102 Former Soldiers in Nanjing, 1937

I went on a used book buying spree last week, finally blocking off some time to roam the stores near Waseda’s campus one afternoon. One book I snapped up was a cheap copy of the normally $60 oral history book 『南京戦：閉ざされた記憶を尋ねて』edited by 松岡環 (Matsuoka Tamaki). The book is part of a series of new Japanese books coming out which is methodically publishing vast amounts of primary materials on the Nanjing Massacre. Don’t read this posting if you are squeamish. I believe the books are associated with a group of historians who are disgusted by the revisionist nationalist scholars who once completely denied that anything horrible happened at the fall of Nanjing and now still claim that there was nothing out of the ordinary by the standard of modern warfare. While mainstream Japanese historians, along with the rest of the world, recognize that the fall of Nanjing was followed by an unusually horrible amount of slaughter and rape, I think most of them are tired of playing games with the revisionists and thereby sustaining the idea that there is some controversy worth debating. Rather than engaging them in futile debates, this particular group of historians seems focused on getting as much raw data as possible into print. The two newest books that I have seen are a collection of statements by Chinese witnesses of the massacre (which of course, the revisionists dismiss as liars or government stooges) and the volume I purchased collecting the statements of the soldiers themselves.

I have only skimmed through the book and read completely through only a few of the statements (the contents is powerful enough to make a person physically ill after a few pages) but I think that the testimony included in the book (assuming you ignore all of the Chinese witnesses and their version of the horror) is definitely conclusive on two aspects of the savagery beginning in December of 1937 1) Organized Slaughter of Chinese Men and Soldiers and 2) Completely Unrestrained Sexual Violence. What you don’t see in the book is the more simplified and generic image of the massacre in which there was just an uncontrolled slaughter of men, women and children by crazed soldiers. The book does mention the killing of women and children on occasion, but the vast majority of soldier’s testimony is on the organized slaughter of men, and the hunting of women for rape. These two themes are summed up by one of the soldiers, “Killing men, raping women – this is what you learn in the army.” 「男を殺し、女を徴発するのは兵隊の習いや」(269)

1) Organized Slaughter of Chinese Men, Soldiers

A huge amount of often interlinking and overlapping testimony by the soldiers in the over 200 pages of two sections of the book, that thousands of Chinese prisoners of war, indeed ANY suspicious Chinese man found to be roaming the streets of Nanjing or in the refugee areas, was bayonetted on the spot, shot from a distance, or gathered together and mowed down with machine guns. While the wording of their orders differed from unit to unit, these soldiers were directly commanded to slaughter any man which might possibly be a Chinese soldier out of uniform, and ordered to slaughter groups of surrendered prisoners of war en masse. The two arguments repeatedly brought up was that there was no food to feed the prisoners and that the huge number of normal citizens who were slaughtered in this way could not be told apart from the many uninformed soldiers. I was amazed at how mattter-of-factly the soldiers write about those days, their dialects and idioms faithfully recorded, though many of them end their short statements with an apology or at least an excuse for their behavior of the time. One soldier writes about going into the Safety Zone hunting for Chinese soldiers hiding among the refugees, “So we picked out the suspicious looking characters. The men, without resisting, obediently came forward. Each squad took the men out of the camp and bayonetted them. Whether one was killed or not was a matter of fate.” 「怪しそうなものを選びましたね。男たちは抵抗もせず素直に前に出てきました。それぞれの分隊は、男たちを収容所から外へ引き出してみんな突き殺しました。殺されるかどうかは運ですな。」(61) Efficiency was important, “Whenever you found stray defeated soldiers, one did everything possible to bayonet them on the spot,” rather than gathering groups together for later gunning down (wasteful of bullets and time). He brags that his unit was so successful at this that they didn’t have to capture a single man. The same soldier mentions witnessing many Japanese units lined up along the Yangzi river firing their machine guns on boats full of fleeing refugees. Some had unarmed males in them that might have once been soldiers. “Without anyone issuing any kind of order, all you heard was, ‘Hey! There, there, over there, shoot that one!'” だれも号令かけるものもなく、ただ単に「おい、あれあれ、あれ撃て」(60) This encounter seemed to disturb him the most, he ends that section of his statement with, “December 13th was a day of the Japanese military’s one-way attack.” (一方的な攻撃）

2) Unrestrained Sexual Violence

The third of three sections of statements focuses entirely on sexual violence, though many of the statements I saw in the other sections also made reference to the practice of hunting women for rape. It looks like this was almost always referred to as “requisition” 徴発, 「徴発に行く言うたち、女の子を捕まえることが多かったですわ。」(63). Again, I only skimmed through some of the statements, but what stuck out was that many of the soldiers emphasize the continuity between what happened in Nanjing and what they had become accustomed to throughout the war in China. One soldier says, “Everyone looked forward to entering larger towns, because then we could engage in ‘requisition’. Because there was sugar, food, and women, requisition was what soldiers looked forward to.” 「我々、大きな町に入ると、徴発できるから皆楽しみにしていました。砂糖もあり、食料もあり、女もいるから徴発するのが兵隊の楽しみやった。」 and “The primary goal of cleanup maneuvers in occupied towns was to find women. The requisition of women was the most fun. For example, in Nanjing too, whenever I was bored, I would go catch women and rape them.” 「町に入って掃蕩の一番の目的は女の人を探すことで、女を徴発するのが一番楽しかった。例えば、南京でも暇があったら女を捕まえて強姦してたな。」(271)

Apparently, the door to door searches which followed occupation were often in search of women, “they were usually behind the curtain or under the bed” (272). The soldier recounts of a desperate attempt by a mother to save her daughter by offering herself instead. His reply was, 「アホカー」”What, are you stupid?” I was amazed at how reflective this same soldier could be in the very next few lines, “Of course, we thought it was wrong at the time and we thought about how we would feel if someone did this to our children or if this was done to our women in Japan.” 「もちろんやる時悪いと思っていたし、逆に日本がやられ自分たちの子ども、あるいは女性がやられたらどうなるかを考えたこともある。」(272) This doesn’t stop him from concluding, “Even so, because we never knew when we might die, whatever the Emperor’s orders and such might have been, we were going to do what we pleased while we were still alive.” 「それでも、自分もいつ死ぬか分からない状況なので、生きている間に、天皇の命令とかは関係なくて自分がやりたいことをした。」

I could go on an on, but I already feel that sick churning in my stomach from writing this. Suffice to say that for the next 100 pages or so, the most frequent phrase I see leaping from the pages I skimmed in this section was, やり放題 or “run riot / do it to your heart’s content / do it as much as you please” I strongly believe we need to experience that feeling of disgust I get as I write this, we need to be reminded that this kind of thing happens. The revisionists can call the raped women liars, but who is going to believe that a 102 imperial soldiers are all making this up?