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Michigan Historical Society of World War II in Asia
Eyewitnesses
Iris Chang titles her bestseller The
Rape of Nanking - The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. For indeed the rape of Nanking epitomizes Japans conduct of its
war of conquest during WW II and the Chinese in the mainland, and elsewhere as well, bore the brunt of a toll of over 30 million
lives during the Japanese conquest.
After the capture of Nanking on December 13, 1937, the Japanese terrorized
the Chinese remaining in the city and its vicinity by weeks of arson, massacre, plunder and rape, with over 300,000 massacred,
20,000 victims of rape---not infrequently followed by diabolic disembowlment---and much of the city reduced to ashes. See
The Rape of Nanking - An Undeniable History in Photographs, Shi Young and James Yin.
Ms. Ming Yu, now residing in
Madison Heights, Michigan, is the youngest survivor known. Trusting that the Japanese, as human beings, would not harm the
innocent, her grandparents did not want to leave their home in Xiaguan (Hsiakwan), a suburban town near Nanking, and insisted
keeping their favorite granddaughter of four and half year old and her teenage aunt with them, while her parents left with
her brother for safety far away. Her grandfather was rounded up together with other male residents and massacred, her teenage
aunt was forcibly taken away and met unknown fate, and their home burned to the ground. Surviving in a makeshift shelter
in a nearby village with her grandmother, Ming nearly met death by a drunk Imperial Army soldier.
The following eyewitness
accounts of foreign residents then in Nanking are taken from American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937
-1938, Yale Divinity School Library Occasional Publication No. 9 and The Good Man of Nanking, The Diaries of John Rabe, translated
from the German by J. E. Woods.
Dr. MINER SEARLE BATES was born on May 28, 1897 in Newark, Ohio. After receiving
his B.A. from Hiram College (1916) he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. With the United States entering
World War I, he joined YMCA and served in Mesopotamia until the end of the war. He returned to Oxford to finish his B.A. and
did some graduate work in 1920. He was then commissioned as a missionary to teach at the University of Nanking by the United
Christian Missionary Society. In 1923, he married Lilliath Robbins, a Canadian teaching at Ginling College. During 1934-35,
he was Rockefeller Foundation Fellow studying Japanese and Russian at Harvard University. He received a Ph.D. in Chinese history
from Yale University in 1935.
When the Nanking Massacre occurred, Dr. Bates was alone at Nanking as his wife and
two children were staying in Japan. He plunged himself into the work of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety
Zone, protecting the Chinese from being murdered and raped by the Japanese army, and saving thousands of them from starvation.
Only two days after the fall of Nanking (Dec. 13, 1937), Bates lodged his first protest against Japanese atrocities with the
Japanese Embassy, followed by his famous Jan. 10, 1938 letter to protest, a copy of which reached free China. The directors
of the University of Nanking appointed him Vice-president of the University on January 13, 1938, to empower him in dealing
with the Japanese.
Dr. Bates was a major moving spirit behind H. J. Timperleys book, Japanese Terror in China (New
York, June 1938). Except for brief trips to Japan and Spain for conferences, he remained in Nanking from 1937 to 1941, fearlessly
challenging the Japanese for their activities, especially narcotics-trafficking. On behalf of the Nanking International Relief
Committee he wrote two pamphlets: one on Crop Investigation in the Nanking Area and the other on The Nanking Population, both
of which are crucial to our understanding of the Nanking Massacre. After the war, he was summoned as a witness at the Tokyo
Trial and subsequent Chinese trials for war criminals. Excerpts of his letters to the Japanese Embassy in Nanking follow.
December 14
[Japanese] Soldiers tore down the American flag and official notice of the American Embassy upon
the gate of our [University of Nanking] Agricultural Economics Department (Hsiao Tao Yuan), robbed several teachers and assistants
living there, and broke several doors without waiting for keys.
December 15:
In our new Library Building, where
we are taking care of 1500 common people, four women were raped on the property; two were carried off and released after being
raped; three were carried off and not returned; one was carried off but released by your Military Police near the Embassy.
These acts of soldiers have brought great pain and fear to these families, to their neighbors and to all Chinese in this part
of the city. More than a hundred similar cases in other parts of the Safety Zone have been reported to me this morning. They
are not my business now, but I mention them to show that this University problem next door to you is only a sample of the
great misery of robbery and rape carried on by soldiers among the people.
We earnestly hope that discipline may be
restored among the troops. Now the fear is so great that people are afraid even to get food, and normal life and work is impossible.
We respectfully urge that your authorities may arrange for their proper inspections to be carried out systematically under
the immediate direction of officers rather than by stray bands of soldiers who enter the same place as many as ten times in
one day and steal all food and money from the people. And secondly, we urge that for the reputation of the Japanese Army and
the Japanese Empire, for the sake of good relations between the Japanese authorities and the common people of China, for your
own thought of your wives, sisters and daughters, that the families of Nanking receive protection from the violence of soldiers.
Rev. John Gillespie Magee was born October 10, 1884 in Pittsburgh, PA.
After finishing high school in Connecticut,
he received a B.A. from Yale (1906) and a B.D. from the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, MA (1911). He was ordained
as a minister of Episcopal Church and set off for China (1912). In China he met Faith E. Backhouse, an English missionary
from the China Inland Mission, whom he married in July 1921.
Rev. Magee played a role in saving thousands of Chinese
from being murdered by the Japanese, setting up a refugee hospital to take care of wounded soldiers and refugees, and serving
as chairman of the Nanking Branch of the International Red Cross and member of the International Committee for the Nanking
Safety Zone. Films taken by Magee in Nanking and sent to the West were among the first available visual documentation of the
Nanking Massacre.
When Magee first returned to America in the summer of 1938, after 28 years of service in China,
he made an extensive tour to speak about the Nanking Massacre. After the war, Magee was a witness at the Tokyo Trial. Magee
died on September 9, 1953 in Pittsburgh. Jiro Takidanis Witness to the Nanking Incident (Tokyo, 1993) documents Magee work
during the Nanking Massacre.
Magees films on the Nanking Massacre, found in the archives of Nazi Germany at Potsdam
and released after the two Germanys were reunited, gained media attention and rekindled the interest of many people throughout
the world. . . . Based on the Magee films of the Nanking Massacre provided by David Magee, the second son of Rev. Magee,
a video tape was made with the title Magees Testament by Peter Wang. Excerpts of December 19 letter of John Magee to his
wife follow:
The horror of the last week is beyond anything I have ever experienced. I never dreamed that the Japanese
soldiers were such savages. It has been a week of murder and rape, worse, I imagine, than has happened for a very long time
unless the massacre of the Armenians by the Turks was comparable. They not only killed every prisoner they could find but
also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages. Many of them were shot down like the hunting of rabbits in the streets.
There are dead bodies all over the city from the south city to Hsiakwan. Just day before yesterday we saw a poor wretch killed
very near the house where we are living. So many of the Chinese are timid and when challenged foolishly start to run. This
is what happened to that man. The actual killing we did not see as it took place just around the corner of a bamboo fence
from where we could see. Cola went there later and said the man had been shot twice in the head. These two Jap. soldiers were
no more concerned than if they had been killing a rat and never stopped smoking their cigarettes and talking and laughing.
J. L. Chens oldest boy, Chen Chang, 16 years (Chinese count) was carried off with a great body of possibly 500 from right
around where we live two days ago and I think there is very little chance that he is alive. In this group were also 11 other
Ssu So Tsuen Christians. We have been able to get no trace of them since, although I gave the names of our people to the newly
arrived Consul-General Tanaka . . . .
But the most horrible thing now is the raping of the women which has
been going on in the most shameless way that I have ever known. The streets are full of men searching for women. Ernest and
I, one or the other of us, have to stay and keep our eyes on these houses where our Christians from Hsiakwan and St. Pauls
as well as many other refugees we have taken in, are located and Schultz-Pantin s house where we keep our clothing and take
such meals as we can. Cola stays at the house as does another man, a Turco-Tartar who is a mechanic. The Ssu So Tsuen and
San Pai Lon Christians are housed next door to us and Tap. soldiers keep going in there and robbing these people of the little
that they have. It is a regular nightmare to deal with these perverted groups of men. The house where we keep our things is
loaded with women and some even sleep in our dining room. They sit in the house all day in dreadful fear. Several days ago
a Buddhist priest from a little temple across the street came in and said he had heard that Japanese had carried off two Buddhist
nuns and begged me to take some nuns in, which I have done. The house is really packed like sardines. . . .
John
Rabe (1882 - 1949) was born in Hamburg on November 23, 1882. He lived in China from 1908 to 1938, where his last position
was that of director of the Siemens office in Nanking.
As the Japanese army closed in on the city and all foreigners
were ordered to evacuate, Rabe felt it would shame him before his Chinese workers and dishonor the Fatherland if he abandoned
them. Sending his wife to the north, he mobilized the remaining Westerners in Nanking and organized a Nanking Safety Zone
within which all unarmed Chinese were to be guaranteed safety. By virtue of Germanys pact with Japan, John Rabe was elected
as the chairman of The International Committee in charge of the safety zone.
After its capture of Nanking, then
the capital of China, on December 13, 1937, the Japanese army began torturing, raping, and massacring the defenseless Chinese
in untold numbers. At the mayhem swept across the city and its neighborhood, Rabe and his committee saved more than 230,000
lives.
When the mayhem subsided in 1938 and Rabe finally felt able to leave, the Chinese gave him a banner that called
him their Living Buddha, or Saint. Back home in Germany, he wrote Adolf Hitler to describe the Japanese atrocities he had
witnessed. Two days later, the Gestapo arrested him. Miraculously, he was not sent to the camps. Rabe survived the war
and the starvation that followed because the Chinese government learned that he was alive, and Madame Chiang Kai-shek had
food parcels sent to him.
He died impoverished and unrecognized in Berlin in l949. Rabe kept a diary during those
months of horror and the difficult years that followed. It is the record of an unpretentious hero who, when faced with the
inhuman, held his ground with fortitude. In the Memorial Hall of the City of Nanking, there is a tablet erected in honor
of his exemplary humanity. An excerpt of his diary follows.
21 DECEMBER
There can no longer be any doubt that
the Japanese are burning the city presumably to erase all traces of their looting and thievery Yesterday evening the city
was on fire in six different places.
I was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by the sound of walls collapsing and roof- crashing.
There was now a very great danger that fire would spread to the last row of houses between Chung Shan Lu and my own house,
but thank God it didnt come to that. Only flying and drifting sparks presented a threat to the straw roofs of my refugee camp
in the garden and to the supply of gasoline stored there, which absolutely has to be moved.
The following telegram
gives some idea of the desperate mood among the Americans. They want to send this telegram by way of the Japanese embassy,
since there is no other way to forward a telegram. The text, however, is so transparent that I seriously doubt that the Japanese
will even accept the telegram for sending:
Nanking 20th December 1937
Telegram to American Consulate-General
in Shanghai:
Important questions require immediate presence American diplomatic representatives in Nanking stop Situation
daily more urgent stop Please inform ambassador and Department of State stop signed Magee, MilLs, McCallum, Riggs, Smyt
he, Sone, Trimmer, Vautrin, Wilson Delivered to Japanese Embassy 20 December, with request for transmission by naval wireless.
BATES
The Americans are indeed in a bad way. While I succeed in making a suitable impression by pompously pointing
to my swastika armband and party badge, and at the German flags in my house, the Japanese have no regard whatever for the
American flag. Whereas I simply bellowed down the soldiers who stopped my car this morning and after pointing to my flag was
allowed to drive on my way, shots were fired at Dr. Trimmer and Mr. McCallum inside Kulou Hospital. Fortunately the shots
missed; but the fact that we are being shot at is so monstrous that you can understand why the Americans, who have given refuge
to so many women and girls at their universities, have lost their patience.
How long, Dr. Smythe asked quite rightly
yesterday, will we be able to keep up the bluff that we are equal to the situation? If one Chinese man in our refugee camps
kills a Japanese soldier for raping his wife or daughter, everything will fall apart; then therell be a bloodbath inside the
Safety Zone.
The news has just arrived that, just as I predicted, the telegram to the American consulate general
in Shanghai was not accepted by the Japanese embassy.
Im having the entire gasoline supply moved this morning from
my house and garden to Ninhai Lu, because Im afraid that a whole row of houses on Chung Shan Lu will be torched. We now know
all the signs of an impending fire. If a largish number of trucks assembles in a given spot, the houses are usually looted
and torched shortly thereafter.
At 2 this afternoon all the Germans and Americans, etc., meaning the entire foreign
colony, assemble outside Kulou Hospital and march in closed ranks to the Japanese embassy There were 14 Americans, five Germans,
two White Russians, and an Austrian.(*) We presented a letter to the Japanese embassy, asking, for humanitarian reasons, that
1. the burning of large parts of the city be stopped;
2. an end be put at once to the disorderly conduct of the
Japanese troops;
3. whatever steps necessary be taken to restore law and order, so that our food and coal supplies
can be replenished. All those demonstrating
signed the letter.
We are introduced to Commandant Matsui, who shakes
hands all round. I assume the role of spokesman at the Japanese embassy and explain to Mr. Tanaka that we infer that the city
is to be burned down. Tanaka denies this with a smile. . . . . .
Wilhelmina (Minnie) Vautrin was born in Secor,
Illinois on September 27, 1886. She worked her way through the University of Illinois with a major in education, graduating
with high honors in 1912. Then she was commissioned by the United Christian Missionary Society as a missionary to China,
where she first served as a high school principal till her furlough in 1918 -1919, during which she obtained a M. A. in education
from Columbia University.
She then became chairman of the education department of Ginling College, which was founded
in 1916, and served as acting president of Ginling College when President Matilda Thurston returned to America for fundraising.
With the Japanese army pressing on Nanking, she again was asked to take charge of the college, as most of the faculty left
Nanking for Shanghai or Chengtu.
In addition to several reports and articles, she kept a 526-page diary covering
the period 1937 to 1941. Her report to the Ginling College administration, entitled A Review of the First Month: December
13, 1937 - January 13, 1938, as well as her diary, documented the fact that atrocities were continuing well into May, 1938.
In the last entry of her diary, April 14, 1940, Minnie Vautrin wrote: Im about at the end of my energy. Can no longer
forge ahead and make plans for the work, for on every hand there seems to be obstacles of some kind. I wish I could go on
furlough at once but who will do the thinking for the Exp. Course? Two weeks later, she suffered a nervous breakdown. Her
friends in China and abroad persuaded her to take medical leave.
Minnie never fully recovered and a year to the day
after she left Nanking, she ended her own life on May 14, 1941. She was buried in Shepherd, Michigan, where her family had
moved from her birthplace, Secor, IL. Her tombstone bears the words "Ginling Forever" engraved in Chinese (Jin
Ling Yong Sheng). Her last words: If I could live twice, I would still go to China to serve. China is my home.
According
to Dr. Ray A. Lew of Tenderloin Outpatient Clinic, San Francisco, CA, who wrote to us: Given the traumas of being overwhelmed
by witnessing the atrocities committed by the Japanese, Miss Minnie Vautrin most likely suffered PTSD [post traumatic stress
syndrome and major depression]. The latter, when untreated and overwhelmed, can result in completed suicide. Excerpts of
Minnies diary follow.
February 23
Mr. Rabe left this morning. Took one servant with him. As far as I know this
is the third Chinese who has been permitted to leave Nanking.
A mother brought in three young girls this afternoon
and begged us to receive them. One is her daughter who went to the country in early December, the other two were country
girls. They say it has been terrible in the country. Girls had to be hidden in covered holes in the earth. Soldiers would
try to discover these hiding places by stamping on the earth to see if there were hollow places below. They said they had
spent most of their days since December 12th in these holes.
This afternoon between five and six Francis Chen and
I went around our campus by way of Hankow, Hugigwan and Canton Roads. We met a number of old men going back to the Zone for
the night. They say that during the day the stealing of money continues. I put Mr. Chens money in my pocket for fear we
might meet the same fate.
On Hugigwan I saw only four old people who were living there at night. Most houses are
still boarded up. Truly it looks deserted and sad. Not a young person in sight and no normal activities going on. At nine
this morning two young girls came running to the campus from the street between the University and Ginling saying that soldiers
were in their home and they had escaped. It chanced that Lewis was on our campus in a car so we both went over to the house.
The soldiers had left, but one had relieved a poor man of $7.00 before going. . . . .
Friday, May 13, 1938
Spent
morning - or what was left of it in trying to work out a curriculum for J---S. middle grade work for this autumn.
Here
are two typical cases that came to my office this morning:
Giang Lao Tai and daughter called. Her story - Has son
of 53 who has had T.B. for years. He has a wife and son. Has another son of 33 who was earning $50 per month running a machine
in a rice hulling shop. This son has a wife and four children from 3 - 10 years of age. All nine were dependent on this
one son of 33. Eight of the family evacuated north of river last fall and used up everything they had. The son of 33 was
killed by the Japanese soldiers.
Then came a person telling me the story of Liu Lao Tai - a woman of almost 50 living
down near San Pai Lou. She has three sons and two daughters-in-law. Four nights ago two soldiers came to her door about
ten p.m., unable to push the door in they forced their way in through a window and found themselves in Liu Lau Tais room.
They demanded her daughters-in-law and when she refused and started to go for a military police, they cut two gashes in her
face and one in her heart. She died from these wounds.
These two tragedies were told me today. Almost every day
I hear others as heartbreaking. One cannot wonder that people ask you most pitifully, How long will this terrible situation
last? How can we bear it?
See the Yale Divinity School Library publication for stories of other American eyewitnesses.
_____________________________________________________________
* List of Foreign Nationals in Nanking on 21 December
1937
NAME NATIONALITY ORGANIZATION
John H. D. Rabe German Siemens China Co.
Eduard Sperling
Shanghai Insurance Co.
Christian Kroger Carlowitz & Co.
R. Hempel North Hotel
Zaudig
Kiessling & Bader
R. R. Hatz Austrian Mechanic for the Safety Zone
Cola Podshivaloff White Russian Sandgreens
Electric Shop
O. Zial Mechanic for the Safety Zone
Dr. C. S. Trimmer American University Hospital
Dr. R. O. Wilson
Rev. James McCallum
Miss Grace Bauer
Miss
Ina Hynds
Dr. M. S. Bates University of Nanking
Charles Riggs
Dr.
Lewis S. C. Smythe
Miss Minnie Vautrin Ginling College
Rev. W. P. Mills Northern
Presbyterian Mission
Rev. H. L. Sone
George Fitch Y. M. C. A.
Rev. John Magee
American Church Mission
Rev. E. H. Forster
=========================================================
The American Missionary Eyewitnesses
at the Nanking
Massacre of 1937-1938
Beatrice S. Bartlett (1)
Presented at the Commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of
the Nanking Massacre
Organized by Michigan Historical Society of World War II in Asia
Livonia, Michigan
December
13, 1997
Thank you, Professor Tai, (for your nice words of introduction). I am greatly honored to have been invited
to speak to you this afternoon.
In spite of my sad topic for todays talk, I am very glad to be here, even on such
a mournful occasion. It is important for the living and healthy to commemorate the enormous sacrifice of those who suffered
and died in the Nanking Massacre. The program planned for today and the accompanying exhibits are fine testimony to the thoughtfulness
of your president and other members of the Society. (2) In the course of reading the program, I was particularly impressed
to find that the Society welcomes Japanese and Japanese- Americans at its sessions. If there is any meaning at all in what
we shall discuss today, it must be healing and reconciliation.
[At this point, in response to the request of the
organizers, I shall give a brief summary of my ta1k in Chinese. Please do not worry I shall shortly come back to Fnglish!]
------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) The speaker is Professor of History at Yale
University.
(2) I am grateful to Ms. Martha Smalley, Research Services Librarian and Archivist at the Yale Divinity School,
for inviting me last year to write the preface for the Divinity School publication of selected missionary letters and diaries
concerning the Massacre. I am also grateful to Professor James B. Crowley for advice, to Ms. Wei Zhuang for research assistance,
and to Professor Yingyue Yung for sending me additional documentation from Japan. None of these persons is responsible for
errors that may remain. To facilitate access to the Chinese works mentioned in the notes, I have employed Wade-Giles romanization
and am thus confirming to the romanization systems generally used for Chinese by many university libraries in this country.
The place-name of the capital city, Nanking, however, is rendered in the traditional postal spelling.
Page 2
General Introduction to the Subject:
As you know, the Nanking Massacre was one of the most horrifying events
of many horrible events of World War II. Killings took place on an enormous scale. Rapes were continuously inflicted on females
of all ages. And if all this were not enough, these crimes were carried out with unbelievable bestiality. Those who had family
members involved in this nightmare, as well as those who themswelves were eyewitnesses, can never forget what happened. Today
we assemble to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Massacre the sixtieth is the important anniversary in China, not the
fiftieth, because it measures the supposed normal length of a human life. Todays gathering and others like it all over the
world offer a small way that we may commemorate the heartache and suffering of this terrible event, and above all, the victims
great sacrifice.
I believe that most people in this audience are well informed about the Japanese invasion of China
in the 1930s and the Nanking Massacre specifically. I imagine that in the audience today there may be some with firsthand
knowledge of this event, either because they were there or because they heard about the Nanking Incident from parents or grandparents
who had been there. I hope very much that they will speak up in the time allotted for discussion at the end. I shall therefore
begin with only a brief description of what happened.
The Massacre began on 12 December 1937 when Japanese troops
first entered the city of Nanking, coming up from their recent victories in Shanghai. Todays date, the 13th, marks the anniversary
of the citys capitulation to the Japanese. Some people describe the Massacre as something that lasted only a few days or weeks,
but the missionary
Page 3
accounts belie this assertion. Five months later, Japanese troops were still raping
and killing in Nanking. (3)
What happened: The story really begins well in advance of the arrival of the Japanese
troops, because long before the Japanese assault on the capital city, the missionaries foresaw that their city would be next
on the conquerors agenda. As a result, they acted with a German businessman in Nanking, John Rabe, to set up an International
Safety Zone inside the city an area about a mile square intended as sanctuary for civilian refugees from other parts of the
city and the surrounding countryside. The Japanese embassy in Nanking approved the Safety Zone as a means of protecting the
civilian population. As a result, thousands of people crowded in, seeking safety.
With about fifteen to twenty missionaries
and only one German businessman, it may seem odd that Rabe was chosen to head the Safety Zone Committee. But Rabe was known
to be a Nazi or perhaps it would be better to say that he had long ago joined the German National Socialist Party. Apparently
it was thought that Rabe might be better at negotiating with the Japanese than would the American missionaries, although in
1937 both Germans and Americans should have been treated as neutrals. When I got a German student at Yale to read the Rabe
diary, he exclaimed that this man was no Nazi! He was too kind, too generous, and too human-hearted. (4) In the end, whatever
Rabes Nazi connections may have been, they did not achieve the desired results in negotiations with the Japanese. (5)
Instead of honoring the Safety Zone, as agreed, the Japanese troops constantly violated it, entering at many points and
at all times of the day
-----------------------------------------------------------
(3) See the 13 May 1938
excerpt from Minnie Vautrins diary, which indicates that the carnage continued well into the fifth month; Martha Smalley,
Editor, American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre. 1937-1938 (New Haven, CT: Yale Divinity School Library,
1997 (hereafter Eyewitnesses), p. 65.
(4) This was Michael Blum, Class of 1998.
(5) There has been some speculation
that Rabes entreaties may have been effective when routed via Adolf Hitler to Japan, because there was a noticeable change
in the patterns of Japanese bombing in Nanking from indiscriminate destruction to military targets only. See Iris Chang,
The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), pp. 111-112.
Page 4
and night, entirely contrary to the agreement. But I think we have to understand the Japanese concern for military objectives,
because Chinese soldiers were soon discarding their uniforms and taking refuge in the Zone. This itself was a violation of
the agreement which had set up the Safety Zone to protect the civilian, but not the military population. So there was fault
on both sides as the Japanese troops went into the Safety Zone in pursuit of fleeing Chinese soldiers. (6)
Nonetheless,
Japanese behavior inside the city of Nanking and inside the Zone is not a pretty story. Once inside, the Japanese troops seem
to have gone berserk. Random killing, continuous rapes, looting, and burning were the order of the day. One missionary letter
termed the Japanese perpetrators of these honors human beasts. Another likened the experience to a modern Dantes inferno.
(7) Two American eyewitnesses commented that what they were living through was surely hell on earth. (8)
Numbers:
What are the statistics on this? These are difficult to ascertain because all sides have made statements to their own advantage.
The figures for loss of life, for instance, range from a few tens to up to almost half a million or so.
Japanese
Figures: The Japanese accounts vary the most widely. Most Japanese sources claim that no massacre ever took place at all.
These sources downplay the loss of life and give very low figures. This is the official government position. One account of
this type, for instance, asserted that only forty-seven people were killed in the course of the entire massacre. This appeared
in a Japanese newspaper article published only a year and a half ago.
-------------------------------------------------
(6) See Iris Chang, The Rape of Nankin2, p. 111.
(7) Ernest Forster, 19 December letter, Eyewitnesses p. 24; Robert
0. Wilson family letter
of 15-18 December, EyewitnesseS, p. 16.
(8) James McCallum family letter 19 December, and
R. 0. Wilson family letter 21 December, Eyewitnesses, pp. 21 and 26.
Page 5
Certain Japanese scholars, however,
tell a different story. There is one set of remarkable Japanese sources that do not toe the government line at all. These
are certain Japanese scholars who over the past forty years have made a sincere, thorough-going effort to find out what really
happened. Their work is particularly impressive because they researched and wrote against a strong popular tide of feeling
in Japan that resisted all the bad news that they were dredging up.
Right after the war, the Chinese government was
asked to furnish a figure for the Japanese War Crimes Trials in Tokyo. As a result, they stipulated 200,000 deaths for the
entire course of the Massacre in Nanking, and this was the total used in the trial. (9) Since then, however, additional evidence
has led to higher figures. One recent estimate runs as high as 350,000. (10)
The numbers for rape are different in
that with some exceptions, the figure of 20,000 to 80,000 reported rapes is generally agreed on although a few estimates soar
as high as 100,000. But probably in the end these are part of the death statistics, because the Japanese warned soldiers not
to leave witnesses to their evil. A rape, therefore, usually meant a murder.
As we shall see, however, the problem
is not only that an awful lot of innocent people lost their lives the problem is also that this killing was accompanied by
terrible acts of depravity and sadism. The tales that have come out of this event have verified the missionarys epithet human
beasts.
-------------------------------------------------
(9) One modern investigator has used the Tokyo Trials
figure of 200,000 after researching the subject to his own satisfaction; R. J. Rummel, Chinas Bloody Century:
Genocide
and Mass Murder since 1900 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1991), p. 6. Others also use that statistic; see Nakamura
Fumio, KOkO Nihon shi KvOkasho:
Kentei kvOkasho I 8-satsu o huikaku kentOsuru (Comparison of 18 textbooks official authorized
by the Japanese Ministry of Education), (Tokyo: San ichi Shob, 1987, pp. 300-301.
(1O) James Yin and Shi Yung, The Rare
of Nankin~: An Undeniable History in Photoc~raohs. Ed. Ron Dorfman (Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1996), statistic
from frontispiece; see also p. 128 where it seems that this figure might also embrace the wounded. See also Iris Chang, The
Rape of Nanking, p. 102.
Page 6
Main question: How could one German and Fifteen to Twenty Americans achieve
anything in the face of the carnage?
In what follows I will focus on the missionary accounts of what happened what
they achieved and where they failed. In describing their accomplishments, I will also depict and compare what the Chinese
and Japanese did. My object is to understand what only a few American missionaries were able to achieve when faced with such
honors.
Following the initial evacuations of foreign government diplomats attached to the embassies and the family
members of the American missionaries, the number of westerners left in the city was truly small, perhaps only fifteen to twenty.
(11) The American missionaries were able to come and go, but after the departure of their families, few left during the crucial
five months of the Incident. Of the twenty, nine were the letter-and diary-writers whose testimony survives in the Yale Divinity
School archives, the largest Protestant archival collection in the U.S. (12) and therefore probably in the world. From these
were drawn the materials in the book published by the Yale Divinity School earlier this year, American Missionary Eyewitnesses
to the Nanking Massacre. (13) When the missionaries
-----------------------------------------------------
(11)
U.S. Embassy personnel had evacuated their premises along with the removal of the Chinese government to Hankow, and in the
early days there may have been some British and German diplomats, but they soon departed. Missionary family members were
also sent away. One of the missionary letters speaks of only twenty Americans left in the city.James McCallum letter 6 January
1938, Eyewitnesses. p. 42.
(12) Authors conversation with the late Professor John King Fairbank of Harvard University,
June 1983.
(13) The publication of the Eyewitnesses made available the first authoritative English-language accounts
of the Massacre to be printed in more than half a century. In most cases there was no editing of the content of individual
documents or diary entries, except to correct misspellings and grammatical errors. About six or seven times as many letters
and reports remain in the archives. For the purposes of this book, selection made sense. Duplications which appear in more
than one letter have been eliminated, so that the resulting 66 pages plus photographs and facsimile documents quickly and
smoothly tell the story. The resulting book is manageably and readably brief. At the time of the Massacre, the journalist
Harold J. Timperley assembled some missionary eyewitness documents of the time and brought them out under the title, What
War Means: Japanese Terror in China: A Documentary Record (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), 288p. with map; also other editions.
Because the missionaries feared that public identification of themselves as sources might interfere with their rescue work,
Timperley printed their documents without attribution to any missionaries remaining in Nanking. On the Timperley assemblage,
see the Circular letter of M. Searle Bates, 12 April 1938, Eyewitnesses. p. 64. The Timperley book is not generally available
today, so its partial duplication in the Eyewitnesses book is justified in order to make the story generally known for the
sixtieth anniversary.
Page 7
wanted to mail their letters, they did not put them into the official
post but instead entrusted them to friends leaving the city. (14) None of these nine missionary letter-writers survives to
the present day.
The American Position:
We must first understand that a special benefaction fell to these Americans
and protected them, enabling them to do their work. This was their status as neutrals. In 1937-38, Japan and the U.S. were
not at war with each other and Japan wanted to keep things that way. Orders came down from the Japanese commandant that there
was to be no killing or harming of Americans, no incidents that could possibly bring America into the war against Japan. The
missionary letters tell of moments of tension and stand-off, as when an exasperated Japanese soldier would raise his gun as
if to menace one of the missionaries, only to remember his orders and rest his weapon without following through with any action.
(15) That would never have happened when the Japanese were dealing with Chinese civilians.
What the missionaries
accomplished:
The missionaries special position as neutrals enabled them to move about the Safety Zone and indeed in the
city without great risk. As a result, they were able to mount a strong protection and rescue effort. One missionary wrote
his family: Our presence here...helps to keep [the Japanese] soldiers out. (16) But it only helped, it did not solve the
problem.
Opening their homes to refugees:
But twenty foreign residents could not be everywhere at once. Some
westerners were able to offer additional protection by making their homes
------------------------------------------------
(14) R.O.Wilson family letter of 15-18 December, Eyewitnesses. p. 15.
(15) For example, see R. 0. Wilson letter
of 15-18 December, Eyewitnesses p. 17.
(16) Ernest Forster family letter of 19 December, Eyewitnesses p. 24; M. Searle
Bates to the Japanese Embassy, 18 December, Eyewitnesses. p. 21; James McCallum family letter of 19 December, E ewitnesses
p. 22.
Page 8
available to refugees the German businessman John Rabe had six hundred crowding his house
and grounds. One missionary wrote home that [my] house is really packed like sardines. (17) At first, more than three thousand
Chinese took refuge in the halls and dormitories of Ginling Womens College, with up to 10,000 in the worst days of December.
In the same period an average of 28,000 people were cooped up in the six camps at the University of Nanking. (18) Nevertheless,
the refugees were constantly in danger as many Chinese troops were hiding in the Safety Zone, which gave the Japanese a legitimate
pretext within the rules of war that is to enter the Zone in pursuit. The resulting violations ended with many non-military
Chinese being rounded up, marched off to the killing fields, and shot. In addition, Chinese husbands who attempted to defend
their wives and daughters against would-be Japanese rapists were usually murdered for their pains, even right in the Safety
Zone.
So the American missionaries and the one German businessman, John Rabe, who stayed, were able to set up the
Safety Zone, but it was of limited efficacy. The name Safety Zone did not always mean safety.
Testing the Missionaries
Faith:
What was the Massacres effect on the faith of the missionaries? Oddly, there is little evidence on this point.
With one exception and on only one occasion, not one of the missionaries ever wrote of being assailed by religious doubt in
the midst of the Japanese rampage. But at the end of the long months of the Japanese assault, the missionary M. Searle Bates
wrote: I can see little evidence of God in the tremendous wave of cruelty and greed that has engiulfed a big piece of our
world. (19) Although it may seem extraordinary that the missionaries kept faith, apparently they did
----------------------------------------
(17) The New York Times 12 December 1996, p. A-3; John Magee family letter of 19 December 1937, Eyewitnesses. p. 24.
(18) Ernest Forster family letter of 19 December, Eyewitnesses p. 25; M. Searle Bates to the Japanese Embassy, 18 December,
Eyewitnesses p. 20; Report of the Nanking Internatonal Relief Committee, November 1937 - April 30, 1939, p. 8.
(19) Miner
Searle Bates, unpublished manuscript of late 1938 in the Yale Divinity School archives. I am grateful to Martha Smalley, Archivist,
for furnishing me a copy of this unpublished excerpt from the Bates papers, and also for testing this point against her broad
recollection and wide reading in these archives.
Page 9
not waver or if they did, they did not set down
such doubts in their letters and reports. Possibly they wished to spare family members such news. And possibly they were merely
intent on setting down a record of what was happening leaving deeper philosophizing for later.
The American Journalists:
In addition to the American missionaries, there were journalists. American reporters were usually attached to Chinese
government and military units out in the countryside and were therefore rarely with some signfficant exceptions to be found
within the city. Most of these men did not know Chinese and were therefore dependent on English-language hand-outs framed
by Chinese authorities. For the most part, this was the main source of information for western newspapers such as The New
York Times. As a result, the Times news stories emphasized the two sides battle maneuvers and military strategy.
The
Japanese campaign in China was speedily-transmitted front-page news in The New York Times for several months. I use the word
speedy advisedly. One of the earliest news bulletins on events of December 12 in Nanking the day that Japanese troops first
entered the capital actually appeared at the top of The New York Times front page for 11 December, this having been accomplished
because of the International Date Line. (20) The sinking of the U.S. gunboat Panav two days later on 14 December as it carried
evacuees away from the fighting was also reported on the previous day in New York, along with the story of the resulting diplomatic
brouhaha including threats of rupture of relations and even war. (21) Japanese terroristic acts got only short shrift in
The Times, which only briefly reported how the Japanese were turning Nanking into a city of terror. (22)
--------------------------------------------
(20) Although the attack on Nanking began in China on the 12th of December, because
of the International Date Line
there was still time to report it in the late edition of
December 11.
(21) The Panav story began with The New York
Times issue of 13 December. The next days paper reported that 96 persons out of 150 on board were missing.
(22) The
New York Times 18 December 1937, front-page story.
Page 10
Nevertheless, one missionary letter disparaged
some journalists narrow angle of vision by recounting how a group of reporters were having movies taken of themselves as bountiful
distributors of cakes, apples, and a few coins at a refugee camp entrance. At the same time, the letter continued with heavy
sarcasm, a bunch of [Japanese] soldiers climbed over the back wall of the compound and raped a dozen or so of the women. There
were no pictures taken out back. (23)
Occasionally the journalists got things wrong, as when they wrote that the
Safety Zones protections were completely effective, an assertion roundly contradicted by the missionaries evidence. (24)
Chinese Accounts:
I have not found many Chinese sources on the Massacre. Chinese archives on the later stages of the
war were apparently not well maintained and many of the Chinese archival documents of this period in both Taipei and Beijing
are not open to private researchers. But there are some materials with information I found nowhere else. One book published
about 15 years ago in Taipei, whose title might be translated into English as Ironclad proof: The Veritable Record of the
Japanese armys atrocities in the aggression against China, offered explicit and horrifying photographs of the carnage, and
displayed similar scenes from Japanese occupations of other cities in China. (25) Some of the photographs in this book were
stamped in Japanese: [Publication] not permitted (Fukyoka), (26) suggesting that they came from captured Japanese files. This
Chinese book was also extremely useful for my research because several long despositons by former Japanese soldiers in Nanking
are printed at the back.
Sometimes the missionaries relayed stories told them by the Chinese they were trying to
save. For instance, one Chinese who had been part of a large group rounded up and marched off for machine-gunning managed
to
----------------------------------------
(23) James McCallum family letter of 9 January 1938, Eyewitnesses. p.
43.
(24) The New York Times 19 December 1937.
(25) Tieh-cheng ju-shan: Jih-pen Chun-fa chin-Hua tsui-e shih-lu comp.
Chin-tai
Chung-kuo she (Taipei: Chin-tai Chung-kuo she, 1982).
(26) Several of these are reproduced in Tieh-cheng
ju-shan..., pp. 37ff.
Page 11
survive and crawl out of the pile of bodies in which he found himself. When
he reached the Safety Zone, he was able to tell this story to one of the missionaries. (27)
When the Chinese archives
are opened in the future, Chinese historians are going to have to deal with the accusation that the Generalissimo admitted
defeat early perhaps too early and evacuated the capital area without attempting much of a defence. But to speak for the
governments position: apparently it was thought important to allow the troops to rest after the exhausting battle in which
Shanghai had been lost. Thus Chiang took the army inland, following the government in retreat to Hankow and abandoning the
nations former capital. The thinking may well have been: Better to save half of China than to lose all of it.
Japanese
accounts of their activities:
The Japanese accounts of their activities consist of two kinds of sources with two main
confficting views. As I have said, the Japanese government has attempted to cover up the Massacre, insisting that nothing
that could be called a massacre ever took place and that very few civilians had lost their lives. So far as I know, the Japanese
government has not made available any archives on the subject. What is felt to be a particularly pernicious use of the Japanese
cover-up is its domination in school textbooks in Japan. There have been numerous protests against this. (28)
The
chief kind of primary source in Japanese that has not been much read or translated into English is the accounts of the Japanese
soldiers themselves. Although it is difficult to find men who were there, whose memories of the Incident are clear, and who
are willing to talk, over the past thirty or forty years some have been located. Japanese scholars interested in uncovering
the facts and particularly in reforming and rewriting the school textbooks have gone out into the Japanese countryside.
--------------------------------------
(27) R. 0. Wilson, family letter of 21 December, Eyewitnesses pp. 26-27.
(28) See, for instance, David E. Sanger,
A Stickler for History, Even it Its Not Very
Pretty, The New York Times 27 May 1993. This is the story of the scholar
Saburo
Ienaga.
Page 12
and talked to the men who were in Nanjing. What we really want to know, of course,
is what went through the minds of the raw recruits who perpetrated this terror.
Terror and Depravity:
The Japanese
governments position seems to have been to encourage and even to train soldiers to commit acts of terror and depravity, but
then to deny it all.
We know that the Japanese government was involved. Although the excuse was given that the troops
were out of control, nevertheless the soldiers recent depositions make clear that Japanese troops were trained by their officers
to commit terroristic acts. Indeed, they were required to do these terrible things. It was part of the toughening process,
of making good soldiers out of these young farm boys drafted out of the Japanese countryside.
Soldiers Depositions:
The Japanese soldiers accounts are filled with sadism and death. They contradict the governments denials. One soldiers
deposition asserted that the Massacre really did take place 1 saw it myself, he testified. (29) I should add that the Japanese
have also been accused of using poison gas and bacterial warfare in Nanking. Although these may have been used elsewhere in
the China campaign, the missionaries files never mention such weapons in Nanking. (30)
The pursuit of Chinese troops
in hiding was the excuse for Japanese military to enter the Safety Zone. But once there, they rounded up any and all Chinese
males of arms-bearing age and marched them off to be shot. The soldiers testimony admits this indiscriminate mass killing
of Chinese males without any attempt to distinguish between military and non-
----------------------------------------
(29) Tieh-cheng ju-shan..., Japanese text, p. 65.
(30) Information from Ms. Martha Smalley, Archivist.
Page
13
combatants. All were simply rounded up by the hundred and machine-gunned to death. (31)
Those arrested,
whether or not they actually were Chinese soldiers in hiding, were frequently forced to dig their own graves and then kneel
in front of them, ready to tumble in once the executioners sword had done its work. (32) Or they were marched to the edge
of one of Nankings numerous lakes, herded in, and left to drown. When one Japanese commanding officer was questioned as to
what to do with 120,000 Chinese then being held, the reply sent down was: Just kill them. (33) That was 120,000 human beings.
The sadism that I read about in preparation for this talk was horrifying. There were things I felt I simply could
not repeat in public, could not write in the preface for the Eyewitnesses book as if I were watching a particularly horrible
scene in a movie and had to close my eyes. But in what follows here the historian in me has risen to the top I feel I have
to convey an idea of what went on no matter how hideous to listen to. This is an important part of acquiring an understanding
the situation.
I said sadism.
Killing was always the ultimate objective. The Japanese military took no long-term
prisoners in Nanking. The idea seems to have been to leave no enemy witnesses to the outrages. Not having to squander scarce
food supplies on prisoners was anothger reason for getting rid of them. But the forms of execution were neither swift nor
merciful. One form of execution was to confine a Chinese in a cage and leave him there for days, letting him starve to death.
(34)
-------------------------------------
(31) Tieh-cheng ju-shan..., Japanese text p. 65, statement of Okamoto
Kenzo.
(32) Ibid., p.5, with illustration.
(33) Hata, p. 143. Hata says he did not have access to the original directive,
which he states had been burned. The date supplied was 18 December 1937.
(34) Tieh-cheng ju-shan..., p.7, with illustration.
Page 14
Torture was regularly practised. One soldier in a later interview admitted that sometimes they would
take a knife and cut a prisoners ears, nose, or mouth, or insert the weapon into the eyes. Another soldier explained that
having had no diversion since coming to fight in China, we did this as a kind of entertainment... The officers pretended they
did not know what was going on. (35)
Some Japanese soldiers had contests to see how many Chinese they could kill,
with the results published in their newspapers. (The winner had individually taken more than one hundred lives.)
Catching
babies on bayonets slicing them in two, or in quarters, was another form of torture. Many years later one Japanese soldier
admitted: It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do those things...I was truly a devil. (36)
An extreme
of sadism if such extremes can be identified was reached when officers supervised bayonet practice against individual Chinese
prisoners tied to trees or stanchions. (37) One Japanese soldier recalled: After this kind of practice, killing became an
ordinary matter. (38) Of course this kind of behavior contravened the League of Nations international covenant on the treatment
of prisoners of war but Japan had not signed that document. At any rate, Japan took the official position that her China
involvement had the status of an incident rather than a war, and therefore there could be no prisoners of war. (39)
The
Japanese Treatment of Women:
The soldiers recollections also dwell on the treatment of women, particularly on the troops
preoccupation with rape. One soldier commented, Most victimized were the women even the old; none would
----------------------------------------
(35) Ibid., Japanese text, p. 67.
(36) As quoted in Iris Chang, The RaDe of Nankin~. p. 59.
(37) Tieh-cheng
ju-shan..., Japanese text, p. 67; p. 7 with two illustrations; p. 42 ,with
illustration.
38) Ibid., Japanese text,
p. 67.
(39) Rummel, p. 160.
Page 15
escape this fate. This witness added that frequently fifteen to
twenty soldiers would draw lots and line up to take turns on one woman. (40) As if to parallel the take-no-prisoners outlook,
orders were given to leave no witnesses to the rapes and instead to kill all raped women. (41) One soldier concluded that,
There was not a single Japanese foot soldier who did not rape women, and after the rape they would kill the woman. (42)
Many rapes were accompanied by savagery and mutilation, and if proof is needed, there are many horrifying and explicit
photographs of the victims. One photographer who had been with the Japanese Army at the time declared: ...on all sides of
the roads female corpses could be seen with lacerations made by bamboo in the genital area. (43) The account of this in John
Rabes Diary reads: We found female bodies [that had been] skewered through by beer bottles and bamboo sticks. I saw these
victims with my own eyes I had only a short time before their deaths spoken with them. And I, as I unwrapped the dead in
the morgue of Kulo Hospital, arrived at the conviction that it was left to me to provide powerful statements about the truth.
(44) One Japanese historian has commented that these shocking features of the Nanking Massacre provided a strong impetus
for the armys subsequent encouragement of comfort women. (45)
Japanese Scholars:
Japanese scholars are the key
figures who have unlocked the secrets preserved in the hearts and minds of Japanese soldiers. Their chief endeavor was to
attempt to find former soldiers who could relate what had really happened in Nanking. One soldier interviewed in his eighties
finally confessed that all his life he had never divulged his guilty secret of
-----------------------------------
(40) Tieh-cheng ju-shan..., Japanese text, pp. 67-68.
(41)Ibid., Japanese text p. 68. See also Hata, p. 218.
(42)
Tieh-cheng ju-shan..., p. 13, with illustration.
(43) Ibid., p. 13, with illustration.
(44) Yale Divinity School
Library preliminary translation of excerpts from the Rabe
Diary, p. 27, top.
45) Hata, p. 239.
Page 16
unwittingly having eaten the flesh of a young Chinese boy. (46) The Japanese academicians courageously produced accounts
that offended popular feeling and defied the Japanese governments position.
From all the Japanese scholars who have
studied this, I shall give you one example the work of the historian Hata Ikubiko, but there are others like him. (47) I
have chosen Hata because he is generally regarded as one of the more moderate and open-minded among Japanese historians who
have written on this subject. Hatas work is of special value because he quotes heavily from a broad spectrum of Japanese sources
of those times.
Hata offers several explanations for the extremes of Japanese behavior in Nanking. In Shanghai, the
troops had been warned to take care lest they prey on the numerous Japanese businessmen still resident there once in Nanking
they were released from this concern and free to vent their rage.
Make an example of Nanking:
Some believe
that the Japanese government aim was to make an example of Nanking, the Nationalist capital. If successful, this would make
clear that it would be hopeless to oppose the Japanese juggernaut and its terror. The military objective seems to have been
that the onslaught on the capital would bring about the immediate surrender of all Nationalists. China would fall to the Japanese
grasp.
Of course this did not happen. Apparently the terror had the opposite effect on the Chinese, angering them
and stiffening their resolve. Rather than capitulating to Japanese expectations, Chinese government forces withdrew to the
southwest and for much of the war nursed their strength for future battles.
-------------------------------------------------
(46) Nicholas D. Kristof, Japanese Veterans Taking Agonizing War Memories to the Grave, San Francisco Chronicle 25 January
1997, p. A-9.
(47) See, for example, Hata Ikuhiko, Nankin jiken: Gvakusatsu no kz (The Nanking Incident: Explanation
of the Massacre), (Tokyo: ChO Kronsha, 1986). 269pp. A very useful bibliography of primary sources both official and personal
begins on p. 257, with sections on participants, newspaper accounts, secondary sources, and collections of soldiers letters
already published.
Page 17
According to Hata, another cause of the terror was said to be that the men had
fought in Shanghai on the understanding that they were shortly to be sent home, yet the instant the Shanghai campaign was
completed all promises were off and they were forced to push on to Nanking. (48) In addition, military supply failed to keep
up with the troops sent on to Nanking, with the result that the men arrived in an acute state of hunger and panic which drove
them to further fury. (49)
Another of Hatas explanations was the Japanese troops deep distress over the deaths of
their comrades killed in earlier battles. Hata felt that this situation may in large part have been responsible for the frenzy
the soldiers had become half-crazed by marching from Shanghai to Nanking carrying bits of the bones of their fallen comrades
strung around their necks. (50) Imagine! These were young boys, just off the farms and out of the countryside, who in Shanghai
had just fought their first pitched battles and had seen friends young men just like themselves die in enemy fire. Small
wonder that the situation drove them to excesses. This does not excuse what they did, but it makes it more understandable.
They needed better leadership in the Japanese high command.
Whatever the reasons, ultimately the terror was allowed
to take place without purposeful Japanese government intervention. Indeed, the situation may have come about precisely because
of a calculation that by capturing the Chinese capital city and waging a war of terror, Japanese forces would swiftly bring
the Chinese to their knees and achieve an early end to the campaign.
The significance of the Japanese soldiers and
historians evidence and there is much more than the samples quoted here (51) is that it
-----------------------------------------------------------
(48) Hata, p. 217.
(49) Hata, p. 218. on explanations of this behavior, see also Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical
Survey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), PP. 278-281.
(50) Hata, p. 121.
(51) See files on the Nanking or Nanjing
Massacre. On the World Wide Web both spellings have to be used, although Nanjing will yield many more entries. Some libraries
use Nanking, others have modernized and used Nanjing.
Page 18
directly refutes the official contention that
Japanese army behavior was quite as reputable as any. What is more, it directly contradicts Japanese dismissals of the American
missionary eyewitnesses and the photographs as hostile evidence.
But at this point I have to tell you the fate of
all this scholarly research. This evidence from the aging Japanese soldiers was later battered in a lawsuit for libel. At
the court trial, those deemed responsible for uttering such testimony or relaying it in scholarly books were found guilty
of falsehood and libel. (52) Apparently it is still not possible to oppose the governments point of view in Japan, even though
there are many Japanese who are eager to know the truth.
The Diary of John Rabe:
Just as the Eyewitnesses book
was going to press last year, an exciting and potentially significant development took palce when, thanks to the efforts of
Iris Chang who herself was researching a book on the Massacre, a previously unknown diary of the Massacre came to light in
Germany. This was the famed Rabe Diary, a meticulously-maintained account of more than two thousand pages, written by John
Rabe who had lived in Nanjing as a German businessman for more than thirty years. (53) This is the most detailed account
that has as yet come to light, but let us remember that the Diary does not consist solely of Rabes words. For Rabe also pasted
into his Diary local and foreign newspaper clippings and these take up much of the space. I predict that when Rabes account
is translated it will largely corroborate what has been said in the other sources. (54)
--------------------------------
(52) The New York Times 15 December 1996, p. E-134, announcement of the Alliance in
Memory of the Victims of the
Nanjing Massacre. See also David E. Sanger, A Stickler
for History, Even it Its Not Very Pretty, The New York Times 27
May 1993. (On
Saburo lenaga.)
(53) 5 December 1996, letter to the author from Mr. Tzuping Shao, President of theAlliance
in Memory of Victims of the Nanjing Massacre. See also The New York Times 12 December 1996, p. A-3.
(54) A copy of the
Rabe Diary is on deposit in the Yale Divinity School Library, and another is in the hands of the Alliance in Memory of Victims
of the Nanjing Massacre. I believe the original remains in Germany and that the family has not yet given permission for direct
transcription and publication. This has had the unfortunate effect of discouraging work on the Diary.
Page 19
One of the points where the Diary differs from the eyewitness accounts probably because of the availability of much more
space for describing events is to emphasize the dangers faced by those who attempted to help the Chinese. Simply challenging
an armed Japanese soldier who was in the midst of committing an atrocity could have led to tragedy for the westerners as well
as the Chinese. In the Diary excerpts already available, the foreign residents survival seems a miracle. (55)
Rabes
honor at what he was seeing all around him is clear. At one point he wrote: One of the Americans had coined the phrase The
Safety Zone has been turned into a public house for the Japanese soldiers.... Rabes comment is to observe: This is almost
true. In the last night there were reported rapes of some 1,000 girls and women, over 100 girls in Ginling College alone.
One hears not only of rapes. If the husbands or brothers come to their [the victims] help, then they are shot. Wherever one
looks or hears, there is only the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldliers. (56)
In the past year two other
kinds of information on the Massacre have appeared. One is Iris Changs deservedly acclaimed book, The Rape of Nanking: The
Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. The other is represented on the World Wide Web, where a search for Nanking Massacre will
turn up a few entries, and the search under Nanjing Massacre will yield many. The latter, in fact, has a long report of several
chapters designed by the Museum of the Nanking Massacre that has recently opened in Nanjing.
Conclusions:
In
conclusion we have to ask what we should make of this. Events in other parts of the world over the past year in Afghanistan,
Cambodia,
--------------------------------
(55) As reported in The New York Times, 15 December 1996, p. E-7.
(56) Yale Divinity School Library translated excerpt from the John Rabe Diary. p. 288.
Page 20
Serbia,
and Africa remind us that terroristic acts were not limited to World War II. But if such acts recur and seem to be part of
humankinds repertory, why should they be studied? Why should we commemorate the Nanking victims?
I believe we do
this for several reasons. First, we listen to this story of infamy to commemorate the terrible sacrifice of those who lost
their lives by means of such agonies. And not only the Chinese suffered. We have to pause a moment to consider the living
hells of the Japanese soldiers who returned home to conceal their own memories of the horrors they perpetrated throughout
their life-times. Second, we salute the heroism of the small number of foreign residents whose work may have been instrumental
in sparing the lives of even more Chinese. And finally, we relate the Nanking story for the purpose of condemning it publicly
for that time and for our own. By memorializing the Incident, as we are doing here this afternoon, we announce our resounding
disapproval of such terroristic acts. And while it does seem that not all the world is listening, even if this story is heard
in only a few places, it may cast some light in the darkness of our own times. Thank you.
--------The End
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