Dec 1937-Jan 1938 The Imperial Japanese Army’s attack on Nanking, today known as Nanjing, is widely regarded as the worst atrocity of the second world war’s Asian theatre. After capturing Shanghai, the Japanese military advanced up the Yangtze river to Nanking, the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government. In the slaughter of civilians and soldiers that followed, Chinese sources estimate claim that more than 300,000 people died. Japanese soldiers also perpetrated widespread rape.
Japan According to a brief reference to Nanking at the Yasukuni museum in Tokyo, the Japanese general in charge gave his men maps showing foreign settlements and a civilian “safety zone”, and ordered them to maintain strict military discipline. The visitor is left to assume they did. The museum notes only that “Chinese soldiers disguised in civilian clothes were severely prosecuted”.
This nationalist view does not, however, represent a widely shared understanding of what happened at Nanking, as illustrated by Japanese textbooks’ rather different treatment of the atrocity. While the books’ take on Nanking is stilted and feels like the product of a committee, in various versions they acknowledge the deaths of thousands of Chinese including women and children, as well as looting, arson and assaults by Japanese soldiers. They do not spell out the sexual nature of these assaults.