A Brief Historical Background
In the summer of 1937, shots were fired at a Japanese regiment while they were conducting nighttime maneuvers near Marco Polo Bridge in China. Afterwards, a Japanese soldier failed to appear for roll call. The Japanese regiment demanded to search the nearby Chinese Fort Wanping for the soldier. When the Chinese refused, the Japanese began to shell the fort. Japan used the act as a pretext for their advance from their previously seized territory of Manchukuo into southern China. Thus began the Second Sino-Japanese Conflict. On December 13, 1937, after days of shelling and aerial bombardment, the Japanese finally broke though the Chinese defenses of the Chinese capital city, and Japanese soldiers marched triumphant through the gates of the Nanking.
Unfortunately, the story gets hazy from there. Although there is strong evidence from oral accounts, battlefield diaries, and photographs suggesting that during the Japanese occupation of Nanking, a large number of atrocities were committed, including rape, mass executions, and public beheadings of civilians, a vocal minority of historians maintain that the Nanking Massacre, as the event is widely referred to, was in fact highly exaggerated or even entirely fabricated. This group of historians, called the revisionists, has been in conflict with the progressives, who want the atrocities of the Nanking Massacre to be recognized as historical fact. To demonstrate the wide range of stances on the Nanking Massacre, below is a table on the claimed death tolls from various sources.
Table 1. Estimated death tolls from various sources1
| Authority | Estimated number of soldiers killed | Estimated number of civilians killed | Total death toll |
|---|---|---|---|
| Miner Searle Bates (member of the International Safety Zone Committee for Nanking), as reported to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (January 1938) | 28,000 | 12,000 | 40,000 |
| Ku Wei-chün (Speech of the Chinese delegation to the League of Nations) (February 2, 1938) | 20,000 | ||
| John Rabe (German head of the International Safety Zone Committee for Nanking), letter to Hitler after returning to Germany (June 1938) | 50,000-60,000 | ||
| History of the Sino-Japanese War (translation of official history produced by the Nationalist government in Taiwan; Taipei, p. 213) (1971) | 100,000+ | ||
| Hora, Tomio, Nankin daigyakusatsu (The great Nanking Massacre), rev. ed. (1982) | 200,000+ | ||
| Tanaka Masaaki, “Nankin gyakusatsu” no kyokō (“The Nanking Massacre” as Fabrication) (1984) | "very few" | ||
| Nanking war crimes trial verdict (including 190,000 mass slaughter deaths and 150,000 individual killings) (March 10, 1947) | 300,000-340,000 | ||
| Tokyo Trial final judgment (November 1948) | 50,000 | 12,000 | 200,000+ |
| Hata Ikuhiko, Nankin jiken (The Nanking Atrocities) | 30,000 | 10,000 | 40,000 |
| Ōsaka Shoseki (publisher), Japanese middle school textbook (1996) | 200,000 | ||
| Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanjing Massacre (inscription at main entrance) | 300,000 |
The heated debate between the progressives and the revisionists has lasted all the way into the present day. The constant reinterpretation of the event by both sides has kept Nanking present and relevant in modern-day politics between China and Japan. This website will focus on modern interpretations of the Nanking Massacre in popular films in conjunction with the recent tensions in Sino-Japanese relations.
- Ikuhiko, H. (1998). Nanking gyakusatsu ‘shōko shashin’ o kantei suru. In Japan Echo (Eds.), An Overview of the Nanjing Debate. (2008). Tokyo, Japan: Japan Echo Inc. (Reprinted from Shokun, 82-93). ↩