This is the prepared text of a shortened lecture given at the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan, September 30, 1999, and handed out to the press.

Last week, I happened to run into a friend of mine, Dr. Ishimura, who is professor emeritus of Nihon University.
Dr. Ishimura was in Nanking in the summer of 1944, as second lieutenant of the Japanese army. His duty there was proper maintenance of airfields. He employed Chinese workers everyday. However, he told me none of them or other people he came in contact with ever talked about any massacre in Nanking, and he had no notion whatsoever about such stories.
Believe it or not, Dr. Ishimura's response is typical of Japanese who had been to China during the last war.
The story of the so-called Nanking massacre appeared suddenly at the post-war International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trial.
However, the USA and the Republic of China made different charges on the scale of this massacre. China said that Japan had illegally killed 260,000 Chinese. The USA charged that there had been 40,000 victims.
Who was right? I have been conducting research on Nanking for the past ten years, and my conclusion, and my topic today, is that both were wrong.

Why did chief prosecutor Joseph Keenan or the American prosecution say Japan had killed 40,000 unarmed people? Their belief was based on claims by a man called Bates.
Miner Bates was a missionary, and also taught history at the University of Nanking from 1920 to 1950. He was one of those who organized an international committee in Nanking to form a Safety Zone inside the city, and headed its Relief Committee from 1939 to 1941.
Bates knew Nanking well, and was there during the time-period in question. In contrast, the government of the Republic of China, or Chiang Kai-shek's government, had fled to the distant city of Hankow, and lacked direct knowledge of the situation. China asserted that 300,000 people had been massacred at the Tokyo Trial. Bates did not believe so. His figure was 40,000. Why was China wrong? I would like to present to you three reasons: population, burial of corpses, and historical material.

I) Population

The first reason is that the population of Nanking was 200,000 at the time of its fall, and that it increased to 250,000 after the first month of the Japanese occupation. Bates and other Westerners knew this. How is it possible to kill 300,000 people in a city of 250,000?
Iris Chang says that 300,000 people were massacred in Nanking. There is a trick in her rhetoric. She says that Nanking had 250,000 refugees in the Safety Zone, and about the same outside the Safety Zone, making a total of approximately 600,000 people altogether.
Five days before the fall of Nanking, Commander-in-chief of the Nanking Defense Force, Tang Shengzhi issued an important order to all non-combatants : Everyone had to go to the Safety Zone and remain there. To go outside the zone, it became necessary to carry special permits. As a result, all the remaining residents of Nanking and refugees from the outskirts were within the Safety Zone before the arrival of the Japanese army. The Safety Zone became absolutely packed with 200,000 people. This is clearly recorded in The Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, written by Westerners of that time.
Meanwhile, the non-Safety Zone areas became practically deserted until the end of January 1938, or the end of the 6th week of the Japanese occupation, according to the book What War Means, edited in 1938 by correspondent and Chinese army intelligence advisor Harold Timperley. So that is how it was in Nanking during the crucial 6-week period, when Iris Chang says mass carnage occurred.
What about areas outside the city walls?
Chinese soldiers outside had fled. Residents outside had taken refuge in the Safety Zone. The outlying areas were also deserted.
In addition, the gates to the city were heavily guarded, and no one was allowed to pass freely until the end of January, 1938. John Rabe notes this in his diary. So that means there was no significant inflow or outflow of people.
I would like you to realize that during the first six-weeks of the Japanese occupation, the city of Nanking was empty of Chinese, except for the very crowded Safety Zone. Numerous records and testimonies prove it. Despite Iris Chang's explanation, the population of Nanking then was equal to the population of the Safety Zone.

This is the over-all picture, when, after the fourth week of the Japanese occupation, an increase in the population to 250,000 is recorded.
One may question the exact accuracy of that number. That is not important. What is remarkable is that the Nanking International Committee observed not a decrease, but an increase of some tens of thousands of people. The increase in population is strongly suggestive of the fact that there was no massacre.
You may wonder where that 50,000 increase came from. I personally believe they were Chinese soldiers who had escaped into the Safety Zone when the Japanese came, and disguised themselves as citizens.

II. Burial

Now, I'd like to look at the issue of burials of corpses. If there had been massive slaughter, then there would have been a massive number of corpses.
China presented documents of what it claimed were the burial records of 260,000 corpses at the post-war International Military Tribunal for the Far East, also known as the Tokyo Trial. Iris Chang cites these records as evidence. Here they are
Now, the burials were not volunteer activities. The Japanese army paid the workers according to the number of corpses they buried, and the Nanking International Committee made payments too. That is why burial records were kept.
The Japanese paid 0.3 yen per body.
The International Committee made payments too. I quote the record of that payment from the Report of the International Relief Committee:
"$2,540 was used to complete the necessary burial enterprises undertaken by the Red Swastika Society, which covered over 40,000 bodies otherwise uncared for. During some 40 working days, this employed nearly 170 men", and "forty cents per day of actual work was taken as the standard wage."
Please note two very important points:
First, it was the Red Swastika Society that completed the necessary burials. Secondly, note that "the number of bodies otherwise uncared for" was not over 50,000, but over 40,000.
There are absolutely no records or witness accounts about burial activities by other groups. The claim that the Tsun-shan-tang buried over 110,000 corpses is a blatant fake.
The man who was in charge of the Japanese side of the burial activities, Mr. Maruyama, is still alive today. He has testified under oath that the Red Swastika Society was the only group that was asked to do the burials.
Apparently, however, neither the Japanese nor the Westerners knew at that time that the Red Swastika Society was charging double payment for their burials. However, the Japanese army did know the burial numbers were definitely widely exaggerated, but let it be, because they knew the refugees needed the money.
So when Bates said that 40,000 people were killed in Nanking, he got that figure from the burial records of the Red Swastika Society.
Another very important point is that most of these corpses were those of Chinese soldiers in combat, not civilians. Just think: the Chinese soldiers who could, had fled Nanking in total confusion. They had had no time to bury their dead soldiers. That job was left to the Japanese.
Here, the figure 26,100 at Shia Kwan District: Here, enormous confusion took place, when Chinese soldiers tried to flee: Many fell to their deaths from the top of the wall and died. Others killed fellow Chinese, whom they considered deserters. Heaps of bodies were left behind. However, there was no combat with Japanese here, who advanced from the south. I must tell you the number is likely an exaggeration of casualties of Chinese confusion, and certainly not victims of Japanese butchery.

Iris Chang also cites the testimonies of so-called Chinese witnesses. Mr. Lu-Su is one such witness. This man testified that he saw 57,418 people killed by the Japanese outside a city gate, and the bodies thrown into the Yangtze river. Yet none of the numerous warships, including Western warships, on the Yangtze are known to have witnessed such an event. How was he able to count so many bodies so exactly in less than a day? Why is he the only witness? How did he pass through the heavily guarded gates to tell this story to Westerners?
I have no time to go into details, but the same kind of unreliability marks the remaining three assertions as well.
The Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone was written by Westerners who were sympathetic to the Chinese people. It is also an outraged and meticulous document of Chinese reports of so-called atrocities by the Japanese army. They protested to the Japanese army undesirable incidents that they heard about in the Safety Zone. This document reported a grand total of 52 Chinese killed or executed by the Japanese, but 44 of them were based on hearsay. Only six corpses were actually confirmed by Westerners.

III. Historical materials

You may still wonder, but what about letters and diaries written by Westerners in Nanking, and of articles written by correspondents in Shanghai about Japanese atrocities?
E.W. Jefferey, the British Consul in Nanking, wrote to his country 47 days after the Japanese occupation.
"Military lawlessness continues due to a lack of centralized control. Majority of cases are of ransacking." In his reports, he never mentions killing of citizens and prisoners-of-war by the Japanese army.
I believe the Japanese army won the battle of Nanking in December 1937, but later lost the war of propaganda.
The so-called "Rape of Nanking" story was fed into the Westerners of Nanking by Chinese intelligence and their collaborators. Incredible at first, the Westerners gradually came to believe such stories. Remember, many Chinese soldiers hid themselves in the Safety Zone. In addition, the Westerners, and missionaries in particular, were probably shocked at the mop-up operation of the Japanese army, which picked up and in some cases executed those they believed were Chinese soldiers-in-hiding. The sympathetic Westerners were susceptible targets of an intelligence operation. The Japanese army confiscated tons of hidden weapons from the Safety Zone, and John Rabe, for example, is known to have hidden two Chinese officers in his back yard.

The Chinese accusations were written down by Bates in a long note, and sent to Shanghai. Bates titled it memorandum. Who received this memorandum? It was Timperley, advisor to the Chinese intelligence agency, who played a major role in disseminating Bates' claim to the Western media.
By the way, there is a famous telegram which are allegedly the words of Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, that "the Japanese Army behaved and is continuing to behave in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns". This telegram was actually written by Timperley. Iris Chang has deleted a vital part which said Japan had intercepted this telegram from Shanghai. I have handed to you the original cable.

Now even the Republic of China quoted Bates' memorandum verbatim, in their official records about war with Japan. However, they deliberately deleted, again and again, the passage that "40,000 unarmed persons were killed", because I believe they knew it was not true. Actually, the Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone also contain his note, but they deleted the massacre story of 40,000 people also. I have distributed detailed information on this to you.
The Japanese did execute some of the Chinese soldiers hiding in the Safety Zone. However, such executions, although extremely upsetting to the Chinese, never violated international law of war, or jus in bello, relating to prisoners-of-war. I have handed out this information to you too.

Mao-tse Tung never mentioned a massacre in the battle of Nanking in his famous lecture, On Protracted War, six months after its fall.
At about the same time, the League of Nations denounced Japan on the Far Eastern situation, but made no mention of massive slaughter in Nanking.
Chiang Kai-shek made no mention of mass killing of civilians or POW's seven months later, when he denounced Japan to the West upon the first anniversary of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Surely, it would have made excellent material for denouncement, if true.
It was only at the International Tribunal for the Far East that the Chinese apparently decided to make big of this rejected material, and use it against the shocked Japanese army.

I have explained to you why Iris Chang's book is not based on fact .
The Rape of Nanking cannot be called a history book.
Finally, there are about 170 simple mistakes on historical facts, but
even those mistakes seem irrelevant compared to the groundless descriptions of cruelty supposedly committed by the Japanese. Her descriptions of cruelty are beyond the imagination of the ordinary Japanese. However, such cruelties, including cannibalism, appear frequently throughout China's history, even as recently as the Cultural Revolution. On this, please refer to the material I have brought today. Iris Chang has twisted truths and has also fabricated stories to produce a book which can bring only unfortunate repercussions for good relations between Japan, China, and the USA.
That is the end of my talk, thank you very much.