Nanjing massacre how many died

The main points of agreement constitute a major step forward in Sino-Japanese relations. Japanese leaders have historically ignored pleas to acknowledge fully the extent to which Japan was responsible for Pacific War-era devastation and violence not just in China but also in Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. So, all in all, the report has much to recommend it. The same has been true in much of the Japanese press.

Still, the report could be a very welcome harbinger of movement away from the old fights about the Pacific War. The "textbook controversies" have unfolded over several decades, but the postmillennial years have been particularly fraught, with high-profile protests in China and South Korea over how the war is taught and memorialized in Japan even while some Japanese historians and others in Japan have repeatedly called for a more forthright acknowledgment of Japanese wartime atrocities both at home and abroad.

There will probably never be full agreement on the Nanjing numbers. But precise death tolls are not, ultimately, the real issue at hand. Shusha was the key to the recent war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Now Baku wants to turn the fabled fortress town into a resort. Argument An expert's point of view on a current event. February 9, , PM.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California, Irvine; editor of the Journal of Asian Studies; and author, most recently, of the forthcoming book China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know.

Later, I tried to explain away the gaps, rather than make space for new stories to fill them. Yaya had been too young to remember the Battle of Shanghai and the ensuing Japanese occupation, I told myself.

Too fragile to remember the percent inflation rate of the price of rice. The starvation. The factories continued running under Japanese occupation, making little money but providing jobs to over 4, people.

After the war, business boomed and Yaya and his family moved into a big house with a garden, only to lose it along with their wealth after the Communists took over in Yaya and his extended family packed into a one-room rental with three tiny beds.

His breathlessness, his rapid-fire sentences crashing into one another, as if emerging dazed after a long period of confinement.

His insistence on speaking, even with his weak throat. His story about his grandmother giving him his scar may have left me questioning my own memory, but I will remember that he was the one to tell it. However messy his tellings, Yaya is the one taking charge. Perhaps in a world that tells us how to feel about our past, a way forward is to ask a different kind of question—not how a scar came to be, but how it hurt.

How it continues to. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest. Immediately following the fall of the city, Japanese troops embarked on a frenzied search for former soldiers, in which thousands of young men, civilian or otherwise, were captured.

Many were taken to the Yangtze River , where they were machine-gunned so their bodies would be carried down to Shanghai. Thousands were led away and mass-executed. Others were reportedly used for live bayonet practice.

Decapitation was a popular method of killing, while more drastic practices include burning, nailing to trees, or hanging by their tongues. Some people were beaten to death. The Japanese also summarily executed many pedestrians on the streets, mainly on pretext that they might be disguised soldiers in civilian clothing. Women and children were not spared of the horrors of the massacres. Many women were first brutally raped then killed.

The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases or rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted cases are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital. Robert Wilson, letter to his family, Dec. They not only killed every prisoner they could find but also a vast number of ordinary citizens of all ages Just day before yesterday we saw a poor wretch killed very near the house where we are living.

John Magee, letter to his wife, Dec. They [Japanese soldiers] bayoneted one little boy, killing him, and I spent an hour and a half this morning patching up another little boy of eight who had five bayonet wounds including one that penetrated his stomach, a portion of omentum was outside the abdomen. Rapes were often performed in public during the day, and often in front of spouses or family members. A large number of them were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door to door for young girls, with many women taken captive and then gang-raped , and then killed immediately after rape, often by mutilation.

Any resistance would be met with instant shootings. While the rape peaked immediately following the fall of the city, it continued for the duration of the Japanese occupation. Thirty girls were taken from language school last night, and today I have heard scores of heartbreaking stories of girls who were taken from their homes last night--one of the girls was but 12 years old Tonight a truck passed in which there were eight or ten girls, and as it passed they called out " Ging ming!

Ging ming! Minnie Vautrin's diary, Dec. It is a horrible story to relate; I know not where to begin nor to end. Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape: Rape: Rape: We estimate at least 1, cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. James McCallum, letter to his family, Dec. This section needs citation of testimonies from Foreigners residing in Nanking. It is estimated that over one-third and as much as two-thirds of the city was destroyed as a result of arson.

Whether this was caused by Japanese or by Nationalists leaving the city is still disputed. Still, there was considerable destruction to areas outside the city walls. Soldiers pillaged not only from the wealthy but the poor as well.

Japanese soldiers were given a free hand immediately following the fall of the city. This resulted in the widespread looting and burglary. To aid the Japanese war effort, soldiers collected every bit of metal including hinges on doors following the United States embargo on scrap metal.

This section is a stub. You can help by adding to it. Please add info of the tribunals. The section is not meant as an endorsement or rejection of these allegations.

Please find citations preferably with archival source citations then transfer them to the appropriate section. This section also contain many interpretation of the event by modern commentators.