New Delhi: Following the Battle of Nanking in the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Imperial Japanese Army executed a mass murder of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, known as the Nanjing Massacre or the Rape of Nanjing previously romanized as Nanking. The massacre took place over a six-week period starting on December 13, 1937. Along with mass rape, looting, and arson, the perpetrators also committed other war crimes. During World War II, the massacre was among the worst atrocities committed.

As soon as it had taken Shanghai in November 1937, the Japanese Army had quickly advanced through China. It had reached Nanjing's outskirts by the beginning of December. The fact that commanders permitted rape and looting along the way probably contributed to how quickly the army advanced. The Chinese army withdrew the majority of its forces as the Japanese drew closer because Nanjing was an invulnerable position. Nanjing's civilian government fled, leaving the city in the de facto hands of John Rabe, a German citizen and the founder of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone.Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was appointed the Japanese campaign's commander on December 5. It is debatable whether Asaka directed the rape or merely watched it happen, but he did nothing to stop the bloodshed.

On December 13, the first Japanese troops entered the city and encountered little opposition. The massacre started that day, with Japanese troops acting completely unrestrained. Unlawful summary executions of Chinese soldiers were committed. Numerous women and girls were raped, and there was extensive looting. Estimates of the death toll range from 40,000 to over 300,000 due to a number of factors, and rape cases range from 20,000 to over 80,000. However, the majority of reliable academics in Japan, including many well-known academics, agree with the International Military Tribunal for the Far East's estimates of at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 rapes.

A Japanese officer is about to use a shin-gun to behead a Chinese POW.

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In the beginning of 1938, the massacre came to an end. Safety Zone by John Rabe, which is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives, was largely successful. Numerous Japanese military personnel, including Kiki Hirota, a former prime minister of Japan and foreign minister at the time of the atrocities, were convicted of war crimes and executed after the war. Due to their deaths or seppuku by the time of the tribunals, some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not prosecuted (ritual suicide). As a member of the Imperial Family, Prince Asaka was given immunity and was never put on trial. The massacre continues to be a point of contention between contemporary China and Japan. Nationalists and historical revisionists have been charged in Japan.

Genocide

Beginning on December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army committed war crimes including rape in times of war, looting, arson, and random killing. Depending on the type of crime, this crime persisted for three to six weeks. The initial three weeks were the most demanding. In order to protect the city's civilians, a group of foreign expatriates led by Rabe established a 15-person International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone on November 22.

The Japanese have raped women, destroyed schools, killed people, and engaged in extensive looting both yesterday and today. The International Committee hoped to save 1,000 disarmed Chinese soldiers, but they were taken from them and are now most likely being shot or bayoneted. Japanese invaders broke the storeroom panel in our South Hill House and stole some old fruit juice and a few other items.

Photograph of a Japanese soldier by the Qinhuai River with the bodies of Chinese civilians

Genocide competition

Toshiaki Mukai (3 June 1912 – 28 January 1948) and Tsuyoshi Noda (1912 – 28 January 1948), two Japanese Army officers, competed in the challenge to kill 100 people with a sword during the Japanese invasion of China. The objective of the competition was to see who could use a sword to kill 100 people the fastest. After being accused of war crimes, the two officers were later put to death. Since then, the historicity of the incident has been fiercely debated, frequently by Japanese nationalists or negationist historians who want to disprove the Nanjing Massacre's historiography.

The problem first surfaced in a string of wartime Japanese newspaper articles that praised two Japanese officers for their "heroic" killing of Chinese soldiers as they competed to see who could kill the most people first. The topic was brought up again in the 1970s, which led to a larger debate about Japanese war crimes in China, specifically the Nanjing Massacre.

However, historians have proposed that they were most likely a further component of the widespread mass killings of defenceless Chinese prisoners. The original accounts printed in the newspaper described the killings as hand-to-hand combat.

Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda, two Japanese officers, were mentioned in a passage where it was said that they were competing to be the first to slash 100 people to death with a sword. Four articles from 30 November 1937 to 13 December 1937, the last two of which were translated into Japanese for the Japan Advertiser, covered the competition, which is said to have occurred on the way to Nanking before the infamous Nanking Massacre.

It was difficult to determine who had won the competition because both officers allegedly exceeded their objectives in the heat of battle. As a result, they decided to start a new contest with a target of 150 kills, according to the journalists Asami Kazuo and Suzuki Jiro, who wrote about it in the Tokyo Nichi-Nichi Shimbun of December 13th. "'Incredible Record' in the Contest to Behead 100 People—Mukai 106 - 105 Noda—Both 2nd Lieutenants Go Into Extra Innings," read the headline in the Nichi Nichi for the story on December 13.

An article from the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun about the "Contest to kill 100 people with a sword." "Incredible Record" (in the Contest to Cut Down 100 People) - Mukai 106-105 Noda - Both 2nd Lieutenants Enter Extra Innings, according to the headline.

Rape

Yale University claims that over 80,000 rapes occurred during the occupation, while the International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women, some of whom were young children and the elderly, were assaulted. As the Japanese soldiers searched for girls from door to door, they committed a large number of rapes in a methodical manner, capturing many women and raping them in groups. The women were frequently executed right away after being raped, frequently involving overt mutilation such as the insertion of bayonets, long sticks of bamboo, or other objects into the vagina.

bayonet penetrated in vagina of rape victim aged 5 yeras 

James M. McCallum, the Reverend, recorded in his diary:

I know not where to end. Never I have heard or read such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet.... People are hysterical... Women are being carried off every morning, afternoon and evening. The whole Japanese army seems to be free to go and come as it pleases, and to do whatever it pleases.

"A conservative estimate of people slaughtered in cold blood is somewhere about 100,000," wrote Robert O. Wilson, a surgeon at the university hospital in the Safety Zone run by the United States, in a letter to his family on March 7, 1938. "Of course, thousands of soldiers who had thrown down their arms" were also included. Here are two excerpts from his letters to his family dated December 15 and 1937.

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It is horrifying to see civilians being killed. I could go on for pages, describing instances of brutality that almost defies belief. Seven street cleaners were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers stormed in without warning or cause, killing five of them and wounding the two who made it to the hospital. Two bayoneted corpses were the only survivors. Let me describe a few events from the past two days. The home of one of the university's Chinese employees was broken into last night, and two of the women inside—his relatives—were sexually assaulted. In one of the refugee camps, two teenage girls were murdered after being raped. The Japanese entered the University Middle School, which has 8,000 students, ten times last night over the wall, stole food and clothing, and committed rapes there until they were content. One eight-year-old boy was bayoneted; he had five wounds, one of which went through his stomach and exposed some of his omentum. I believe he will survive.

Two Japanese soldiers are about to enter our home after scaling the garden wall. They claim that they saw two Chinese soldiers scale the wall when I show up as an explanation. They respond the same way when I display my party badge. A woman was raped in one of the homes on the winding street behind my garden wall before being bayoneted in the neck. I was able to secure an ambulance so that we could transport her to Kulou Hospital. Up to 1,000 women and girls allegedly had rapes last night, including about 100 girls at Ginling College alone. All you can hear is rape. If brothers or husbands step in, they are shot. Everything you see and hear all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers.

The Rape of Nanjing, a book by Iris Chang, is one of the most thorough accounts of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during the Second World War in China. According to her book, between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women were raped by Japanese soldiers. Furthermore, Chang notes that not all rape victims were female. Some Chinese men were forced to engage in "repulsive sex acts" after being sodomised. There are also reports of Japanese soldiers forcing families to engage in incest. The rape of mothers was coerced upon sons, the rape of daughters upon fathers, and the rape of sisters upon brothers. Yoshimi Yoshiaki, a well-known history professor at Chuo University, notes that instead of punishing the Japanese soldiers who committed mass rape, "the Japanese expeditionary Force in Central China issued an order to set up comfort houses during this period because Japan was afraid of criticism from China, the United States of America, and Europe following the case of massive rapes between battles in Shanghai and Nanjing."

Since December 13, 1937, the Imperial Japanese Army has been entering the Nanking Safety Zone in an effort to find former Chinese soldiers who may be hiding among refugees. Many mistakenly identified and murdered men were innocent. Due to the large number of bodies that have been purposefully burned, interred in mass graves, or dumped into the Yangtze River, it is challenging to calculate the precise number of civilian deaths. According to testimony given by Dr. Robert O. Wilson, cases of gunshot wounds "continued to come in to the hospital of University of Nanjing for a matter of about six or seven weeks following the fall of the city on December 13, 1937. The hospital's normal bed capacity was one hundred eighty, and it was constantly overflowing during this time.

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Given that civilians continued to be massacred in large numbers after the battle, despite the victory and certainty of the outcome, B. Campbell referred to the Nanjing Massacre as a genocide. [61] Jean-Louis Margolin disagrees that the Nanjing atrocities should be classified as a genocide, arguing that only prisoners of war were executed in a deliberate manner while civilians were randomly targeted and killed by uninvited individuals.

The genocide has ended

The Japanese army ordered all refugees in the Safety Zone to return home as of the end of January 1938 while announcing that it had "restored order." Order was gradually restored in Nanjing after the weixin zhengfu the collaborating government was established in 1938, and atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers significantly decreased. The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone was forcibly renamed the Nanjing International Rescue Committee on February 18, 1938, marking the official end of the Safety Zone. In May 1938, the final camps for refugees were shut down.

Evidence

Important documents were either hidden or destroyed by the Japanese, greatly reducing the amount of evidence that could be seized. The Japanese military and civil authorities "systematically destroyed military, naval, and government archives, much of which was from the period 1942-1945" between the announcement of a cease-fire on August 15, 1945, and the arrival of American troops in Japan on August 28, 1945. Incriminating evidence of war crimes was ordered to be destroyed by overseas troops in the Pacific and East Asia. The Japanese army's wartime records were destroyed in about 70% of cases. In relation to the Nanjing Massacre, Japanese authorities purposefully withheld wartime documents to avoid being seized by American authorities. A few decades later, some of the secret information was made available. For instance, disturbing passages from the diary of Kesago Nakajima, a commander at Nanjing, were published in the early 1980s along with a two-volume collection of military documents pertaining to the Nanjing operations.