A Japanese soldier practicing his bayoneting skills
Although the United States did not fully enter WWII until after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 the war had started earlier in Europe and Asia. The start of WWII began in Asia when Japan started to occupy Manchuria in 1931 (Chang, 3). Other parts of China started to fall to the Japanese including Nanking in 1937. After the fall of Nanking the Japanese were ruthless towards the Chinese civilians. The Japanese soldiers gathered all the men and killed them with guns, used them for bayonet practice, or were soaked in gasoline and burned alive (Chang, 4). The women were raped and babies were killed. The Japanese were ruthless towards these civilians and they did not seem to care that they were killing thousands of unarmed people. This awful slaughter of the Chinese civilians by the Japanese soldiers became known as the Rape of Nanking.
The statistics for the death toll from the rape of Nanking are extremely controversial. There are disputes between the number of people killed during this massacre. The Japanese claim that the statistics are much lower than some historians claim them to be. One historian claimed that “…the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons…these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building” (Chang, 5). The Japanese killed so heartlessly that even the Nazis were surprised and shocked by the mass killings in Nanking. The women in Nanking were raped and used as sex slaves. In the movie, In the Name of the Emperor, it said that 200,000 women were used as comfort women who were forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers up to fifty times a day. Some of the women became pregnant, but the soldiers did not care, they would still continue to have sex with the women.
It was shocking to me that the Rape of Nanking is not mentioned in many textbooks. The event is either not mentioned at all, like in some Japanese textbooks, or it is vaguely mentioned and not explained in full detail. I remember learning about it in high school, but not in an as detailed fashion as I did in one of my college classes about World War II. Chang’s article mentions that the Japanese try to hide the Rape of Nanking from their textbooks because it is something they want to forget. We still have the Holocaust in textbooks so why is the Rape of Nanking not included as well?
Sources
Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking – The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.pdf
In the Name of the Emperor (Links to an external site.)
That’s a great question–why do we leave out the Rape of Nanking when our textbooks focus so much on the Holocaust? I think focusing on this tension and violence between the Japanese and Chinese reveals so much about each of their cultures but even more so about human kind. As always, I keep in mind that we learn about history (and I’m majoring in it) because it can teach us so much about human nature/life; why is it then that this is nearly completely overlooked?
The section we read from Iris Chang’s book really surprised me. Not only had I never learned about a significant event, I never learned about one that is compared to the Holocaust. Her book explained to me different reasons why I may not have heard about it, but it was not until I read the section from Tanaka Maasaki’s book that I truly began to understand. There were, and still are, people who deny this event occurred. I wonder, though, if my opinion would be different if I had reads Maasaki’s book before Chang’s. I believe it is certainly possible I went into Maasaki’s argument already having made a decision for myself. When I attempt to look at it objectively, however, I find Chang’s evidence far more sufficient than Maasaki’s
I feel like there are two answers to your question. The Nanking Massacre is not mentioned in many textbooks because it does not seem “important” enough to whoever makes the decision about what children learn in school, or for political reasons. Perhaps the United States does not want to include something in textbooks that the Japanese do not in order to maintain good relations with the Japanese?
I like that you brought up comfort women in your blog. For decades after World War II, discussion of rape was muted and silenced. The Japanese military was not unique in inflicting sexual violence through their forced implementation of “comfort women.” Around 1.9 million women were raped by the red army soldiers (Barbara Johr). Sexual assault was committed on such a massive scale during World War II. I have often asked myself.. Why has taken historians and scholars so long to ask questions about rape? Is it just a cultural feeling of discomfort to talk about sexual assault, or is it more political than that?
I agree with your opinions about the importance of including some teaching of the Rape of Nanking in textbooks. It is extremely important for the world to be educated about the massacre, so that it can be learned from. The hard part, for me, is figuring out how it should be taught. Because almost all of the testimony on the topic appears to have extreme bias, it is hard to find a way to explain the facts.
I agree that it is shocking how often this event in history is overlooked by scholars around the world. However, I would say that it is unsurprising that the estimated dead vary so much from scholars from China and scholars from Japan. When many Japanese scholars don’t even acknowledge that the Nanjing Massacre is a real event, I would not be surprised if they low-ball the estimates. Hopefully this will be an event that is not lost to history as we move closer to an era where we do not have any first-hand accounts to follow.
I feel there is a similarity between how Japanese view the Rape of Nanjing and how Americans view the Trail of Tears and other atrocities committed against Native Americans. I know that I didn’t learn much of anything about Native America in high school. When I confronted a teacher about why this was not on the lesson plan, I was told that the state does not feel it is an important subject for students to learn about. This feels similar to Japan’s dismissal and censorship of the Rape of Nanjing as both are dark marks against countries that call themselves great.
This s a great post and really brings up some important questions about the lack of knowledge about this subject. Why has this subject been swept under the rug not only by the Japanese but also relatively overlooked by the Chinese?
First I want to comment about how awful the photo is to think about. The Chinese man being used for bayoneting would have been alive for much longer than people think. War movies usually show people dying almost immediately after being stabbed, but in most instances it is a much more slow and agonizing death that would take at least several minutes, depending on the location of the wound or wounds.
The inclusion of facts about the number of comfort women taken by the Japanese as sex slaves and using that as a way to show that more people were affected than just the people killed was a good way of provoking deeper thought into the massacre.
Great post.