The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (76 page)

SUB-LIEUTENANTS IN RACE TO FELL 100 CHINESE RUNNING CLOSE CONTEST

Sub-Lieutenant Mukai Toshiaki and Sub-Lieutenant Noda Takeshi, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyang, in a friendly contest to see which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat, are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck [
sic
].

The score was given as Mukai 89, Noda 78. A week later the paper reported that, as the two men could not agree who had reached the one hundred mark first, they had upped their target to 150. By this time, all battalions had been issued with orders to divide their prisonersinto batches of a dozen and shoot them.

As news of the approaching Japanese army reached the city of Nanking, the Chinese authorities decided to shut all but one of the gates in the wall that encircled the city. Vainly attempting to keep the invaders out, they ended up locking the inhabitants in. The Japanese 10th Army arrived on December 8. The 30,000 battle-weary but still bloodthirsty troops immediately surrounded the city. Chiang Kai-shek had fled weeks earlier, leaving behind him only a poorly equipped force to defend the 500,000 or so people who had not followed his example. They held out for just five days. On December 13 the Japanese breached the city wall at three separate points and marched through. Inside, they found a ready-made slaughterhouse. Tens of thousands of young men were murdered in the weeks that followed, regardless of whether they were in uniform or not. Some were simply lined up in rows and machine-gunned. Otherswere beheaded, bayoneted or buried alive. One group was sprayed with gunfire and then soaked with gasoline and set on fire. A few were hung by their tongues on metal hooks. A horrified journalist working for the
Tokyo Nichi
Nichi Shimbun
watched Japanese soldiers line up prisoners on top of the wall near the Chungshan Gate and bayonet them:

One by one the prisoners fell down to the outside of the wall. Blood spattered everywhere. The chilling atmosphere made one’s hair stand on end and limbs tremble with fear. I stood there at a total loss and did not know what to do.

Asked by another journalist to justify what was happening, Lieutenant-Colonel Tanaka Ryukichi replied simply:

Frankly speaking, you and I have diametrically different views of the Chinese. You may be dealing with them as human beings, but I regard them as swine. We can do anything to such creatures.

General Matsui entered Nanking on December 17, four days after his troops had begun their rampage. Though he subsequently claimed to be dismayed by what he witnessed, he did (or could do) little to stop it. The murderous orgy continued for a further five and a half weeks. It reached its peak in the week from January 28 to February 3, 1938, after civilians had been ordered to return to their homes from the refugee camps outside the city whence they had fled. For days, thousands of unburied bodies littered the streets. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East later estimated that more than 260,000 non-combatants had died at the hands of Japanese soldiers at Nanking – more than four times the number of British civilians killed during the entire war.

The Japanese did not content themselves with murder, however. There was also a systematic campaign of arson and other destruction. John Rabe, the German Chairman of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, described the state of the city on January 17:

Taiping Lu, the pride of Nanking, which was the main business street before and whose lights at night were equal to those on Nanking Road in Shanghai, is totally ruined, everything burned down. There is not one building left intact, just fields of rubble, left and right. Fu Tze-Miao, the former amusement district, with its teahouses and big market, is likewise totally destroyed. As far as the eye can see – nothing but rubble!

But the most striking feature of the attack on Nanking were the rapes. Although the International Committee’s meticulous investigation did
not specify how many of the ‘injured females’ it recorded had been raped, modern estimates put the total at some where between 8,000 and 20,000. The American missionary James Mc Callum estimated that there had been ‘at least 1,000 cases a night’. The diaries of Dr Robert Wilson, a surgeon born and raised in Nanking but educated at Princeton and Harvard Medical School, provide a contemporaneous account of what happened. It was, he wrote on December 18,

the modern Dante’s Inferno, written in huge letters with blood and rape. Murder by the wholesale and rape by the thousands of cases. There seems to be no stop to the ferocity, lust and atavism of the brutes… Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls about 16 were raped to death in one of the refugee camps. In the University Middle School where there are 8,000 people the Japs came in ten times last night, over the wall, stole food, clothing, and raped until they were satisfied.

On December 17 a gang of Japanese soldiers broke into the grounds of Ginling College, where missionaries had offered shelter to ten thousand women and children. They abducted eleven young women. The nine who returned had all been ‘horribly raped and abused’. One young woman, Li Xouying, ended up with no fewer than thirty-seven bayonet wounds when she attempted to resist three Japanese soldiers who found her hiding in the basement of an elementary school. Seven months pregnant at the time, she lost her baby but was saved by doctors at the Nanking Hospital. Many other victims were not so fortunate; post-war depositions indicate that a high proportion of those raped were also killed. Chang Kia Sze saw her own sister-in-law raped and murdered in full view of her husband and two young children, who were also killed. Other victims were mutilated by having sticks, bayonets or other objects stuck into their vaginas. Some survivors later proved to have been infected with venereal disease.

Harrowing testimony like Chang Kia Sze’s was subsequently borne out in interviews with surviving Japanese soldiers. One of them, Tadokoro Kozo, confessed to his own involvement:

Women suffered most. No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks… to the city streets and
villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual inter course and abuse.

Azuma Shiro, another former Japanese soldier, described the part he played:

At first we used some kinky words like ‘Pikankan’… ‘Pikankan’ means, ‘Let’s see a woman open up her legs.’ Chinese women didn’t wear underpants. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. There was no belt. As we pulled the string, the buttocks were exposed. We ‘pikankan’. We looked. After a while we would say something like, ‘It’s my day to take a path,’ and we took turnsraping them. It would [have been] all right if we [had] only raped them. I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed them and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk.

How is what became known as the Rape of Nanking to be understood? As a breakdown of military discipline, fuelled by alcohol and battle-fatigue? As a deliberate imperial policy? As the hideous off-spring of what one writer called a ‘militarist monster, forged in late Meiji from a mixture of late Edo [pre-Meiji] nativism and borrowed German racial theories’?

Three impulses were consciously unleashed by those in command. The first was the contempt felt for those who surrendered. Japanese troops were trained to regard surrender as dishonourable. It was preferable to commit suicide rather than capitulate. Trainees were also encouraged to believe the corollary: that an enemy who did surrender was essentially worthless. This contempt went hand in hand with a culture of extreme physical brutality. If a Japanese colonel felt displeased with one of his majors, it was not unusual for him to strike the offending officer a blow across the face. The major chastised in this way would then lose no time in striking the first junior officer to incur his displeasure, and so it would continue on down the chain. Right at the bottom came enemy captives, so that any aggrieved Japanese NCO or private had one obvious and defenceless target on which to vent his frustrations.

The second impulse was not peculiar to the Japanese army. As the Turks had treated the Armenians, as Stalin’shenchmen were treating the kulaks, Poles and other ‘enemies of the people’, as the Nazis were
soon to start treating Jews, Gypsies and the mentally ill, so the Japanese now thought of and treated the Chinese: as sub-humans. This capacity to treat other human beings as members of an inferior and indeed malignant species – as mere vermin – was one of the crucial reasons why twentieth-century conflict was so violent. Only make this mental leap, and warfare ceases to be a formalized encounter between uniformed armies. It becomes a war of annihilation, in which everyone on the other side – men, women, children, the elderly – can legitimately be killed.

The third impulse, to rape, is the hardest to interpret. Is it possible for men simultaneously to despise people as vermin and yet to feel lust towards them? Were Japanese troops giving in to a primitive urge to impregnate the womenfolk of their enemy? Or was rape just bayoneting by other means? Perhaps the best answer is that all of these impulses were at work, reinforced by some element of peer-group pressure, since many of the as saults reported were gang rapes. As Hino As hihei put it in his book
War and Soldiers
, ‘We would be friendly with Chinese individuals and indeed came to love them. But how could we help despising them as a nation?… To us soldiers, they were pitiful, spineless people.’ After the war, General Matsui told the International Military Tribunal, which would sentence him to hang for his role at Nanking:

The struggle between Japan and China was always a fight between brothers with in the ‘Asian family’… It has been my belief during all these years that we must regard this struggle as a method of making the Chinese undergo self-reflection. We do not do this because we hate them, but on the contrary because we love them too much.

This seemed then and still seems preposterous. Yet it captures the vile ambivalence that lay behind the phenomenon of mass rape.

The Rape of Nanking has become the most notorious of Japanese atrocities in China. It was, however, not an isolated incident. Other towns experienced similar treatment, not just in China but elsewhere in Asia too. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that such atrocities condemned the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to ultimate failure. On the contrary; what the Japanese were demonstrating was that brutality was by no means in compatible with the creation of a new world order based on racial subjugation – and fear.

Japanese atrocities may have played some part in the refusal of Chiang’s government to contemplate a negotiated peace after 1937, despite German efforts to broker a truce. Of more importance was probably the manifest inability of the Japanese to inflict a decisive defeat on Guomindang forces, despite the poor leadership, low morale and appalling under-equipment that afflicted the latter.
*
Although the Japanese armies continued to advance steadily westwards in the course of 1938, capturing Canton, Wuhan and Xuzhou, they suffered increasingly heavy casualties as their lines of communication became over-extended. At Taierhchuang in March 1938, for example, the 10th Division found itself all but surrounded and ended up losing 16,000 men in days of intense house-to-house fighting. Eighteen months later the 11th Army was heavily defeated at Changsha (Hunan). The invasion of Guangxi at the end of 1939 was short-lived; by the end of the following year the Japanese had been forced to abandon Chinhsien, Nanning and Pinyang. By 1940 they had more or less reached their limits in China and the location of the front line did not significantly change again until 1944. The effect of all this was to strengthen the hand of the more extreme elements with in the Japanese military, the so-called ‘Control Faction’, who advocated ignoring the existing Chinese authorities and dealing with puppet regimes, as they had done in Manchuria.

Here, it might be thought, the Japanese had miscalculated. Who in China would want to lend his support to invaders capable of such terrible atrocities? Asin other theatres of war, however, the key to securing collaboration turned out to have little, if anything, to do with the cruelty or kindness of the invading forces. The decisive factor was the extent to which the invaded people were divided among themselves. The Japanese invasion did not elicit national unity, as some Chinese Nationalists had hoped it might. It boosted support for
the Communist Party, which under Mao Zedong’s leadership now committed itself to a campaign of protracted guerrilla warfare. At the same time, Japanese incursions tended to widen divisions within the Guomindang. The more recruits the Communists were able to find among impoverished and disillusioned peasants, the more tempted some Nationalists were to compromise with the Japanese. The further Chiang retreated to the west – and he did not stop until he reached Chongqing in the province of Sichuan, 800 miles from his starting point, Nanking – the greater the incentive for those left behind to make their peace with the Japanese.

Already by 1937 the Japanese had established three puppet regimes in Chinese territory: the ‘Empire of Manchukuo’, the supposedly autonomous Mongolian regime of Prine Te and the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Council. By the middle of the following year, two more had been added: the Provisional Government of the Republic of China set up in Peiping by the North China Area Army, and the Reorganized Government of the Republic of China established in Nanking by the Central China Area Army. In March 1940 the Japanese pulled off a major diplomatic coup when they succeeded in persuading the former Nationalist leader Wang Jingwei to become the figurehead in charge of the latter. After renewed attempts to negotiate some kind of peace with Chiang had foundered, Wang’s regime was officially recognized as the legitimate government of China. Wang himself had been duped; he had been led to expect concessions like a definite date for Japanese troop with drawals and a unification of the variouspuppet regimes under his authority. He ended up having to recognize the independence of Manchukuo, to allow the indefinite stationing of Japanese troops in China and to accept joint control of the maritime customs and other tax agencies. This meant that by 1940 the Japanese and their puppets controlled virtually the entire Chinese coast and a large proportion of the country’s eastern provinces. These were by far China’s most prosperous regions. Wang alone was nominally in charge of half a million square miles of territory and around 200 million people. Many Chinese agreed with the economist T’ao His-sheng, a leading collaborator in Wang’s regime: ‘China is a weak nation. In adopting a policy of being “friendly to distant countries and hostile to neighbours” [she] will inevitably bring about a situation
which is summed up in the proverb: “Water from afar cannot extinguish a fire nearby.”’ Collaborationist slogans such as
Tong Sheng Ghong Si
(‘Live or Die Together’) were not wholly empty of meaning.