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The Nanking Incident As I See It Akira Nakamura |
| From What is the Truth of the Nanking Incident ; published by Nippon Kaigi, and distributed to foreign correspondents on June 12th 1998 at the Foreign Correspondents' Club with permission from author. |
I would like to discuss with common sense, that is, without distortion or bias, and ready to accept truths about both sides if they are verified.
A. Matters to be ascribed to Chinese responsibility: background to the Nanking Incident, which led to unnecessary deaths of many Chinese soldiers and some civilians
1. The Chinese ignored the Japanese Army's summons to capitulate.
2. Chiang Kai-shek, Tang Sheng-chih and other administrative and military leaders deserted the city of Nanking before the arrival of the Japanese, leaving large numbers of soldiers and civilians behind before the Japanese troops arrived.
3. The Chinese army closed all the gates of the city, causing retreating Chinese troops outside to be sandwiched between oncoming Japanese troops and the city walls, as well as shutting in about 200,000 civilians who might otherwise have been able to leave the city prior to its fall. Also, Chinese troops trying to escape from within the city when the Japanese seiged Nanking were unable to get out because of closed gates.
4. Many Chinese soldiers, as was customary with them, changed into plain clothes, and pretending to be civilians, hid themselves in the "International Safety Zone"(Refugee Zone), which later caused the Japanese to mistake civilians for soldiers.
The "Nanking Incident" would never have happend if there had been no guerillas, or soldiers disguised as civilians, in Nanking city. When the Japanese seiged Beijing a few months earlier, no incidents occured because the whole Chinese army retreated out of Beijing southward. The Japanese army was then able to protect the remaining citizens according to international law. If the Japanese army is intrinsically brutal, why did not a similar massacre incident occur in Beijing?
5. Chinese soldiers set houses and buildings on fire, committed such atrocities as looting, rape and murder even before the Japanese troops arrived. This kind of behavior was customary with retreating Chinese troops of this era. Such incidents are recorded in reports by then Nanking Vice-consul Espy, as well as in the diary of the Chinese army physician Sho Kokaku(Japanese pronunciation). Also Japanese soldiers were said to have been able to march at night towards Nanking because the fires there were clearly visible.
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The contents of this site are direct quotes, translations, or abridged versions of scholarly works by Japanese historians or researchers. |
B. Matters to be 
considered in
approaching the
truth of what took
place in Nanking
1. Chinese remnants who surrendered to or were caught by Japanese troops were released or executed, depending upon the situation.
2. There was a case in which large numbers of Chinese prisoners of war on their way to be released fell into panic perhaps out of suspicion, and revolted. Fighting ensued with the Japanese guards, and about 1,000 of the Chinese are said to have been shot to death and several Japanese officers and soldiers were killed in the fight.
3. In some cases, Japanese soldiers killed civilians by mistake because they were not able to distinguish between civilians and soldiers, the latter being disguised in civilian clothes.
4. I recognize that there may have been undisciplined Japanese soldiers who violated military rules. I am not denying that those men may have committed acts of violence, rape, and looting. However, such violations occurred within the Allies as well. What I would like to emphasize is that illegal behavior and violence by some soldiers had nothing to do with the intention or policy of the Japanese Government or the Army.
C. Peace was
restored to
Nanking soon after
the Japanese
occupation started
1. With the Japanese occupation of Nanking, peaceful civic life was immediately restored and the number of residents coming back to the city increased day by day until it reached 250,000, exceeding the size of the city's population at the time of its fall.
2. The above fact means that the residents of Nanking knew full well that the Japanese troops were not there to kill or torture civilian Chinese.
3. Many photographs showing warm and cordial relationships between Japanese soldiers and people of Nanking were taken by news cameramen of Asahi-shimbun, Mainichi-shimbun, etc. Some of the photos will be shown at the interview.
D. Would you
believe these
numbers of deaths given by the
Chinese at
the Tokyo Trial?
1. Lu Su, who allegedly witnessed Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians and the villages in the vicinity of the Mo-Fu-Shan Hill and in the Ts'ao Hsieh-Hsia District, gave 57,418 as the number of the victims. How was it possible for this man to see the massacre from beginning to end, count the number of so many victims under the vigilant eye of the Japanese troops, and yet go unpunished ? And also how could he be so exact in counting ?
2. The Red Swastika Society and the Tsung-Shan-Tang teams allegedly buried 155,337 corpses of the victims killed. To dig hard frozen ground more than one metre deep and bury one body, at least two strong men will be needed.
This is by no means the work of children, women or aged people. So if more than 155,000 corpses were buried, a total of well over 300,000 strong men must have worked at it amidst the orgies of murder, rape and other bloody atrocities. How was it possible that so many strong men were allowed to be there with perfect impunity ?
E. What Japanese
reporters and
photographers
saw or did not see
at Nanking
1. YAMAMOTO Osamu, Asahi-shimbun correspondent in Nanking at that time, says to ARA Kenichi who interviewed him: 'While at Nanking, I never saw or even heard of a massacre of Chinese people. There were about 80 reporters, cameramen and others working in the Asahi-shimbun office in Nanking but nobody talked of a massacre of Chinese residents there. I never heard even a rumour of it.
2. MAEDA Yuji, who was then a Domei-Tsushin correspondent in Nanking and reported the battle there, writes that, though he once saw Chinese military captives being executed by the Japanese soldiers, there were no large-scale atrocities committed against civilians, and that if such atrocities had taken place in the International Safety Zone, they could not have escaped their notice because they were working right in the middle of the said zone.
3. SATO Shinju, a Mainichi-shimbun news cameraman, who now lives in Kanagawa Prefecture, told me that he once saw a number of Chinese soldiers executed by Japanese troops, but that was the only case he witnessed of a large-scale killing. As for rape, he never saw even a single case. Some photos taken by Sato in Nanking will be presented.
F. The Chinese are
talking about their
own brutality
1. The Chinese have apparently a special liking for talking about the cruel methods of murder used by Japanese soldiers at Nanking, such as, to quote from Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, decapitation, slicing off women's breasts, disembowelling women, live burials, castration the carving of organs, the roasting of people, hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks, slicing babies in thirds and fourths and so on. But all these atrocities are what the Chinese soldiers have been using for centuries past, but unknown to the Japanese.
2. To emphasize the inhumanity of the Japanese soldiers, they often go even as far as to say that Japanese soldiers took pleasure in tossing a little child into the air and piercing it with their bayonet as it came falling down. According to a famous Chinese history book, this is one of China's traditional methods of killing children, but this is in no way Japan's practice. Here again, they are telling their own story, not ours.
3. Why, then, are the Chinese so fond of repeating an exaggerated and distorted story of "Nanking rape"? One reason may be that, by so doing, they can make the world forget their own brutality: Remember that cannibalism or the practice of eating human flesh still persisted in China as recently as thirty years ago.
The second possible reason is that, by shifting the world's blame for their brutality onto the Japanese, they wish to be in a morally superior position to the Japanese.
The third is probably that, by making out Japan to be a fiendish nation, they wish to justify their aggressive political design.
4. All the Japanese, including newspaper reporters and news cameramen, who were then in Nanking, admit that a large number of plain-clothes Chinese soldiers (unlawful belligerents) were executed by the Japanese troops, but unanimously assert that there were no large-scale or systematic atrocities committed against civilians. The strange thing is that despite the world-famous tale of the holocaust of hundreds of thousands of Chinese or knee-deep pools of blood in the city of Nanking, not a single panoramic photograph of heaps of corpses in Nanking is known to us nor has even a single person come forth who has witnessed the scene of the holocaust. It may be safe, after all, to conclude that the repeated story of the slaughter of more than 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking is one of the biggest lies ever told in history.
| Note : Some revisions have been made to the English text in an effort to provide a more accurate translation of the Japanese original. |