Durdin, who worked for The New York Times, toured Nanjing before his departure from the city. China's Rising COVID-19 Death Toll Satellite images suggest a higher number of deaths as China suspends short-term visas for South Korean and Japanese travelers in a retaliatory measure. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanking, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanking on . Hata argued that Chinese troops killed on the battlefield were part of the Battle of Nanking rather than Nanking Massacre, and that only civilians and disarmed POWs should be counted as massacre victims. [6] Over the course of its subsequent occupation of Nanking the Japanese Army hunted down the former Chinese soldiers within the city and in a large number of cases summarily executed them. The Flowers of War by Geling Yan, translated by Nicky Harman. Official war journals and diaries were also published by Kaikosha, an organization of retired Japanese military veterans. What happened within the city limits was even more humiliating for humanity. I think he will live. The war, still undeclared, had no clear-cut goal or purpose. Other members of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone who took the witness stand included Miner Searle Bates and John Magee. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. [159][160], The Massacre is sometimes compared to other disasters in China, which include the Great Chinese famine (195961)[161][162][163] and the Cultural Revolution. The first Japanese troops reached the city on December 13, and faced little resistance. [note 1] A group of foreign expatriates headed by Rabe had formed a 15-man International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone on November 22 and mapped out the Nanking Safety Zone in order to safeguard civilians in the city.[38]. Between the declaration of a ceasefire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of American troops in Japan on August 28, "the Japanese military and civil authorities systematically destroyed military, naval, and The Nanking Massacre as a component of national identity. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was convened at "Ichigaya Court," formally Imperial Japanese Army HQ building in Ichigaya, Tokyo. [16], In 2000, historian Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi concurred with certain Japanese scholars who had argued that the contest was a concocted story, with the collusion of the soldiers themselves for the purpose of raising the national fighting spirit. Many were taken to the Yangtze River, where they were machine-gunned to death. The death toll of civilians is difficult to precisely calculate due to the many bodies deliberately burnt, buried in mass graves, or dumped into the Yangtze River. Prosecution's Witnesses. [56][57] Robert O. Wilson, a physician, testified that cases of gun wounds "continued to come in [to the hospital of University of Nanjing] for a matter of some six or seven weeks following the fall of the city on December 13, 1937. General Iwane Matsui waited another hour before issuing the command to take Nanjing by force. The Japanese Army had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937. [citation needed], Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}3203N 11846E / 32.050N 118.767E / 32.050; 118.767, A Japanese soldier pictured with the corpses of Chinese civilians by the, Japanese war crimes on the march to Nanjing, Retreating Chinese Troops' Scorched-Earth Policy, Extrajudicial killing of Chinese prisoners of war, Nanking Safety Zone and the role of foreigners, Apology and condolences by the Prime Minister and Emperor of Japan, Denials of the massacre by public officials in Japan, 1. [25] Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world. From Jurong to Tangshan (two cities in Jiangshu Province, China), Mukai had killed 89 people while Noda had killed 78. Mrs. Hsia was dragged out from under a table in the guest hall where she had tried to hide with her 1-year-old baby. . Many atrocities were reported to have been committed as the Japanese army advanced from Shanghai to Nanjing. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. Jones, Paul. [110][111], In the 2010 Japan-China Joint History Research Committee meeting, scholars from the Japanese side set the maximum possible number of civilian victims at 200,000, with estimates of around 40,000 or 20,000. The last murders in the house were of Ha's two children, aged 4 and 2 respectively. Tang gathered about 100,000 soldiers, largely untrained, including Chinese troops who had participated in the Battle of Shanghai. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo dispatched enciphered messages to field commands throughout the Pacific and East Asia ordering units to burn incriminating evidence of war crimes, Recent. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. [12][63][64] Bob Wakabayashi concludes from this that estimates over 200,000 are not credible. [73], According to Canadian scholar David Bruce MacDonald, the higher range of estimates of over 100,000 victims are more likely to be accurate,[74] whereas by contrast the Irish historian LM Cullen argues that the lower range of estimates, which put the death toll in tens of thousands, "are probably the most credible. On December 13, 2009, both the Chinese and Japanese monks held a religious assembly to mourn Chinese civilians killed by invading Japanese troops. [93], In 2003, the director of Japan's Military History Archives of National Institute for Defense Studies said that as much 70 percent of Japan's wartime records were destroyed. . Many innocent men were misidentified and killed.[1]. Matsui was convicted by a majority of the judges at the Tokyo tribunal who ruled that he bore ultimate responsibility for the "orgy of crime" at Nanjing because, "He did nothing, or nothing effective, to abate these horrors. [156] Trade between the two nations is worth over $200billion annually. Fuller data and our own observations have not brought out facts to discredit their information. On 13 December, the 6th and the 116th Divisions of the Japanese Army were the first to enter the city, facing little military resistance. In the museum adjacent to the shrine, a panel informs visitors that there was no massacre in Nanjing, but that Chinese soldiers in plain clothes were "dealt with severely". Men, women and children were killed in uncounted numbers throughout the city. A year before that a series of "smaller courts" held in China, including in Nanjing, put the death toll at 300,000. [75], Rabe wrote that, from time to time, the Japanese would enter the Safety Zone at will, carry off a few hundred men and women, and either summarily execute them or rape and then kill them. Estimates of the number of victims vary based on the definitions of the geographical range and the duration of the event. : Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing,", Akira Fujiwara, "The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview," in, David Askew, "The Scale of Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing: An Examination of the Burial Records,", Joshua A. Fogel, "The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory," in, Kaz Ross, "Remembering Nanjing: Patriotism and/or peace in architecture," in, Lloyd Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945," in, Barry Schwartz, "Rethinking Conflict and Collective Memory: The Case of Nanking," in, Takashi Yoshida, "Refighting the Nanking Massacre: The Continuing Struggle over Memory," in, International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone, International Military Tribunal for the Far East, International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, International Military Tribunal of the Far East, "The Nanjing Incident: Recent Research and Trends", "The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Controversy in Japan", "The Nanking Atrocities in the 1990s: The Death Toll - Current Estimates", "Japanese Crimes in Nanjing, 1937-38: A Reappraisal", "Nanjing Massacre certitude: Toll will elude", "400,000 People Killed in Nanjing Massacre: Expert", Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, Rape during the Soviet occupation of Poland, Imperial Japanese Army General Staff Office, Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors, Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, German preWorld War II industrial co-operation, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Death_toll_of_the_Nanjing_Massacre&oldid=1121556661, Short description with empty Wikidata description, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, Government of the People's Republic of China, includes all Chinese killed including those killed in action, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between early December 1937 and late January 1938, includes all disarmed POWs; includes soldiers killed on the battlefield but not immediately capable of fighting back, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between December 4, 1937, and March 28, 1938, the city of Nanking, its immediate outskirts, and all six surrounding counties between December 1, 1937, and March 1938, the entire area from Shanghai to Nanking between November 1937 to late January 1938, includes all disarmed POWs; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and early February 1938, only includes disarmed POWs buried by the Red Cross, and civilians whose deaths they verified; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and late January 1938, the city of Nanking and its immediate outskirts between December 13, 1937, and early January 1938, does not include approximately 4,000 Chinese soldiers captured out of uniform and executed; does not include any soldiers killed on the battlefield, This page was last edited on 12 November 2022, at 22:54. [50] In their view Honda, who had previously put forward the idea that more than 100,000 people were murdered in the city of Nanking alone, was failing to prove his argument and therefore sought to extend the boundaries of the massacre until a larger figure for the death toll could be achieved. [citation needed], The entry for the same day in Matsui's diary read, "I could only feel sadness and responsibility today, which has been overwhelmingly piercing my heart. [44] Most Japanese ultranationalists who deny the Nanking Massacre admit that the Japanese Army killed a large number of Chinese POWs, though they consider these to be legal executions,[45][46] an argument denounced by mainstream historians. Through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937 from Jurong to Tangshan ( two cities in Jiangshu,... International Committee for the New York Times, toured Nanjing before his departure the... As the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo 's Budokan! 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