From The River at the Centre of the World (Simon Winchester, 1996) pp128-35
I had come to Nanjing armed with an old Japanese guidebook, and I had done so very much on purpose. Not long after Karl Baedeker and John Murray had uncovered the delights of Europe and published them in pocket-sized compendiums in Leipzig and London, so a Japanese nobleman, Baron Goto ~ and for far less amiable reasons ~ began to do much the same for Asia, in Tokyo. By today’s standards Goto was not a very laudable figure: he was a keen believer in Japan’s right to expand and to rule the lesser peoples of Asia, he had been a fairly brutal civil administrator of Formosa during her early years as a Japanese colony, and he had come to China to run the South Manchurian Railway. But his colonial attitudes aside (and what Briton can decry colonial attitudes?), he did inspire editors and writers to produce excellent guidebooks. The small red volumes published between 1908 and 1920 under the colophon of the Imperial Japanese Government Railways remain masterly.
Not, however, just as guides. Certainly, on one level the books offer hugely detailed, highly accurate, prettily designed and compact tour’s d’horizon – they remain undeniably useful, even nearly a century on. But they also offer, unwittingly – and this is why I had decided to stuff them into my rucksack back in New York – an unexpected window on the Japanese mind, a revealing look at the way that Japan then regarded her neighbour states across the sea. Each of the books deals in detail with peoples (Koreans, Manchurians, Formosans and, most particularly, the Chinese) whom the Japanese considered then, and perhaps still consider today, to be amusing, colourful, interesting – but grossly inferior. Given time, Japanese readers of these volumes must have thought, each would be ripe for the plucking.
I had with me Volume IV. Its chapter on Nanjing can be seen, in hindsight, as offering the first lip-smacking, appetite-whetting accounts of a city that the Japanese were soon to brutalize like few others, anywhere. Baron Goto’s tidy little book must have seemed to the sterner souls in the Japanese army rather like a menu card in a fancy Roppongi restaurant: Oh come ye sons of Nippon, some might have heard its siren call, and feast yourselves on this! Beneath the come-hither of it all, a sneering tone is audible, if faintly.
Encircled by these cyclopean walls, the city has been planned on a most magnificent scale, no unworthy capital of a great empire . . . Before the coming of the Taiping rebels there existed tolerably good roads and drainage . . . The Taipings made dreadful havoc everywhere and scarcely anything had been done by way of repairs, until the recent introduction of the new regime . . . which is now making roads and repairing the drainage, burning up all the garbage and filth. Carp and mandarin-fish are caught in the Yangtze-kiang, and are of a very fine flavour. The Flower Boats in the Chin-hwai-ho contain chairs, tables and quilts, food and liquor as well as singing girls . . . There is a club, the Hwa-Ying, established by the Japanese and Chinese together.
Such was the beguiling image of Nanjing – pools filled with succulent carp, boatfuls of pretty flower girls, a walled capital of great beauty – in the autumn and early winter of 1937. It was a treasure that such unworthies as mere Chinese should not be allowed to keep. Japan’s ambitions in China – which she had stoutly denied throughout her annexation of Manchuria, and her installation of Pu Yi as the puppet emperor – were by now nakedly apparent. In July she had instigated the Marco Polo Bridge incident, which many see as the true origin of the Pacific War. By August she was occupying Beijing and Tianjin. In November she landed troops in Hangzhou Bay, and she took Shanghai with extraordinary violence but without so much as an official murmur from the League of Nations, the spokesman for the outside world; and now, come December, her soldiers were racing towards Nanjing, which for the past ten years had been the capital of the Chinese Republic.
Chiang Kai-shek was wily enough to know what would happen. He fled up along the Yangtze to Wuhan and Chongqing, declaring each a new capital in turn. Foreign ambassadors did much the same, pleading not unreasonably that they needed to be wherever the nation’s heads of state and government presided and resided. Only the ragged remains of Chiang’s Nanjing garrison, together with a few hundred foreigners and half a million wretched civilians, were left to face the music. Chiang had left Nanjing, the city that Baron Goto’s writers had called, in their oily way, ‘one of the most interesting in China’, in the hands of an incompetent scoundrel of a general, a former warlord. And he fled too, when six divisions, containing 120,000 well-trained Japanese soldiers, began to bear down on the walls of his city.
The battle for the land south of the Yangtze was well fought: Chinese soldiers in Jiangyin and Zhenjiang fought bravely, but hopelessly. The tanks and field pieces and planes of the Japanese advanced along the river’s right bank, day by ghastly day. By 6 December 1937 their troops were surrounding Nanjing on three sides – and the river that streamed below the city walls on the fourth, the west side, was about to be crossed by General Matsui Iwane’s soldiers, who were also advancing on the river’s left bank.
Mitsubishi bombers began to pound the city nightly: casualties were terrible. But the Chinese, even leaderless, fought on doughtily. Japanese losses rose stubbornly. There was hand-to-hand fighting in the suburbs – down where Lily and I had driven, where I had knocked the young woman from her bicycle – soldiers from the armies of the two competing tiger-states had fought with bayonets and bare hands, the victims broken and dying amid the rubble and the backyard paddies. One unit of the Chinese Army did manage to break out from within the walls – which were, at 21 miles long, 40 feet high, and dating from the Ming dynasty, at the time one of the grandest sets of city walls to be found anywhere in China, a wonder of the Eastern world – and do battle with the onrushing armies. But it was all, inevitably, to no avail.
On the evening of Monday 13 December 1937 General Matsui entered through the great eastern gates of Nanjing’s wall and proceeded to unleash one of the most horrifying episodes of soldierly excess in modern times. It has since become known as the Rape of Nanking – but rape was only a part of it. This was cruelty on an epic scale, the settling of unspoken scores and the uncollaring of decades of blind hatred, one race for the other.
Thousands tried first to flee across the river, to swim to safety. But the river in December is cold and swirling with residual autumn currents, and the pace of‘ the swimmers was slow: machine-gunners raked them with bullets, and hundreds, maybe thousands, drowned. One Japanese, Masuda Rokusuke, reckoned later he had shot five hundred, at least. But after this, as terrible an atrocity as it would have been alone, the Japanese turned their attention to the hundreds of thousands who remained behind.
They performed a formal gate-opening ceremony and then commenced their butchery. Kalazukem was one word for it: tidying up. Shori – treatment – was another. Missionaries and doctors and foreign businessmen and women stood in horror as the terror unfolded and then went on and on and on, for six terrible weeks. Japanese soldiers treated the soldiers and civilians they had pinioned in Nanjing as animals, available for every act of barbarism and butchery it is possible to imagine. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal said later that 200,000 men were slaughtered, and 20,000 women raped.
Children were used for bayonet practice. Women were raped repeatedly by dozens of soldiers standing in line, one after another. Old people were buried alive. Contests were held to see how many heads could be cut off with a single sword blade – the winner claimed 106, and his victory made headlines in the Tokyo press. Women had sharpened bamboo poles thrust deep into their vaginas. Men were lashed between the poles of bullock carts and made to pull away booty looted from the stores, then shot or burned to death. The Japanese hacked and sliced and filleted and butchered and battered and burned their way through an unprotected civilian people. They lined them up and machine- gunned them to death. They herded them into ruined buildings and doused them with paraffin and torched them. They humiliated them in every way imaginable, and most unimaginable ways as well.
Soldiers staked their victims out on the wrecked ground and knifed them and raped them and then took snapshots of one another doing so, and sent the films off to shops in Shanghai to be developed and sent back home to Japan to demonstrate how they had ‘taught the Chinese a thing or two’. They did what they did with swagger and brute pride: they had caught the Chinese, from whose loins they had once sprung, and taken them down a peg or two, or more. They had brought the mighty Celestials low, had showed them who were the masters now.
Lily and I spent a stunned afternoon wandering around the museum to this horror show. Its compound is in a distant suburb, and its buildings are ugly, though better maintained than most state-funded operations. There is a rock garden, with names of victims, and a large concrete building with an inscription over the main entrance: Victims, 300,000. There are sandboxes filled with skulls and bones, said to be those of murdered and tortured Chinese.
The Massacre Museum was built not to demonstrate a horror that must never be permitted to happen again, but, according to a notice on the wall, ‘to commemorate the victory of the Chinese people in the anti-Japanese war . . . to educate the people . . . to promote friendship between the Japanese and Chinese people . . .’ Lily and I were as dazed and quiet as all the others who came, even though the tour buses from which they spilled made us think they would be noisy and would behave like tourists, gawking and insensitive. Instead, everyone came here well prepared to be shocked, and they saw it all, and they duly were. Rooms after rooms of black~and-white pictures (not grainy or out of focus or the hasty work of surreptitious spies, but well-posed, well-composed studies) — snaps, for the wife and children back in Sapporo and Kagoshima and Tokyo — of man behaving with the utmost incivility and depravity towards his fellow man . . . and woman.
One of the display cabinets held a roll call of the International Relief Committee, a body set up in a hurry in response to the terrible happenings. There was John Rabe of Siemens, J. M. Hanson from the Texas Oil Company, J. V. Pickering of Standard Vacuum, Ivor Mackay from Swires, the Rev. W. P. Mills of the Presbyterian Mission, E. Sperling of the Shanghai Insurance Company – such comfortable, suburban names, having to deal with such horrors. They set up a number of encampments that they called ‘safety zones’, where terrified civilians could take sanctuary from the marauders. But time and again the Japanese stormed into the zones anyway and took young men away, adding them to the steadily rising toll of victims. Afterwards the committee members wrote a report; nine years later they gave evidence to the War Crimes Tribunal. They did their best: but against the awful power of the Japanese army, it was little enough.
And against the awful power of Japanese disbelief, their story still has not been properly told in Japan itself. For years there was no mention of it; history books spoke not a word of the atrocities, and merely praised Japan’s action in ultimately liberating Asian countries from foreign or rather, Western – domination. School history books spoke of the Japanese Army’s ‘advances’ into China, rather than its ‘invasion’. The terrible happenings in Nanjing were summarized with surgical succinctness: ‘In December Japanese troops occupied Nanjing. At this time [explains a footnote] Japanese troops were reported to have killed many Chinese, including civilians, and Japan was the target of international criticism.
As late as 1991, senior Japanese officials were insisting that the story of the Rape of Nanking was all invention, that spiteful and humiliated Chinese were telling lies to besmirch the reputation of their innocent neighbour. Only in 1995 did a Japanese prime minister make a first formal apology: but there was still plenty of opposition to his doing so, and scepticism continues among many Japanese that they might be capable of such a thing.
The museum – which has captions in Japanese, and a book of condolence and a room where Japanese visitors could leave their gifts and their apologies – was in the process of expanding. There were cranes and backhoes all around, piles of gravel, bags of cement. More sculptures are being added in the garden, more rooms being built above and below ground, the further to remind the world of what happens when a people goes mad for blood.
There was a small cinema in the complex, and every few minutes a film was shown. One might think that a film of a massacre would merely appeal to a voyeuristic streak in all our natures; but watching the Chinese – and a few Japanese, amazingly – who sat on those hard metal chairs and watched in rapt and sad attention the images of life being squeezed and burned and choked and stabbed out of so many victims, I felt that it was something else, something very different from mere voyeurism, that had brought them all there. There was a sense of shame, a sense of awful incredulity, that man might be capable of such things.
There was a sense, too, undeniable, that in their attitude to the Chinese, the Japanese were somehow different. True, they were cruel beyond belief to the alien others with whom they dealt in the Pacific War — to the Burmese, the Filipinos, the Malays, the Americans and the British. But to the Chinese it was always much, much worse. They were terrible to the Koreans: they were pathologically inhuman to the Chinese, and the Chinese never have forgotten, and never will forget.
Tgk1946's Blog 