PHOTO 1

"the Japanese... rounded up thousands of women. Many of them were gang raped or forced into military prostitution": caption in Iris Chang's book

Original caption and source: "A group of women and children returning to Rising Sun Flag Village after working in the fields, protected by our soldiers."

Original source: Nihon University professor Hata Ikuhiko traced the photo to one of a set of four taken by correspondent Kumazaki, for November 1937 issue of Asahi Graph. The original title of the article in which it appeared was A Wartime Refuge: The Rising Sun Flag Village in Jiangnan.

This is the original photo:

in preparation

Japanese troops had entered the village of Jiangnan on a pacification mission. Pacification involves informing the occupied residents about the occupying nation's policies, and allaying their fears. In this case, it meant keeping watch over farming activities and communicating with the villagers.

Many of us are unfamiliar with the behavior of Chinese soldiers of this period. Chinese soldiers habitually stole from civilians, burnt their homes, and raped and murdered them. In this photograph, Japanese soldiers are accompanying the villagers to protect them from potential outrages of that sort.

Here are the other three photos taken by Mr.Kumazaki, and their explanations:

villagers picking cotton.

the villagers sorting the cotton in front of a farmhouse.

This family was the first to seek refuge in Rising Sun Flag Village after having heard about it. The mother became ill and died during the war. The father fled the hostilities with his three daughters aged 20, 14, and 12, wandering from village to village. The party, having been joined by a relative's daughter, finally arrived at Shengjiaqiao. They now enjoy peaceful lives under the protection of the Imperial Army.

The 12-year-old and the 20-year old daughters re-appear in Iris Chang's photo:

Transformation of a photo's atmosphere, from bucolic to beastly:

Technique 1) trimming of photo, especially the little child and older women plodding behind and the cotton cart at the tail of the procession

Technique 2) blur images to eradicate peaceful expressions of the villagers, including the smile on the boy

Technique 3) fake caption

Professor Fujioka's comment, at Foreign Correspondents' Club of Tokyo, Sept.17, 1999

"I visited Stanford University in November last year in an effort to trace the source of such fraudulent usage of photos. There, at the East Asian Library of the Hoover Institute, I found a Chinese book entitled "Records of the Japanese Atrocities", published by the Politburo of the Nationalist government’s Military Committee in 1938.

This book contained the same photo. The gist of the Chinese text describing it is, "Group after group of women and girls from farming families in the Jiangnan District was led away to Japanese Army Headquarters, where they were humiliated, gang-raped, and shot to death.

The book was published in 1938, only a year after the original appeared in Asahi Graph. The Politburo, which was the propaganda arm of the Nationalists, was already busy using a photo from the Japanese press to concoct what they called proof of Japanese Army atrocities."