December 9, 2007
The Rape of Nanking Posted by Fredric Smoler at 04:35 PM EST Today, December 9, is the seventieth anniversary of the day the Japanese Imperial Army arrived outside the walls of the city now known as Nanjing, which in 1937 was the capital of China. The Japanese demanded surrender within 24 hours, and on the tenth of December began to bombard the city. The city fell on the thirteenth, which is when the events still known as the Rape of Nanking began. Respectable Japanese estimates of the numbers of civilians and prisoners of war killed in the course of the subsequent Japanese atrocities—rape, murder, theft, and arson—range between 100,000 and 300,000, while current Chinese estimates range between 200,000 and 400,000. Estimates of rapes run between 20,000 and 80,000, many of them public rotation rapes followed by murder and mutilation of the victims. A number of the allegations about Japanese behavior are significantly uglier than what has just been noted, but they are available in almost any account of the massacre, for curious people with very strong stomachs. Disputes about the massacre are legion, with some Japanese politicians and schoolbook authors still denying that anything startling took place. In 1982 a Japanese government banned mention of any massacre in Nanking from textbooks, on the grounds that the alleged events were not established historical facts. This was wholly indefensible, but problems of definition are legion. A number of different estimates use a time frame of six weeks for the atrocities associated with the Japanese army’s entry into the area, but historians dispute what precise territory should be considered the scene of the crime. If you exclude the suburbs, the numbers go down; if you consider the six counties making up the Nanjing Special Municipality, the numbers go up. Still, no respectable estimate goes below six figures. The massacres are rarely mentioned at any length in most modern books I read recounting the origins of the Second World War, or by my students, when they enumerate the causes of American entry into the Second World War, but rising American determination to stop Japanese aggression in Chine spiked sharply when news of the massacres reached the United States. It is more common than it used to be to hear that by 1941 the U.S. had backed Japan into a corner, leaving Japan no choice but humiliation or war, and it’s much less common than it used to be to hear about what moved American opinion to push Japan so hard. Japanese rightists explain government-backed Chinese interest in the Rape of Nanking as a cynical excuse for mobilizing nationalist sentiment. This may be true, but Japanese inability to face the fairly recent past is at least as remarkable as widespread Chinese interest in a crime of such magnitude. What is more remarkable yet is that although the numbers murdered in Nanking may be the equivalent of three or four Hiroshima bombings, no phrasemakers describe the horrors of the twentieth century as those of “the age of Auschwitz and Nanking.” “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” however, has become a familiar yoking of crimes. The politics of historical memory has in recent decades been a popular topic in my profession. Oddly enough, the people who profess the greatest interest in it seem likeliest to have the most imprecise and wispy memories of the Rape of Nanking.
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