Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles) by Buruma Ian

Author:Buruma, Ian [Buruma, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2003-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

The Nanking massacre of December 1937 was undoubtedly one of the worst atrocities of the Japanese war. However, comparing it to the Nazi Holocaust, as some do, is not very helpful in understanding the particular nature of this war crime. It was an orgy of violence more than a planned extermination campaign. Behaving like medieval conquerors, drunken Japanese soldiers roamed the streets with cartloads of loot. Thousands of women of all ages were gang-raped before being killed or mutilated. Entire neighborhoods were put to the torch. Chinese men and boys, tethered like cattle, were machine-gunned into ditches or the Yangtze River, whose banks were clogged with bloated corpses. Civilians were often murdered for the sheer fun of it, used for bayonet practice and other grisly games. And this went on for six weeks. Embarrassed Japanese diplomats sent foreign eyewitness reports to Tokyo, hoping that something would be done to stop it. Nothing was. Right next to the embassy was a girls’ school. The diplomats would have been able to hear the screams of students being raped and tortured.

We shall never know exactly how many Chinese died in the massacre. Estimates—often depending on political points of view—range from thousands, to tens of thousands, to more than 300,000. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal put the figure at 250,000. But the exact number should not be the main issue. What needs to be explained is the peculiar ferocity of this assault on a defenseless population. If the point was not to exterminate every last Chinese, what then was the reason for this extraordinary frenzy of rape, murder, and pillage? What caused the complete breakdown of discipline in an army that in earlier wars had been known for its orderly behavior? Many answers have been put forward: the pathology of Japanese culture, the Way of the Samurai, and all that; a deliberately planned act of terror, ordered from Tokyo, to force Chiang Kai-shek’s government into submission; a massive letting off of steam by brutalized, battle-weary troops.

That the massacre was ordered by the government in Tokyo seems unlikely. The emperor and his advisers were still conscious of international opinion. Japan desperately needed a constant supply of raw materials and industrial exports from Britain and the United States. Washington’s policy was to remain neutral, yet public sympathy was on the side of China. This was why Japan had not declared war on China; policing an “incident” seemed less likely to give offense. And America, under its so-called neutrality laws, would have been forced to cease trading with both sides in the event of a declaration of war, cutting off war-related imports neither Japan nor China felt they could easily afford to lose. Upsetting the American public with atrocity stories was, in any case, not in Japan’s best interests. And the Japanese generals quickly realized that mass rapes hardened Chinese resistance. To counter that trend, the Japanese War Ministry decided to recruit or, more usually, kidnap Koreans, Chinese, Southeast Asians, and even some Europeans to serve in a vast network of army brothels, or “comfort stations.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.