What Happened During the Rape of Nanking?

For a week I’ve been listening to Olivia rant in vague terms about how awful her topic was going to be. I’m not sure what I expected (I mean, it is War Crimes, after all), but somehow I was still caught completely off-guard. Welcome to our newest Heavy Hitter series, everyone. Let’s talk about the Rape of Nanking.

Oh, No.

Yup.

For those of you who have absolutely no idea what this is, you’re not alone. Hardly any public schools cover it beyond “Nanking was pillaged by Japanese soldiers for six weeks,” which is beyond an understatement. For Olivia and I, our high school history classes spent about ten minutes glossing over what happened in Nanking - so it’s no wonder folks have no idea what happened these days. Allow Olivia to enlighten you. 

For the sake of appropriateness and length, I’m going to leave out a lot of the more gory details in this summary. But links to our sources will be available - those combined with the episode and images will paint as full a picture as you need.

Where Do We Start?

As per usual, this kind of thing is preceded by a lot of context. We start against the backdrop of the second Sino-Japanese War, and eight year-long conflict between Imperial Japan and Nationalist China. 

The Japanese government took the interesting tack of re-educating their people to do two things: to value rural living and frugality (which was meant to redirect supplies and resources to the military) and to refuse the concept of surrender. They weaponized the samurai code Bushido to extend to the general military, nurturing a recklessness in soldiers that the government hoped would encourage them to do more damage to their enemies regardless of personal loss of life.

To simplify it to its most basic, soldiers were manipulated into attributing military sacrifice with honor to the highest degree. Any advances, no matter how reckless or messy, were seen as successes. Soldiers who died in battle were deified, seen as the ultimate symbol of selfless sacrifice and honor. There’s a lot to this, but the big takeaway here is that idea of sacrifice and how it related to surrender.

Surrender was not an option. People were encouraged to kill themselves rather than being taken as prisoners of war. Soldiers suspected of defeatism were arrested for treason or simply killed. In fact, most soldiers were pointedly not trained for what to do when captured by enemy forces.Training them for defeat would mean encouraging defeat, after all. We can’t have that. 

Now, this isn’t to say that the things we’re about to discuss are excusable. It would be reductive and, frankly, racist to imply that the atrocities committed over these six weeks were in any way attributable to culture. But the big takeaway here is that prisoners of war were considered lower than scum to the Japanese military. 

This Sounds Like a Bad Combination

As a matter of fact, it was.

Needless to say, relations between China and Japan didn’t improve. Anticipating an invasion from Japanese forces that, frankly, the Chinese military was not equipped to combat, nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek prioritized the preservation of his most valuable troops over the citizens in Nanking (now Nanjing). He ordered his best troops to leave the city with him, leaving 100,000 poorly-trained troops to defend the city. He also forbade civilians from leaving the city, and the military barred exits and destroyed landmarks to prevent their evacuation.

The Japanese soldiers on their way to Nanking had been told on no uncertain terms that they would be allowed to do whatever they pleased once they reached the city. It’s disputed what exactly happened, but the Japanese made haste to Nanking, killing citizens and pillaging towns along the way.

The only silver lining here was a group 25 of missionaries and business people who joined forces to create what is known as the International Commitee for the Nanking Safety Zone, headed by John Rabe, a high ranking Nazi at the time (read more about John Rabe’s conflicting story and the movie made about his life here). Together, they created a protected area where civilians were sheltered from the violence on the streets. Their efforts saved an estimated 200-250,000 lives, and their work is the main reason we have any record of what happened in Nanking during those weeks at all. 

What follows in our podcast episode is a series of firsthand accounts of what it was like living in Nanking during those six weeks. For the sake of length and keeping this post to a PG-rating, I am not going to recount the anecdotes here. If you would like to view the pictures and videos described in the episode, (HEAVY TRIGGER WARNING) click here. Suffice to say that the citizens of Nanking and the soldiers left behind were brutally and indiscriminately murdered. The injuries sustained by survivors were severe and often debilitating. The level of inhumanity displayed by the invading soldiers was unspeakable. Gang rape was common, and the dead were often burned or left in bodies of water to clear them from the streets. It was mayhem of the highest order, and absolutely can be classified as a genocide. All told, anywhere from 40,000-300,000 people were killed during the Rape of Nanking, though the tribunal where Japanese soldiers and leaders were tried for their crimes estimates 200,000. Celia Yang has a collection of essays outlining the brutality that you can read here - Olivia fully recommends you read them, but be aware that the previous trigger warnings on the episode apply. 

There’s not much more to be said. If you can handle it, I fully encourage you to listen to the episode and look at the pictures/videos linked here for a full image of what happened. The devil is truly in the details on this one, and the overview doesn’t do it full justice.

Doesn’t This Whole Thing Keep You Up at Night?

Well, yeah. 

But more specifically, Olivia is haunted by the fact that this absolutely was not an isolated incident. More likely, the Japanese military inflicted this kind of behavior on many, many other cities as they made their way to Nanking. These atrocities are lost to time. We will never know what happened to those countless people because there was no one there to document it. 

For me, it’s chilling to wonder what must have happened to those Japanese soldiers to make them desire that kind of violence. With the opportunity to do whatever they wanted, they indiscriminately killed and maimed and, well, raped. This isn’t a functional desire, obviously, but the kind of rage it takes to fuel such brutality also doesn’t come out of a vacuum. It’s created. I can’t imagine what happened to those people to make them sacrifice their humanity so fully. 

The only thing we can do with this is talk about it. By keeping these people’s memories alive, we are taking steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again. It’s important to remember even the worst of history. The victims deserve that much, don’t you think?

Now it’s time for both Olivia and I to descend into a pit of mumbling incoherently about the state of the world. Until next time.