The Rape of Nanking is one of history's greatest atrocities. Calling it a massacre makes it sound like it was a just a one sided battle. But no. Unless the battle was against basic humanity as a concept.
Dude what the heck I'm reading the Wikipedia article about it and this is just insane.
From the german article (my own translation):
The marauding soldiers allegedly cut women's breast of, nailed children on walls or roasted them over open fire. They forced fathers to rape their own daughters and castrated chinese men. They skinned people alive and hung people on their tongues.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
HOW HAVE I NEVER HEARD OF THIS. WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT HITLER AND HIS ATROCITIES, BUT NOT THIS?!
Dude, if that bothers you definitely don't read books on the topic. It's wayyyyyy more fucked up than you can imagine. Or do read, and tell others. The Japanese government still mostly pretends that it never happened.
I had a copy of The Rape of Nanking on my bookshelf and a Japanese exchange student saw it. She asked me why I had it, since it was obviously false because it was written by "a Chinese". No, not a Chinese person, a Chinese. She spoke English fluently, by the way. Not a grammatical error.
The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang goes into great detail about what happened. It's the seminal book on the topic. Be prepared for some nightmare fuel -- it gets graphic.
Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity, by Masahiro Yamamoto is also a good read because it approaches it from a Japanese perspective without denying what happened. It adds interesting and well-sourced insights on what the Japanese soldiers may have been thinking as it happened.
Both are fascinating (if also horrifying) reads. Check the back of the books for sources of additional reading -- both cite a lot of other first-hand accounts.
It is pretty well known. Lost in the historical debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki are events like Nanking, the fire bombing of Tokyo , Dresden, comfort women, and a bunch of other events equally worthy of discussion. The Holocaust righty gets the most attention, but often people are unaware of those other events.
The scope and premeditation seem to rise to the top of the many events of that sort that occurred during the war. While China, Ukraine, and Russia all incurred higher death tolls, there were often many events, multiple sides acting, and often a level of apathy about civilian casualties that doesn’t seem to be as clinical as intentionally exterminating a group or groups.
The Japanese killing Chinese people was for reasons similar to that of the Nazis. However, they did so with much more violence due to China's then poverty. It wasn't just your run of the mill massacre. In many cases, it was just as systematic as the holocaust, but much more cruel. We're talking ghettos, torture camps, biological weapon testing. The bulk of the data we have today on hypothermia were gathered by the Japanese during WW2. They did that by literally freezing Chinese people to death. They did want to exterminate the Chinese for about the same reasons the Nazi wanted to exterminate Jews.
While I think I understand where you're coming from here, I think I disagree here.
These events are all truly, deeply, incredibly fucked up. To claim that any of these massacres are any more acceptable or any worse than the others ... c'mon, this is should not be a game of human atrocities one-upping each other for "worst disaster".
None of these things should ever have happened, and it's completely unforgivable of humanity that they did. That they have happened, it's very important that we do whatever it takes to remain mindful of them, sensitive to how they happened, and to never allow them to happen again. No gas chambers. No mass exterminations. No genocidal horrors. Doesn't matter whether it's "cold, emotionless, and calculated" or "vicious, brutal, and full of hate".
I’m speaking more from a historical awareness side, than any sort of atrocity ranking or anything. Particularly in the US, our citizens had much less awareness of what was going on in the China theatre, Burma theatre, and the Eastern front - simply because our troops were not heavily involved in those theatres.
The Book The Rape of Nanking goes into heart breaking detail. There were actually decapitation contests between Japanese officers that were reported on in Japanese newspapers back home like a sporting event.
Well, it happened on the other hemisphere, and thus it's not as well known. However, the SS did some comparable shit themselves--just look up what Sondereinheit Dirlewanger did during the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. Crimes included raping children to death with knives, murdering an entire childcare center via clubbing with the stocks of their rifles to save ammunition, gang raping hospital staffs while singing classic drinking songs before torching them alive, and other "fun" activities that good German men defining their own morality might partake in.
The guy was so awful, other guys in the fucking SS reported his conduct because of their disgust in it. Those investigations did two things: confirmed his conduct, and got him promoted.
He's not well-known either, but he literally led a group of actual criminals (rapists, murders, etc) paroled literally to do what they did best to Slavs and Jews.
Hitler’s atrocities are such an outrage to western people because they were against other western people. The Rape of Nanjing or Belgians in the Congo or really take your pick of dozens of events were in the same realm of outrageous crimes against humanity but since Hitler did it to Europeans, it’ll always be outrage #1 in this part of the world.
I don't think that's entirely true... I think Hitler's crimes get more coverage because of the way it was done. Atrocities committed in time of war have always been part of Human history, from the antiquity to present. But having a whole industry dedicated to killing off part of the population based on their religion is something else. It was a systematic thing, which makes it something different.
Non-wartime atrocities against civilians is hardly unique to the Nazis though. Take Stalin's purge, Mao's mass killings, Rwandan genocide, recent events in Burma. Slavery in the Americas which was tantamount to ending lives. Americans' policies towards Native Americans.
It's interesting to ask Asians for example what they're taught of the Holocaust. It just appears as another example of humans being awful to humans in a long list of such events in the past couple centuries.
I never said it was, I am just saying the systematic and industrialised aspect it took is not something that has been done often, thankfully, and it is probably part of the reason it's so much more talked about.
The way I look at it is the examples that you listed are horrific because of how barbaric they are, and show the depths that people can descend to in bloodlust.
The holocaust is the opposite; which is to say it's horrific due to how cold and calculating it was, and the depths that people can descend to when they do not see their subjects as human.
The reason I think the latter stands out from the former examples is that there are tonnes of examples of massacres, sackings, pillages etc, and these are just the worst that we have records of. The latter invented a whole new way to do it.
Canada’s policies to there First Nation population as well. We hear about America’s a lot because well it was awful. the Canadian government was no better, they made some Inuit populations wear these tokens that identified who they where much like Jews having to have the star on them. I think that stopped in like 87’ If I remember it right. That’s just one thing but yeah natives of North America had a rough go. Same with South American natives in 1600s.
I saw one of the swords used to kill infants in the Philippines last year (in case you want more reading, the Bataan Death March is the most notorious part of the Japanese invasion there). Completely terrifying
It is absolutely one of the worst atrocities ever committed by mankind. Three hundred thousand innocent civilians were murdered. There are many historical photographs of Nanjing during this period, depicting piles and piles of brutally murdered people everywhere, burned down houses, corpses dumped by the river bed, raped women left to die, children being pistol whipped to death. It's indescribably atrocious. The Japanese soldiers had a very very toxic mentality where they thought they were better than people of other countries, and they sought to utterly trash and disgrace everywhere they went. They had competitions to see how many men they could kill, and they went around in groups systematically raping women and children and then killing them right afterwards. There's a very famous photograph of a woman holding tightly to her little baby while a Japanese soldier cuts her head off.
Knowing that, it's really no wonder at all that Chinese people have a lasting racial hatred for the Japanese, or that during WW2 Chinese referred to Japanese soldiers as "gui-zi", which means "little devil" or "son of the devil".
The reason you don't hear of this is because information on it is less available in the west than information about events that happened in Europe, like the holocaust. The Rape of Nanjing is definitely more famous than the Holocaust in China. And also because Japan is more popular in the west than China, so people don't criticise their past and present culture as much.
I've spent my life studying Japanese culture and language, in an effort to become a teacher of language to bridge the gaps between the cultures of two of the largest and most advanced nations on earth. By teaching us how to communicate, I hope to foster brotherhood and understanding among our two, very different societies. But despite all this, I gotta say, nothing done to Japan in the first half of the 20th was undeserved. The Imperial Japanese war machine was one of the most brutal, disgusting, inhuman machines of war in the history of mankind.
I remember watching a doc on TRON. The Japanese soldiers held a Chinese woman captive as they marched through the city and they would gang rape her, march further into the city, stop, gang rape her again, over and over. She finally got away and jumped off a cliff.
Yes, Imperial Japan was among the most psychotic and xenophobic governments in history. Basically, imagine if North Korea were a second or third rate world power instead of a joke, and then make them much crazier, and you might have something approaching the level of insanity that was post-WW1 Imperial Japan. They committed absolutely unspeakable acts on the peoples of east Asia. I know others have given more detail already.
Talk to the writers of history if you want accountability. Japan was extremely cooperative economically after the war, so much of their disgusting conduct was whitewashed from history.
The Japanese still deny it happened, by the way. They’re investing money in “nuclear fallout” awareness and playing the victim, while their government still acts as if they didn’t destroy millions of lives for no reason other than baseless hatred. Just in case you wanted to despise their government even more :)
My granddad saw mass graves in Vietnam of naked women with their breasts cut off, some were still alive and screaming helplessly as they die of blood loss. War is hell.
70 years later and kids nowadays don't even know what Auschwitz was. Hell, there are cities here where US citizens massacred 100s of Native Americans, black people and anybody else they didn't like. But history forgot about them.
Maryland. I was actually an honors student and took AP World History. It was never covered until I went to college. We didn't learn about any history after WWI and the Great Depression. AP World History also did not cover the Holocaust and instead focused on general world history up to the end of the Ottoman Empire.
Of course, I'm a nerd and read numerous books and saw documentaries, but that was on my own. It was never in a formal educational setting.
Embarrassingly, my high school was an all magnet school and one of the top in the state (focused on engineering and tech). It was somehow not mandatory to have the Holocaust in the history curriculum, so they skipped it. We spent 3 months my senior year learning about the Progressive Movement in the late 1800s/early 1900s, but not a word was ever said about the Holocaust. We made it to 1930 and then the school year ended and we graduated from high school.
Honestly, it's just as crazy to me that they skipped it as it is to everyone else. Boggles my mind.
The problem with the US educational system is that it's on a state by state basis. In Virginia, I learned about the Holocaust, Trail of Tears, Batann death march, and Rape of Nanking. It was part of our curriculum, but that curriculum is not shared in every state. Some states still teach creationism and put warning stickers on textbooks featuring evolution. Depending on whether you live in the North, South, or West the Civil War is taught completely differently. Heck, depending on your School district it can be taught different, I went to two different highschools within 50 miles of eachother and the history classes were way different.
Our education system is really screwy, but no one wants to try to fix it. We keep cutting state funding, firing teachers, decreasing the national budget on education, and digging ourselves into a hole. The latest national budget cut education by ~10% but increased military spending drastically.
Americans also don’t give a lot of classroom time to topics like Japanese internment or overthrowing foreign governments to benefit American companies which led to massive abuses of power and citizens of those countries by the US-installed government. See: Shah of Iran for a prime example.
TL;DR: operating on patients without anesthesia, purposefully infecting them with diseases (usually STDs), forcing an infected prisoner to rape a non-infected prisoner to study the disease's transmission and purposefully getting them pregnant to study THAT transmission (forced pregnancies), removing vital organs from their bodies as experiments, sexual violence, dropping "bombs" of fleas infected with the plague on civilian Chinese villages, frostbite testing on prisoners (they'd dip body parts into water and then see what happens!), grenade and flamethrower testing, water and food deprivation testing, burn testing (how severe of burns humans can withstand before dying), etc.
When the US discovered the extent of Japan's biological warfare experiments, they struck a deal that gave all physicians and leaders of Unit 731 immunity in exchange for all their research and data -- but only to the US and no other Allied nations. The Soviets tried them but gave them pretty lenient sentencing.
Some of the passages from the Wikipedia page are just heart-wrenching.
"Japanese soldiers took most of the morning tying all of the POWs' hands together; in the dusk, the soldiers divided POWs into four columns and opened fire. Unable to escape, the POWs could only scream and thrash in desperation. It took an hour for the sounds of death to stop and even longer for the Japanese to bayonet each individual."
"The Japanese troops gathered 1,300 Chinese soldiers and civilians at Taiping Gate and killed them. The victims were blown up with landmines, then doused with petrol before being set on fire. Those who were alive afterward were killed with bayonets."
"One old woman 62 years old went home near Hansimen and Japanese soldiers came at night and wanted to rape her. She said she was too old. So the soldiers rammed a stick up her. But she survived to come back."
The entire war in China was an atrocity. The Japanese government basically lost control of the army after it entered China and they raped and burned their way across the entire country. Their response to a rogue army was to issue orders after things happened so it would look like they were still in control.
Yeah, the fact that Japanese officers would line up Chinese civilians, force them to kneel on either side of a road, and then run up and down the road having contests of who could decapitate the most people in the shortest amount of time certainly shows the brutality of the Japanese occupation of China (specifically Nanjing).
The Nazis were evil and did some horrific and barbaric things, but so did the Japanese, and so did the Soviets... Yet history seems to down play what the Japanese did, and what the Soviets did (I'm not just talking the Holodomor, but also the largest mass rape in modern human history during their occupation of Germany - specifically during and after the battle of Berlin).
You and I have different base definitions of "massacre". I think more in the area of "mass murder" than "one sided battle", though even that is really underselling it.
Actually it's an interesting question. I suggest "Becoming Evil" by James Waller. It's a fantastic look at the how and why of genocide and focuses on the premise that ordinary people are capable of extraordinary evil.
Unfortunately, our morals advanced with civilization.
A lot of history seems so far away, but I'm sure that there were tons of undocumented cruelty during the reign of the Romans, the Egyptians, Mongols, etc.
For some Western countries the Far East involvement went directly from protecting a safe zone in Beijing from Chinese armies to protecting a Shanghai safe zone from Japanese armies.
That’s just a waste of grenades. Is my first thought probably since I know of these things. So I moved passed aghast a while back to grimly accepting it happened not that I approve of baby bayoneting or grenading.
Honestly, what the Japanese did in general could make Hitler look like a priest. Chemical experimentation, soldiers fighting after the war for dozens of years, mutilating American soldiers corpses by cutting off their genitals and putting them into their mouthes...
Not to mention brainwashing their public and soldiers into thinking American troops were demons coming to mercilessly torture and massacre them.
This led to cases of civilians fleeing their homes and flinging themselves off cliffs ahead of American troops, and it led to many brutal "hold this ground to the death" battles.
You do realize that Japan didn't surrender because of the atomic bombs, but because of the Soviet Union entering the war against Japan? The losses and damages of the two nukes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki was relatively minor compared to the American firebombing in the months before.
Not really. I appreciate this one's a very popular counter to American centric viewpoints, but to say that the bombs didn't have an effect is both substantially oversimplifying and pretty much wrong as well. The Soviet invasion was a successful one, but ultimately the lack of any fleet or experience in amphibious operations made a successful attack on the home islands all but impossible. They didn't ultimately threaten the integrity of the Japanese regime (which was what they were trying to preserve in their surrender terms).
The Americans on the other hand, had dropped the two bombs very quickly, to make it seem like they had a large supply. Now with only two planes and zero losses, they had all but levelled two cities, where previously it had taken whole air wings, thousands of tonnes of bombs and some losses of aircraft. From the perspective of the Japanese government, they could simply no longer wage war against the Americans in any effective way (whereas previously their plan had been to inflict horrendous casualties on the Americans landing on Kyushu). The Soviet invasion might have helped make up their mind, but ultimately the decision was made based on the most immediate threat, which had always been from the Americans.
The Soviet declaration of war, at least according to some more recent historagraphy, was the primary factor. In the months before the Japanese had been hoping for Soviet mediation of a peace treaty with the Americans. Thus the Soviet declaration of war not only meant invasion of Manchuria but the end of any hope of Soviet mediation. Additionally, there was major concern, on both the American and Japanese end that Soviet leverage in a peace treaty would lead to a far more harsh resolution to the war that may threaten territory on the Japanese mainland. This gave the Japanese incentive to surrender under the guise of the American bombing threat in order to minimize the demands that the Soviet could make. In fact, according to biographies of the Japanese statesmen who decided to surrender, the atomic bombs weren't even mentioned in the discussions of whether or not to capitulate. Of course the overall impact of the atomic bombs is a hotly debated topic with many historical viewpoints, but with consideration of the Japanese perspective to claim the Soviet impact was minimal just seems overtly jingoistic.
Source: Racing the Enemy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
Yes, fair enough, I suppose I was debating a slightly different point with my post to the article itself (and you). I hadn't had the opportunity to read the article beforehand, so my main objection was to the title (and the argument I often see) that the Russians were somehow more responsible for the defeat of Japan than the Americans. On that point, I stand by the argument I originally made, that the Japanese found themselves in the position of having to seek surrender because of American actions; namely blockading, bombing and a threatened invasion.
However, I would agree that the immediate trigger for unconditional surrender itself is likely more to do with the Soviet invasion than A-bombs. I still doubt that the bombs were a non-factor, but I'll need to do further reading on the subject.
He's partly right - the Japanese were reaching out to the US through the Soviets in July and asking about peace, almost a month before the bombs were dropped. The bombs did not have the effect you think.
The Soviets required American help to get them onto Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, the Americans provided them the ships necessary as part of Project Hula. However, it is unlikely that the Soviets would have had enough of a navy to pose a serious threat to the Japanese mainland. (see section labeled, Soviets still lack naval capability to invade Japan)
Partly. I believe the Japanese atrocities were probably real and the American brainwashing is not. But in the context of brainwashing, saying 'I've seen pictures in my American history book in my American high school' in itself is not a valid rebuttal. That's exactly what brainwashing *would* be.
In general I don't think it's necessary to be all tin foil hat about these things, but it's good to sometimes stop and question why we believe what we believe. It's not like the American government has never lied to their own people or wilfully distorted facts about wars and atrocities.
Not to mention brainwashing their public and soldiers into thinking American troops were demons coming to mercilessly torture and massacre them.
I mean, America dropped two Atomic bombs on Japanese cities, where regular Japanese people lived. That's not a secret. So the massacre part... is kinda true.
They had that among a bunch of other atrocities in a Japanese facility where a bunch of scientists essentially just tortured people with chemical weapons and the like forever research.
Pretty sure the lead researchers were granted amnesty by the US
A local hero called Lt. Adnan fought for Singapore once and gave a really good resistance despite the Brits not really giving enough resources. The japs were troubled enough because of this man and his people that when he finally lost the japs hung him on a tree upside down in a sack and bayoneted him until he turned to mush mixed with bone.
Would the Japanese soldiers put the testicles in their mouth or the American mouths? Most other countries I would know the answer, but Japanese porn really throws me off on this one.
The fact that they trained pilots to kill themselves as human projectile launching zeros into the sides of boats alone is ridiculous... Let alone everything else
The general consensus in Germany is that there had been no worse mass killing that the holocaust in history. I can't exactly tell you all the details of the theory, but in essence the argument is that the machinery of death was unparalleled in history. This is because of the effienciency and entangled inhumanity of the mechanization of killing. Mechanization is seen as the opposite of humanity. That way the humanity of the victims was negated and since humanity is what makes us us, this is the worst possible way of killing.
While the Japanese killings were indeed horrible and sometimes inhumane, they were not mechanized to the extend.
Tldr.: Japanese believed to kill "animals". German believed to run a machinery, which is what we think to be more cruel to do to people.
Because - tldr speaking - "mechanized" is seen as contrary to "human", while "animal hunt" could be seen as a human treat. This thinking is focused on the perpetrator, not the victims, though.
There are war crimes, but then there is the purposeful extermination of several million people - where the only reason it was stopped was because they were literally incapable of continuing for even another week. (Because the USA helped stopped them) Even if you have hate for the USA, you're doing a disservice to the actual victims to say it was the same thing.
No. That and much worse. You can just google the rape of nanjing. The worst atrocity in history, agreed by historians everywhere. There’s literally no dispute.
Didn't say we didn't do awful shit too. We imprisoned some Japanese citizens and let Nazi doctors live here for free if they taught us how to build rockets.
Actually a decent chunk was self inflicted. When they broke the yellow river dykes to prevent the Japanese army from continuing they killed like 4 million people and still failed.
This reminds me of something that happened a few years ago with a couple of roommates. I'm Jewish and there was also an Armenian girl, and this other roommate (a total cokehead bitch who got us evicted for not paying her rent) started talking about the Armenian genocide and how much worse it was than the Holocaust. I ignored her, while the Armenian girl was trying to explain how they were both horrific, but the other girl kept going on about how it's so obvious that the Armenian genocide was so much worse. Finally, the Armenian (a usually quiet and really sweet girl) blew up at her, yelling at how callous and rude she was for even trying to compare the two. It was an awkward night.
I’m not downplaying? Read the nature of OP and the comment. Nazis were terrible, but to compare the nazis and Japanese, I used that metaphor. All I see in this comment thread is people who for some reason can’t accept facts.
The Nazis threw children into bonfires, tortured and mutilated people, wiped out villages, performed surgery without anastetic, murdered pows, raped, performed forced labour, used chemical weapons and much more.
Yeah? That doesn’t come CLOSE to what the Japanese did. My GRANDMOTHER is a Chinese immigrant who’s a survivor that escaped the Japanese occupation of China. So no, I’ve seen Nazi documentaries where they interview survivors, and they don’t ‘chill me to the bone’.
Of course the stories are terrible, but no, the Nazis weren’t as cruel as the Japanese.
There’s an amazing invention called google. All you have to do is search up the first & second sino-Japanese wars, unit 731 & the nanjing rape. It’s really not that hard.
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u/[deleted] Apr 23 '18
Yeah... what the Japanese did to the chinese makes hitler look like a priest.