Why did Japan create the Nanjing Massacre?

Text | Zhang Chunru

The Nanjing Massacre was just one of countless barbaric atrocities committed by the Japanese army in the long 9-year war. Long before the Nanjing Massacre, Japan was notorious as the first country in Asia to violate the taboos of war, using the Air Force not only as a weapon on the battlefield, but also as a means of intimidating civilians. Then, the Japanese launched a killing campaign that began in Shanghai, passed through Nanjing, and advanced to Chinese mainland.

Although there is no "final settlement" of the Chinese in Japanese, the Imperial Japanese Government approved a policy of complete elimination of all in some parts of China. One of the most brutal policies was the "Three Lights Policy" (snatching the light, killing the light, and burning the light) in northern China, where the guerrillas of the Chinese Communist Party engaged in fierce battles against the Japanese army and effectively fought against the Japanese invaders. A frustrated Japanese colonel revealed in his diary how simple and straightforward this brutal policy was: "I was ordered by my superiors to kill everyone here. ”

As a result of this policy, in 1941 the Japanese launched a massive terrorist campaign aimed at wiping out all the people in rural northern China, which led to a sharp reduction in the population of the region from 44 million to 25 million. At least one scholar on China, JulesArcher, believes that most of the 19 million people who disappeared from the area were killed by the Japanese, although others speculate that millions escaped to safety. Author of China's Bloody Century, R. J. Rammel (R. J. Rummel notes that even if only 5 percent of the area's disappeared population was slaughtered by the Japanese, that number was close to 1 million.

The Japanese also launched a brutal biological experiment against China. Some biological warfare was retaliatory, and the Japanese retaliated directly against villages suspected of assisting American pilots in airstrikes on Tokyo in April 1942. In areas that could be used as bomber landing areas, the Japanese slaughtered 250,000 Chinese civilians and destroyed all Chinese airfields within a 20,000-mile radius. During the war, all cities and regions in north China, like other regions, were targeted by biological weapons. We now know that Japanese pilots spread fleas with plague germs to big cities such as Shanghai, Ningbo and Chengde, and put flasks containing disease-causing bacteria (cholera, dysentery, typhoid fever, plague, anthrax, paratyphoid fever) into rivers, wells, reservoirs and houses.

The Japanese also mixed deadly bacteria into their food, infecting Chinese civilians and the military. Cakes mixed with typhoid germs were thrown around campsites to tempt hungry farmers to eat; food with typhoid and paratyphoid bacteria was distributed to them before thousands of Chinese prisoners of war were released.

The final death toll is incredible, ranging from 1.578 million to 6.325 million. Lamel came up with a judicious estimate: 3.949 million people died, of which only 400,000 were not civilians. He also noted that, to a large extent, famine and disease caused by Japanese robberies, bombings and medical experiments also led to the deaths of millions more. If these deaths are also recorded in the final statistics, it can be said that Japan killed more than 19 million Chinese in its war against China.

Most people can't understand exactly what the Japanese military had in mind when it came to committing violence. Many historians, witnesses, survivors and even the abusers themselves have summed up the motives behind the naked brutality of the Japanese army.

Many Japanese scholars believe that the horrific atrocity of the Nanjing Massacre and other atrocities committed by the Japanese army during the Sino-Japanese War were caused by a phenomenon called "oppression and transfer." Yuki Tanaka, author of "Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II," believes that the modern Japanese military has hidden great threats of violence since its birth, for two reasons: first, the arbitrary and cruel abuse of its officers and soldiers by the Japanese army; and second, the hierarchical nature of Japanese society. The social status in this hierarchy was determined by the estrangement from the emperor. Before the invasion of Nanking, the Japanese army had already humiliated its soldiers endlessly. Japanese soldiers were forced to wash their officers' underwear or to stand obediently and let their superiors slap them until they were beaten to blood. In Orwellian parlance, the daily beatings and scoldings of Japanese soldiers are called officers' "acts of love," and the Japanese Navy's practice of purging military discipline through an "iron fist" is called "whipping of love."

It has been pointed out that in the hierarchy, those with the least power were often extremely sadistic once they had the power to kill and kill at the lower classes, and when the Japanese soldiers arrived overseas, the anger they had accumulated in the harsh hierarchy suddenly found an outlet. In foreign countries or colonies, the Japanese army, as the representative of the emperor, enjoyed great power over the people of the region. In China, even the lowest-ranking Japanese soldiers were of higher status than the most powerful and prestigious Chinese in the country, and it is not difficult to see that the anger, hatred, and fear of authority that had been suppressed for many years finally erupted into uncontrollable tyranny in Nanjing. For a long time, Japanese soldiers had silently endured all the ill-treatment inflicted on them by their superiors, and now Chinese must accept any punishment given to them by Japanese soldiers.

Scholars believe that the second factor that led to the atrocities of the Japanese army was the hatred of China by many in the Japanese military — a contempt that was fostered through decades of propaganda, education, and social indoctrination. Although the Japanese and Chinese have similar (if not identical) ethnic characteristics (which is perhaps why the Japanese distort it as a threat to their own uniqueness), many in the Japanese military see Chinese as a sub-human species, killing them as if they were pinching a bug or killing a pig without any moral pressure. In fact, both before and during the war, Japanese soldiers at all levels often compared Chinese with pigs. For example, a Japanese general once told reporters: "Frankly, your view of Chinese is completely different from mine. You see Chinese as people, and I see them as pigs. "During the Nanjing Massacre, a Japanese officer who tied the Chinese captives in groups of 10 and then pushed them into a pit and burned them to death, exonerated himself by explaining that he felt the same way when he killed the Chinese as he did when he killed pigs. In 1938, the Japanese soldier Shiro confessed in a diary written in Nanjing: "Now a pig is more valuable than the life of a Chinese." Because pork can also be eaten. ”

The third factor is religion. The Japanese army gave violence a certain sacred meaning, viewing it as an essential cultural element, and the power it produced was as strong as the religious forces that drove Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition. In 1933, a Japanese general declared in a speech: "Every bullet must be infused with the glory of the Empire, and the tip of every bayonet must be branded with a national spirit." ”

Few Japanese soldiers doubted the legitimacy of their mission in China. Nagatomi Kakuto, a Veteran of Japan who participated in the Nanjing Massacre, said that his upbringing had led him to believe that the Emperor was the rightful ruler of the world, that the Japanese were the finest race in the world, and that it was Japan's destiny to control Asia. A local Christian priest asked Yongfu, "Which is greater, God or the Emperor of Japan?" He had no doubt that the correct answer was "emperor."

With an emperor higher than God on its side, the Japanese army was determined to take the next step—believing that the war (and even the violence that accompanied it) would ultimately benefit not only the Japanese people, but also the victims of the war. Many Japanese believe that violence is a necessary tool for victory, that Japan's victory will benefit all and help Japan create a better China within the framework of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Teachers and officers in Japan who beat students and soldiers mercilessly held the same view, insisting that it was all for their own good when they punched and kicked the victims.

In defending The Japanese invasion of China, General Matsui Ishigen perhaps summed up the Japanese general psychology of self-deception. In 1937, before leaving for Shanghai, he told his supporters: "I went to the front not to fight the enemy, but to go to China with the feeling of comforting my brothers." 16 Later, he often commented on Japan's aggression against China:

The struggle between Japan and China has always been a fraternal struggle within the "Asian family"... I have always had the idea during the war that we must see the war as a means of inducing self-reflection Chinese. We do this not because we hate them, but rather, we love them dearly. It is like being in a family where when an elder brother can't stand his brother's misdeeds, he has to be severely punished in order to convert him to evil.

No matter how events unfold after the war, the Nanjing Massacre will always be a stain on human honor. However, this stain is so repulsive because history has never written a proper ending to the Nanjing Massacre, and even in 1997, Japan as a nation still tried to bury its victims again—not in the ground, as it did in 1937, but in forgotten corners of history. In addition, the Nanjing Massacre is still little known in the Western world, because very few people systematically collect relevant documents and tell the public about this historical event, which is also a shameful offense to the victims.

The book begins with an attempt to save the victims of the Nanjing Massacre from the re-humiliation of the Japanese revisionists and to offer my sacrifice to hundreds of thousands of nanjing's nameless graves. At the end of the book, I'll do some personal exploration of the dark side of human nature. The Nanjing Massacre has left many important lessons to the world, the first of which is that human civilization itself is very fragile, like a thin piece of paper. Some argue that the Japanese nation is a dangerous race with a unique evil nature that will never change. But by reading a large number of archival documents on Japan's war crimes, as well as the accounts of ancient atrocities in world history, I am compelled to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was not so much the product of a dangerous nation as it was of a dangerous government, which, in a fragile cultural atmosphere and a dangerous era, was able to peddle seemingly rational ideas of danger to its citizens, which were originally contrary to human nature. The Nanjing Massacre should be seen as a cautionary tale – it tells us that humanity is highly susceptible to incitement, allowing teenagers to suppress their good nature and to be molded into efficient killing machines.

The second lesson that should be learned from the Nanjing Massacre is the role of power in genocide. Those who have studied historical patterns of mass murder have noted the mortal danger of high levels of government centralization —only unchecked absolute power would have made atrocities like the Nanjing Massacre possible. In the 1990s, Lamell, the world's titan who studied mass murder (a concept proposed by Lamar, including genocide and government-perpetrated mass killings), completed a systematic quantitative study of atrocities in the 20th century as well as ancient times, and summarized this impressive research by quoting a quote from the famous Lord Acton: "Power leads to killing, and absolute power leads to absolute killing." Lamer found that the less constrained the government's power, the more likely it is that the government will act on the whims of its leaders or the impulses of the dark side of psychology to wage foreign wars. Japan is no exception, and atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre are predictable, if not inevitable. An authoritarian regime controlled by the military and the royal elite uses unfettered power to mobilise entire peoples to achieve the pathological goals of minority elites.

The third lesson to be learned is perhaps the most distressing, namely, that the human psyche can accept genocide so easily and make all of us passive spectators, indifferent in the face of the most incredible atrocities. The Nanjing Massacre was front-page news in the world media at the time, but when the entire city of Nanjing fell into wanton slaughter, most of the world's people stood by and did nothing. The international community's response to the Nanjing Massacre was exactly the same as the world's reaction to the atrocities in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Rwanda: when thousands of people died in an incredibly cruel way, the world's reaction was nothing more than watching the news reports and rubbing their hands. One can argue that the Failure of the United States and other countries to prevent the Nazi "final settlement" of the Jews during World War II was due to the fact that the genocide was carried out in secret during the war, and the Nazi massacres were ruthless and efficient, until the Allied soldiers liberated the concentration camps and saw the horrors there, most people believed that the reports they had received were indeed true. But in the case of the Nanjing Massacre or the massacres in Yugoslavia, such pretexts do not hold. The Nanjing atrocities have long been prominently featured in newspapers such as The New York Times, while the Bosnian atrocities are broadcast on television in every household's living room almost every day. Clearly, there are many grotesque aspects of human nature that can turn the worst evil deeds into trivial things in a matter of minutes, provided that such evils are far away and do not pose a direct threat to us personally.

Sadly, the world continues to face Japan's second rape with a passive bystander mentality — refusing to apologize, even refusing to acknowledge the atrocities committed in Nanking, and even more so, Japanese extremists are trying to erase the event from world history. To better understand the extent of this injustice, one need only compare the compensation provided by the Japanese and German governments to victims after the war. There is no doubt that money alone does not return the lives of the victims, nor can it erase the trauma in the memory of survivors, but monetary compensation can at least express the attitude that everything suffered by the victims is due to the evil of the abuser.

By 1997, the German government had paid at least 88 billion Deutsche Marks in compensation and war reparations, and another 20 billion Deutsche Marks by 2005. If you take into account all the reparations paid by the German government, including compensation for individual victims, compensation for property damages, compensatory compensation, state statutory compensation, final compensation in individual cases, and compensation under war reparations agreements with Israel and 16 other countries, the total is nearly 124 billion Deutsche Marks, or about $60 billion. Japan, for its part, has paid little compensation for its war crimes. In this day and age, even Switzerland has pledged to invest billions of dollars to set up a fund to return funds that have been stolen from Jewish accounts. Many Of Japan's leaders continue to believe (or pretend to believe) that their country has done nothing that requires compensation to others, or even apologize for Japan's past actions. They claim that many of the most serious atrocities that have been accused of being committed by the Government of Japan have never occurred, and that the evidence that these atrocities did occur is merely fabricated by Chinese and those who want to strike Japan.

The Japanese government believes that all war reparations have been resolved in the 1952 San Francisco Peace Treaty with Japan. However, a careful reading of the treaty reveals that the issue of reparations was postponed until Japan's fiscal situation improved. Article 14 of Chapter V of the Treaty provides: "It is hereby determined that Japan shall compensate its allies for the damage and suffering it has caused in the war, but at the same time acknowledges that, in order to maintain a viable economy, Japan's current resources are insufficient to compensate in full for such damage and suffering, and at the same time to fulfil other obligations." ”

One of the most ironic events of the Cold War was that Japan not only evaded war liability, but also received billions of dollars in aid from the United States. The United States helped former enemies grow into economic powers and rivals. Today, many countries in Asia are very concerned about the prospects for the revival of Japanese militarism. During the Reagan administration, the United States pushed Japan to strengthen its military — much to the dismay of many countries that had suffered from Japan's years of aggression during the war. "People who ignore history tend to be victims of history." Philippine Foreign Minister and Pulitzer Prize winner Carlos Romulo, who served as General MacArthur's aide-de-camp during World War II, warned. He also knows the competitive national spirit inspired by Japanese culture: "Japan is a very determined nation, and they are also very brainy. At the end of World War II, no one expected Japan to become one of the world's most important economic powers, but it is now. If Japan is given the opportunity to become a military power, it will certainly be able to become a military power. ”

The Cold War is over and China is rising rapidly. Other countries that suffered Japanese aggression during the war are now emerging in the international economic arena and have the potential to challenge Japan. In the coming years, radicalism denouncing Japan's war crimes is likely to grow rapidly. Demographically, Asians are increasingly influential in the North American public domain. The younger generation of Chinese-Americans and Chinese-Canadians, unlike their parents, who work primarily in science, are rapidly gaining increasing influence in the legal, political and journalistic fields. In the past, Asians in North America rarely set foot in these fields.

From the time I began my research on the book to the time I finished writing it, the public's understanding of the Nanjing Massacre made significant progress. In the 1990s, there was a proliferation of novels, history books, and newspaper articles about the Nanjing Massacre, comfort women, japanese use of prisoners of war for live experiments, and other atrocities committed by Japan during World War II. By 1997, the San Francisco School District had planned to include the history of the Nanjing Massacre in its curriculum, and Chinese real estate developers had designed blueprints for the Nanjing Massacre Memorial.

As the book was about to be completed, the U.S. government began responding to the demands of activists to pressure Japan to confront its own misdeeds during the war. On December 3, 1996, the U.S. Department of Justice listed a watchlist of Japanese war criminals barring them from entering the United States. In April 1997, Walter Mundell, the former U.S. ambassador to Japan, told the media that Japan needed to face history honestly, and he expressed his desire for a full apology for its war crimes. 21 In addition, the Nanjing Massacre has even become a bill and will soon be submitted to the House of Representatives. In the spring of 1997, members of the U.S. Congress and human rights activists drafted a bill condemning Japan's mistreatment of prisoners of war in the United States and other countries during World War II, demanding a formal apology and compensation for war victims.

The movement that forced the Japanese government to confront its wartime atrocities won support even in Japan. Japan's official refusal to acknowledge the atrocities committed during the war provoked considerable shame and unease among many conscientious Japanese. A small number of outspoken Japanese people believe that if the Japanese government wants to gain the trust of its neighbors in the future, it must confess its past. In 1997, The Japanese Agency for Love issued the following statement:

In past wars, Japan arrogantly invaded other Asian countries, causing suffering to many people, especially Chinese. For 15 years around the 1930s, Japan waged war against China. Protracted wars have victimized tens of millions of Chinese. We sincerely apologize for Japan's past mistakes and ask for your forgiveness.

Contemporary Japanese people are faced with a major choice: they can continue to deceive themselves, believing that Japan's war of aggression was a holy war, and that they themselves were unfortunately defeated only because of the great economic power of the United States; they can also admit the truth that the world is a better place because Japan lost the war of aggression and failed to impose its terrible "love" on more peoples. Only by facing history squarely can Japan cut off from the past acts of terror of its own nation. If contemporary Japanese continue to do nothing to uphold the truth of history, they will leave history with the same stain as their wartime ancestors.

Japan must admit the crimes it committed in Nanjing, which is not only a legal responsibility, but also a moral obligation. At the very least, the Japanese government should formally apologize to the victims and compensate those who suffered losses in the holocaust; most importantly, japan should educate the next generation to face the truth of the Nanjing Massacre correctly. These long-overdue actions are of crucial importance to Japan if it expects to gain the respect of the international community and to conclude a dark chapter that tarnishes its history.