (XI) Kirby's forward also contains a typo of sorts--"Nanking" is spelled with a "k" throughout, but once with a "j", which was serendipitous perhaps in that it confirmed my assumption that the Nanking I was reading about was the "Nanjing" which appeared on the map I used to orient myself--from Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong: A Life (1999).
The war the Japanese evidently were aching for, now called the Second Sino-Japanese War (Chang does not consistently use caps when referring to it), broke out in July 1937 and the Japanese quickly asserted control over the northern region of China around Peking (Beijing). The Japanese next moved on Shanghai, which resisted until November. Having believed themselves vastly superior militarily to the Chinese, the battle for Shanghai frustrated the Japanese. "To the chagrin of the Japanese, the battle of Shanghai proceeded slowly, street by street, barricade by barricade." "When Shanghai finally fell in November, the mood of the imperial troops had turned ugly...". (33-4)
Having served as China's capital at various times in China's history, Nanking had again been made the nation's capital in 1928. (61-3) After taking Shanghai in November, the Japanese moved toward the capital and captured it in just four days of fighting in early December. Chiang Kai-shek, "leader of the Nationalist government" had moved the capital elsewhere after the fall of Shanghai and left Nanking to be defended by a subordinate. Many factors were aligned against the approximately 90,000 Chinese defenders who faced about 50,000 Japanese. (33, 69, 42) Chinese soldiers were either exhausted from the battle of Shanghai or newly recruited and completely inexperienced. When Chiang Kai-shek, his advisers, and other government officials left the city, they took with them communications equipment that could have benefited the defenders. The problem of communications was compounded by the fact that "the troops did not come from the same regions and literally had trouble speaking to each other." Soldiers demonstrated a lack of fighting spirit and officers distrusted one another. (71-2) In addition, the air force was not made available to the defenders, of dubious significance however considering that at 300 planes it was a tenth of the size of the Japanese air force. (70-1)
The retreat of the Chinese was disastrous. Soldiers, desperate to shed their uniforms and blend in with the civilian population, raided shops, ripped clothing off passersby, or even wandered around in their underwear. Some soldiers, deserted by their officers who did not inform them of the retreat, fired upon their fleeing comrades. A Chinese tank crushed "countless Chinese soldiers in its path". The northwest gate of the walled city--the only escape route--became jammed with thousands of fleeing Chinese troops. When a fire broke out, "terror-mad soldiers surged forward, their momentum pushing hundreds of men into the flames and hundreds more into the tunnel [of the city's wall], where they were trampled underfoot." At the banks of the Yangtze River "soldiers tried to balance tanks on rows of boats bound together." "...some ten thousand men" fought each other over vessels, many resorting to grappling buoyant logs or boards, or floating down the river in bathtubs. Some attempted to swim, "meeting almost certain death." (76-8) The episode marks "one of the worst disasters in Chinese military history." (74)
The Rape of Nanking
The phrase "The Rape of Nanking" refers to the first six to eight weeks following the fall of the city on December 13 when the Japanese army was let loose on a rampage. (x, 159) The Japanese murdered POWs, tortured and murdered civilians, and raped tens of thousands of Chinese women.
Though the circumstances of the issuance of the order to massacre all prisoners of war are not entirely clear, evidently the Japanese army had indeed adopted such a policy. Chang writes that the order had a "ruthless logic" to it. "The captives could not be fed, so they had to be destroyed." Moreover, killing them eliminated the possibility of uprisings or the formation of guerilla units. (40-1) I did not find a reference to the total number of POW deaths at Japanese hands. Chang does mention "the single largest mass execution of prisoners of war during the Rape of Nanking" which "took place near Mufu Mountain." But again, the categories of the victims becomes blurred when she discusses numbers. Referring to this massacre: "an estimated fifty-seven thousand civilians and former soldiers were executed." (44, my emphasis) The most that might be surmised is that all of the tens of thousands of the 90,000 Chinese soldiers who had defended Nanking but were unable to flee were murdered by the Japanese.
For the civilian population of Nanking a Nanking Safety Zone had been established by a handful of Europeans who remained in the city during the invasion. These men and women stand out as heroes in Chang's account, and are all the more intriguing in that some of them were Nazis, including John Rabe, the head of the Safety Zone, whom Chang dubs "the Oskar Schindler of China." (109) They were inspired by the example of a French priest who established a similar zone in Shanghai during the fighting in that city, and they expected that the Japanese would quickly establish order so that the zone would be necessary for only "a few days or weeks". (106) The Safety Zone would ultimately provide refuge for between 200,000 and 300,000 people. This is approximately half the population of 600,000 to 700,000 residents, refugees and soldiers in the city when it fell to the Japanese. (Prior to the war Nanking was home to about a million people.) Because the Japanese are believed to have killed as many as 350,000 or more during the Rape of Nanking, "almost everyone who did not make it to the zone...probably died at the hands of the Japanese." (81, 100, 139)
Nanking had been subjected to 120 air raids. However, the International Safety Zone Committee estimated that the air raids and the four day siege accounted for only a small fraction of the destruction. The cause of most of the property destruction was arson. "By the end of the first few weeks of the Rape of Nanking, the military had incinerated one-third of the entire city and three-fourths of all the stores." (160) Villages outside the city walls, and the peasants' farming implements and livestock, were--evidently systematically--destroyed. And looting was rampant. "In late December the Japanese began to heap stolen goods--jewelry, art, furniture, metal, antiques--on the wharves for transport back to Japan." They even "broke into the Safety Zone repeatedly to steal bedding, cooking utensils, and food from the homeless." (161)
The savagery of the Japanese treatment of the people of Nanking is graphically recounted throughout much of the book. When the Japanese entered the city on December 13 they simply shot everyone in sight. "Using machine guns, revolvers, and rifles, the Japanese fired at the crowds of wounded soldiers, elderly women, and children...". (46) They "systematically killed the city dwellers as they conducted house-to-house searches for Chinese soldiers...". (46) As indicated above, they murdered just about everyone who did not make it to the Safety Zone.
The phrase "Rape of Nanking" has more than a metaphorical meaning. Chang cites Susan Brownmiller, author of Against Our Will, who "believes that the Rape of Nanking was probably the single worst instance of wartime rape inflicted on a civilian population with the sole exception of the treatment of Bengali women by Pakistani soldiers in 1971." Unsurprisingly, it is impossible to determine the exact number of women raped by Japanese soldiers. The estimates range from 20,000 to 80,000 victims. (89, 6)
Chang bombards the reader with a litany of gruesome acts and vivid, disturbing images. The word "rape" seems to appear multiple times on every page. It occurs seven times on page 94 and eight times on page 95. Here's a list of words and phrases that also appear on page 94: "disgusting scene", "mass rape", "babies suffocating", "bayoneted" (twice), "Countless men died", "crying", "kill", "wounds", "human degradation", "sexual perversion", "killing contests", "games of recreational rape", "torture", "glut of sex", "brutal", "impalement of vaginas", "corpses", "orifices pierced", "painful", "torment", "suffered", "almost unendurable ordeals".
Page 95: "sodomized", "repulsive sexual acts", "necrophilia", "gang rape", "castrated", "sexual torture", "sadistic pleasure", incest", "the Japanese ordered sons to rape their mothers", "saber strokes", "suicide", "death", "horrifying", "devastated".
A theme throughout Chang's book is that the world had knowledge of these events as they unfolded. Three American journalists were in Nanking on the 13th, the day the Japanese entered. Two remained until the 15th, the third until the 16th. Their stories "were splashed across the biggest and most prestigious newspapers in the United States...". (144-5) The story that most outraged Americans was the story of the bombing of the US gunboat the USS Panay. This ship was "packed with diplomats, journalists, and Western and Chinese refugees" trying to escape Nanking along the Yangtze River. It was sunk by the Japanese on December 12 "without warning". Incredibly, two American journalists onboard filmed the incident and survived. Their footage was played in movie houses throughout the country, though in a censored format at the request of President Roosevelt. In addition, the US government was intercepting Japanese diplomatic messages and "knew what the Japanese were trying to hide." However, to demonstrate this last point, Chang quotes an intercepted message that simply encouraged preventing the US embassy from returning to Nanking, suspicious perhaps but not exactly proof that the American government "knew what the Japanese were trying to hide." The organizers of the Safety Zone also spread the word of Japanese atrocities. George Fitch, involved with the YMCA, saw his accounts published in "mainstream print outlets" and even in books. (106-7, 146-7, 148-9, 116-7, 155)
What Explains the Atrocities?
Chang begins her discussion of Japanese militarism by pointing to bushido, or the "Way of the Warrior". This was the code of conduct among samurai, the Japanese warrior class that had developed to serve the interests of feudal lords. "...its most notable characteristic was the moral imperative that adherents commit suicide if ever they failed to meet honorably the obligations of military service...". Bushido, over time, "penetrated deep into the Japanese culture and became the model of honorable behavior among all young men." (19-20) During the Meiji Restoration, "the new imperial government adopted the samurai ethic of bushido as the moral code for all citizens." (22-3)
An ambiguity stood out to me regarding Chang's discussion of bushido. On the top of page 20 she writes: "...by the medieval times these armies had evolved into the distinctively Japanese samurai warrior class, whose code of conduct was called bushido...". Yet, on the bottom of the page: "Time did not erode the strength of the bushido ethic, which first emerged in the eighteenth century and was practiced to extremes in the modern age." (my emphasis) Did it emerge in the medieval period or the eighteenth century? The possibility that the term "medieval" means something different in the context of Asian history occurred to me, but her discussion after using the term is about the twelfth century, suggesting it does not.
Militarism was in the ascendant during the Meiji Restoration, and "in the 1930s the martial influence seeped into every aspect of Japanese boyhood." "Toy shops became virtual shrines to war...". And "It was commonplace for teachers to behave like sadistic drill sergeants, slapping children across the cheeks, hitting them with their fists, or bludgeoning them with bamboo or wooden swords." (29-31) Those who became soldiers were treated with brutality and regularly humiliated. Those who became officers were insulated from the outside world and compelled to meet extreme standards.
The academy was like an island to itself, sealed off from the rest of the world. The Japanese cadet enjoyed neither privacy nor any opportunity to exercise individual leadership skills. His reading material was carefully censored, and leisure time was nonexistent. History and science were distorted to project an image of the Japanese as a superrace. [32]
So terrified were the cadets of any hint of failure that examination results were kept secret, to minimize the risk of suicide. [32]
Chang discusses the processes by which soldiers and officers alike were shocked by the crimes when they first witnessed them but eventually found themselves carrying them out. This required desensitizing soldiers "to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking" by engaging in killing contests and other "games and exercises" that involved murdering unarmed Chinese. (55-7)
Chang mentions a group of theories that have been proffered by others to explain the atrocities. We might call these "theories of Japanese tribalism". The premise underlying them is that individuals in Japanese society have moral obligations to a limited group of people and would therefore have been easily moved to commit atrocities against outsiders. Chang doesn't seem impressed with this notion. (54-5)
In the Epilogue Chang discusses three potential factors in producing the barbarism of the Japanese army during the Rape of Nanking. She notes that "Some Japanese scholars" point to "a phenomenon called 'the transfer of oppression.'" Japanese soldiers, subjected to routine degradation and cruelty, unleashed their pent up rage upon the Chinese. Second, as noted above, the Japanese military cultivated the notion of Chinese racial inferiority. Third, "the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition." (217-8)
After the Rape of Nanking
From December 1937 until August 1945 the Japanese occupied the former Chinese capital, administrated by a puppet regime called the Nanking Self-Government Committee. (167, 162) The people were organized into a baojia system, an elaborate scheme, based on a Chinese practice, by which the Chinese were compelled to police each other's movements. The authorities imposed draconian taxes and rents. They "treated many of the local Chinese laborers worse than slaves, often killing them for the slightest infractions." A hospital was converted into a laboratory known as Unit Ei 1644 at which the Japanese conducted experiments that involved subjecting victims to "a variety poisons, germs, and lethal gases...". Opium addiction became widespread, and Chang suggests that this was encouraged by the Japanese, who "routinely used narcotics as payment for labor and prostitution in Nanking." (162-5)
"Within a few years Nanking pulled itself up from its ruins." By the spring following the invasion people began returning. From a population of 250,000-300,000 in March 1938, Nanking grew to almost 600,000 by the end of 1939, and by 1942 had reached about 700,000, which it remained at until the end of the war. During the occupation "rebellion was sporadic and rare." When news of the Japanese surrender reached Nanking in 1945, residents remained in their homes, afraid the news may prove untrue, so there were few incidents of Chinese taking revenge upon Japanese soldiers. "The evacuation was swift, and there was no mass persecution or imprisonment of Japanese soldiers." (166-7)
Two sets of war crimes trials were conducted by the Allies after the war, one in Nanking itself, the other in Tokyo. During the former, beginning in August 1946 and concluding in February 1947, "more than 1,000 people testified about some 460 cases of murder, rape, arson, and looting." A famous piece of evidence consisted of sixteen photographs taken by the Japanese of their own crimes. The developer of the film preserved a set of duplicates which had spent years being passed from hand to hand. (170) The most notorious of those tried in Nanking was a lieutenant general named Tani Hisao. "The indictment had been long, listing hundreds of stabbings, burnings, drownings, strangulations, rapes, thefts, and destruction commited by Tani's division", and "more than eighty witnesses came to court to recite an endless litany of horrors." (171) He was executed by firing squad in April 1947. (172)
While "Only a handful of Japanese war criminals were tried in Nanking", the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, (officially The International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE)) "would become the longest war crimes trial in history", "three times as long as the Nuremberg trials", involving the prosecution of "twenty-eight Japanese military and political officials...". (170, 172) At the time, much of the blame for the atrocities committed in Nanking was placed on Matsui Iwane, "commander of Japan's Central China Expeditionary Force". Yet, "historians have suggested that Matsui may have served as the scapegoat for the Rape of Nanking." (174) Chang seems inclined toward this interpretation. She describes him as "guilt-stricken", and notes that "A sickly and frail man suffering from tuberculosis, Matsui was not even in Nanking when the city fell." (174) I was shocked to learn that Matsui, upon becoming aware of the extent of the atrocities committed during the invasion, chided hundreds of Japanese officers during a military funeral. He subsequently stated to the New York Times, "'the Japanese army is probably the most undisciplined army in the world today.'" (51)
Yet, "To this day Matsui's behavior at the IMTFE remains perplexing." (175)
During his testimony he failed to disclose the full story of what happened in Nanking, an account that would have implicated the imperial family. Instead, he waffled between lies and occasional self-denunciation. He tried to make excuses for the atrocities of Nanking, sometimes denied them completely, and irritated the prosecution with this circuitous, vaguely mystical discussions about Buddhism and the nature of Sino-Japanese friendship. But never once did he point the accusatory finger at the imperial throne. [175]
Continued Injustice
Matsui's refusal to allow responsibility for the atrocities in Nanking to fall upon the emperor was indicative of what lie ahead. "Hirohito... never faced a full moral accounting for his activities during the war" and "lived peacefully and in dignity until his death in 1989." (176, 180)
The place of the Rape of Nanking in the Japanese collective consciousness seems to be in evolution at this point. Chang discusses the efforts of a Japanese historian, an author of children's textbooks, to introduce the Rape of Nanking to Japanese schoolchildren, efforts which appear to have met with some success. (206-7) She lists various political figures whose careers have been harmed after making statements dismissing or playing down the seriousness of Japanese war crimes during the Second World War. (202-205)
On the other hand, the notion that the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities were not serious crimes or that they are Chinese fabrications appears widespread still. Academics in Japan avoid the topic. (209) The scholars who do tackle the subject face intense scrutiny and criticism. (211-2) In 1987, when Azumo Shiro, a Japanese soldier during World War II, and whose story is featured in Chang's book, publicly apologized for his role in perpetrating war crimes "The result was an avalanche of criticism and death threats." (213) In 1988, when the mayor of Nagasaki stated that he believed Hirohito--on his deathbed at the time--was responsible for the war, he was the victim of a (failed) assassination attempt. (213-4) Chang provides examples of prominent politic figures dismissing the seriousness of Japanese war crimes into the 1990s. No wonder then that
Strongly motivating me throughout this long and difficult labor was the stubborn refusal of many prominent Japanese politicians, academics, and industrial leaders to admit, despite overwhelming evidence, that the Nanking massacre had even happened. [12]
...I became terrified that the history of three hundred thousand murdered Chinese might disappear just as they themselves had disappeared under Japanese occupation and that the world might actually one day believe the Japanese politicians who have insisted that the Rape of Nanking was a hoax and a fabrication--that the massacre never happened at all. [200]
Chang offers some explanations as to why "An event that sixty years ago made front-page news in American newspapers appears to have vanished, almost without a trace." (200)The first is that the emperor and the imperial family were granted immunity in exchange for Japan's surrender. This "impeded the Japanese people's own historical awareness of their World War II crimes," by facilitating the notion that the emperor had been unaware of any crimes. (176) In addition, documents seized from the Japanese during the surrender were eventually returned and are now unavailable to scholars. "For these reasons it is practically impossible today to prove whether Emperor Hirohito planned, approved of, or even knew of the atrocities in Nanking." (177) The decision to grant the imperial family immunity meant that Prince Asaka, the individual responsible for the order to kill all POWs (though the circumstances of the order are not wholly clear), also never faced a public accounting. (176, 40)
After the war, the USSR "seized Poland and part of Germany", the Communists, under the leadership of Mao Zedong, came to power in China, and the Korean War broke out. "With China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea as its new postwar enemies, the United States suddenly viewed Japan as a country of strategic importance." Rather than imposing democracy and purging Japan's leadership, which had originally been among US intentions, "Washington decided to maintain a stable government in Japan in order to better challenge communism in Asia." (181-2) Japan has received billions of dollars worth of aid from the US, and the Reagan administration even pressed Japan to "beef up its military power...". (223) All this is to say that the US now had little incentive to pressure Japan to own up to the crimes it committed during the Second World War.
Compounding Japanese evasion of the topic, and US reluctance to undermine its relationship with Japan was the reticence of the Chinese themselves. The Chinese government sought trade with Japan and so neglected to demand reparations. (11) This, coupled with the broader international situation, helps explain why "The Japanese paid close to nothing for their war crimes." (222) As a consequence, "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." (181)
The fates of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone are "Equally sobering...". (184) Robert Wilson, "The Only Surgeon in Nanking" at one point, experienced mental collapse, seizures and nightmares as a result of his extraordinary efforts to care for the victims of Japanese aggression.
Few people in Nanking pushed themselves as hard as Wilson did in the hospital. When the massacre and rapes gradually subsided, several of the other physicians went to Shanghai every weekend to recover from the strain. But Wilson continued to operate on patients relentlessly, day and night, around the clock. His selflessness was remembered almost sixty years later by survivors who spoke of Wilson with great reverence, at least one of them discussing in detail the preparations and successful result of his operation under Wilson's hands. He operated for free, because few patients had money to pay him, but the surgeries exacted a terrible price from his own health. [129]
The stories of each of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone are filled with moving courageous acts, and each of their fates is saddening. I'll discuss John Rabe, partly because his selflessness is emblematic of the selflessness demonstrated by each of the other organizers, and partly because John Rabe is simply an irresistible figure--a German businessman who became head of the Nanking Safety Zone, Rabe was an ardent National Socialist.
Actually his ideas about "National Socialism" are somewhat unclear. His granddaughter--with whom Chang was in contact during the process of researching the book--"insists that Rabe saw the Nazi Party primarily as a socialist organization and did not support the persecution of Jews and other ethnic groups." Chang adds, "This may well be true" and notes that he often spoke in socialist terms regarding his support for Nazism. (109-110)
The idea that naivety is sufficient to explain Rabe's involvement with Nazism, or that he was part of some left-wing of the party, is difficult for me to accept. As a successful and well-traveled businessman he was likely a well-educated individual, even if he had not received a formally elite education. He had access to a variety of sources of information, indeed sources of information uncensored by the Nazis. Nevertheless, Rabe was not just a party member but the head of the party in Nanking (exactly why there was a Nazi Party of Nanking is never explained). Chang also provides this quotation from 1938: "'I believe not only in the correctness of our political system but, as an organizer of the party, I am behind the system 100 percent." Though this statement appears to have been made before Kristallnacht in November of that year, it was made well after the April 1933 boycott of Jewish shops and the 1935 Nuremberg Laws. (109-110) On the other hand, the idea that Rabe was naive (choose a more charitable word if you prefer) has credence considering that he attempted to contact Der Fuhrer himself to request that he pressure the Japanese to halt their atrocities, an effort that gets him arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo upon his return to Germany in early 1938. (111, 187, 189-90)
Whatever his politics, Rabe's actions during the Rape of Nanking earned him the title of "'the living Buddha of Nanking'" from the Chinese, and "'the Oskar Schindler of China'" from Chang. (109) Insisting on remaining in the city to organize the Safety Zone while virtually all the other Westerners fled, the organizers attempted to negotiated a cease-fire and even a surrender of the Chinese army. Unsuccessful, Rabe and the others found themselves responsible for the protection of 250,000 refugees by December 13, when the city fell to the Japanese. (110, 112) In order to feed them,
Rabe and the remaining foreigners drove frantically through Nanking, using their own automobiles to haul as much rice as possible into the zone. As the Japanese bombarded the city, the foreigners continued the deliveries; one driver actually lost an eye from flying shrapnel. [113]
One of the dilemmas the Safety Zone leaders faced after the city fell was what to do with Chinese soldiers who sought refuge. Conflicted, they allowed the soldiers to enter the zone so long as they disarmed. Rabe contacted the Japanese military regarding these men and "a Japanese officer promised him that the lives of the Chinese soldiers would be spared." (115-6) Unfortunately, this promise was not kept. The Japanese began raiding the Safety Zone, removing anyone they suspected of being a solider--because they had calluses that may have been caused by handling a gun, or marks that indicated carrying a heavy backpack--and executing them. (116-7) "Rabe wrote letter after letter to the Japanese embassy." (117) In fact, "The International Committee had made daily visits to representatives at the Japanese Foreign Office and the Japanese embassy to report on the situation, even filing two protests a day for the first six weeks." (174)
Rabe ultimately resorted to "the unthinkable: he began to roam about the city, trying to prevent atrocities himself."
Whenever he drove through Nanking, some man would inevitably leap out and stop the car to beg Rabe to stop a rape in progress--a rape that usually involved a sister, a wife, or a daughter. Rabe would then let the man climb into the car and direct him to the scene of the rape. Once there, he would chase Japanese soldiers away from their prey, on one occasion even bodily lifting a soldier sprawled on top of a young girl.
Chang is the first researcher to record the events of Rabe's life after the Rape of Nanking. He left Nanking in February 1938 and was back in Germany by April. (187, 189) In June the government responded to his attempts to bring the atrocities of the Japanese to the attention of Hitler by interrogating him and prohibiting him from discussing the issues in public. (190) Rabe's home was bombed during the Russian invasion and his family was reduced to poverty. He was arrested and interrogated for three days by the Soviets, and later was arrested and interrogated for an additional full day by the British. Next, he was compelled to undergo "a long, drawn-out 'de-nazification'" process...". (190-1)
Rabe's story contains a final, uplifting twist. While Rabe was head of the Safety Zone
the Chinese revered him. To them he was the man who rescued daughters from sexual slavery and sons from machine-gun fire. Rabe's very presence sometimes touched off riots in Safety Zone camps. [121]
Little wonder then that, in 1948, when Rabe's difficulties were made known to the people of Nanking, "the response was tremendous." (121, 193)
Within a matter of days the survivors of the massacre raised for Rabe's support $100 million in Chinese dollars, roughly equivalent at the time to $2,000 in U.S. dollars, no small amount in 1948. In March that year the mayor of Nanking traveled to Switzerland, where he bought large quantities of milk powder, sausages, tea, coffee, beef, butter, and jam to be delivered to Rabe in four huge packages. From June 1948 until the fall of the capital to the Communists, the people of Nanking also mailed Rabe a bundle of food each month to express their heartfelt thanks for his leadership of the International Safety Zone. The Kuomintang government even offered Rabe free housing in China and a lifelong pension if he ever chose to return. [193]
The Rape of Nanking's Place in Historical Memory and Conclusion
A final aspect of the book that merits mention is the unclear relationship of the massacre to other atrocities, in particular its relationship to other Japanese war crimes committed throughout China during the war and the Holocaust.
Inexplicit yet palpable throughout is an indignation not only at the ignorance of most Americans about Japanese war crimes, but an indignation at that ignorance in light of universal familiarity with the Holocaust and the iconic figures of Anne Frank and Oskar Schindler. This is of course a subjective judgment, but I suspect other readers would sense it as well. "Is there a child today in any part of the United States, and perhaps in many other parts of the world, who has not seen the gruesome pictures of the gas chambers at Auschwitz or read at least part of the haunting tale of the young Anne Frank?" (199) Speaking of the organizers of the Nanking Safety Zone: "There are no famous books devoted to these forgotten heroes of World War II, and certainly there has been no movie about them that has captured the imagination of the world public as intensely as Schindler's List." (185) Such comments run throughout the entirety of the book. Indeed, the Rape of Nanking is "the forgotten holocaust of World War II."
The chronicle of humankind's cruelty to fellow humans is a long and sorry tale. But if it is true that even in such horror tales there are degrees of ruthlessness, then few atrocities in world history compare in intensity and scale to the Rape of Nanking during World War II. [3]And thus the Rape of Nanking is more than once suggested to have actually been worse than the Holocaust:
It is certainly true that in this century, when the tools of mass murder were fully refined, Hitler killed about 6 million Jews, and Stalin more than 40 million Russians, but these deaths were brought about over some few years. In the Rape of Nanking the killing was concentrated within a few weeks. [5]
Speaking of Rabe's granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt, after Reinhardt first read her grandfather's account of Japanese atrocities in Nanking:
Months later Reinhardt remained so horrified by her grandfather's report that she did not hesitate to tell a reporter from the Renming Ribao (People's Daily) her honest opinion of the Nanking massacre, an opinion certain to provoke controversy: that the Japanese torture of their victims in Nanking surpassed even the Nazis in cruelty, and that the Japanese were far worse than Adolf Hitler himself. [195]
This second statement is technically Chang's conveyance of someone else's perspective, but Chang makes a point of drawing our attention to such judgments, such as George Fitch's statement that the Rape of Nanking "'has no parallel in modern history.'" (156) (I should note that this statement was made in the late 1930s, before the Holocaust.)
The relationship of Japanese atrocities in Nanking to Japanese war crimes elsewhere in China also struck me as troublesome. The Rape of Nanking involved the massacring of an extraordinarily large number of people--more people than the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, Chang points out--in a very short amount of time and frequently in manners uniquely appalling. As mentioned above, it was one of the largest mass rapes in history. Moreover, Nanking was the Chinese capital and a place of historical significance to the Chinese. (6)
And yet, "The IMTFE...proved that the massacre was just a tiny fraction of the totality of atrocities committed by the Japanese during the war." (173) Before they even arrived in Nanking, the Japanese army slaughtered the occupants of the villages they passed through, and "entire cities were razed to the ground." (37) In fact, the Japanese carried out "a massive terrorist campaign in 1941 designed to exterminate everyone in the northern Chinese countryside." Chang attributes almost twenty million Chinese deaths--only a fraction of which were of soldiers--to Japan's actions in China. (216-7) (Contemplating the scale of Japanese war crimes perhaps helps explain the reluctance of the Japanese to apologize or pay reparations for the Rape of Nanking, for doing so would seem to clearly entail doing so for the immense number of other crimes.)
If it is the scale or intensity of the Rape of Nanking that renders it unique, why does the city of Suzhou deserve only a paragraph while the Rape of Nanking receives an entire book? The Japanese reduced Suzhou to a population of 500 from 350,000 as they "murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery." Also apparently a walled city, Chang makes no mention of anyone fleeing, suggesting a deathcount comparable to that of the massacre at Nanking. Is it a lack of sources that explains the absence of a book entitled The Rape of Suzhou?
This obviously is not meant to disparage the book, only to make the point that, while The Rape of Nanking succeeds in its mission to rescue "one of the greatest bloodbaths of world history" from obscurity, I do not think it alone fully establishes its place in history--where it fits in relationship to other Japanese war crimes, other atrocities during the Second World War, or indeed, other atrocities throughout history. (149)
Chang closes her book by noting several lessons that ought to be drawn from the Rape of Nanking as well as other atrocities. The massacre is "an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." She warns against the concentration of power. And "perhaps the most distressing of all" the lessons to be drawn, "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 Rape of Nanking, as "the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda", were front page news as they were being carried out. (220-1)
What Chang desires most is for the Japanese government to admit what took place and to provide the survivors with reparations.
Japan carries not only the legal burden but the moral obligation to acknowledge the evil it perpetrated at Nanking. At a minimum, the Japanese government needs to issue an official apology to the victims, pay reparations to the people whose lives were destroyed in the rampage, and, most imortant, educate future generations of Japanese citizens about the true facts of the massacre. [225]
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