Skip to main content

There is a frank discussion of rape and other atrocities committed during war.

 


Please note: The following subject matter is of immense importance, but could be difficult to read. There is a frank discussion of rape and other atrocities committed during war.


After entering a large museum in one of the world’s most ancient cities and the former capital of the Chinese empire, Nanking—or Nanjing as it’s known today—my 18-year-old daughter Sophia and I walked over a glass walkway that allowed us to look down 10 feet of earth and observe an ancient footpath. 


Lights highlighted the ground under the glass while the room we were in was dark. To our right hung numerous photographs on a black wall showing Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese citizens in December 1937 revealed by individual lights, the types one sees on art museum paintings.


 Dead babies, severed heads, piles of bodies on Yangtze River banks, and helpless prisoners of war were all documented there by photographs taken by the perpetrators themselves, Imperial Japanese Army soldiers who had conquered Nanking. 


The photo collage documented an orgy of slaughter. Walking along the pathway, there was a rectangular centerpiece in the hall ringed by 3-foot walls. Many, on gazing over the lips of the precipice, shook their heads. Some put their hands together and offered prayers to the heavens. Others whispered to companions, “Bastards,” “I hate the Japanese,” “How can Japan deny this?” or “America should’ve dropped more bombs on the assholes.” Visitors’ eyes were grave and focused. The air vibrated with their energy. 


 My daughter, standing 5’11” with blond hair and blue eyes stood out in the crowd of mostly local Han Chinese. Everyone was silent except for those walking away from the centerpiece. Sophia looked over the wall first and then she glanced at me with wide eyes filled with sadness. I thought of what Dante wrote in the Inferno: “In truth I found myself upon the brink of an abyss, the melancholy valley containing thundering, unending wailings.” As I looked over, I beheld a mass grave. 


Many skulls showed signs of having either been crushed by a heavy object or shot by a bullet. Other skulls had been removed from their bodies, settling several feet away from the shoulders. Sophia and I weren’t aware yet that this crime scene was not even close to being the museum’s biggest. One much larger awaited us in another building where hundreds of bodies lay; old ladies, POWs and children, their remains bearing evidence the Japanese had killed them with guns, swords and clubs. We were walking over a massive unplanned cemetery where everyone had met an untimely and murderous end; the Japanese had “stained the world with blood” to quote Dante again. Lining the exhibit were jars of human remains mixed with the earth that had absorbed their flesh. 


 My daughter and I were visiting one of the largest crime scenes in history. Sophia was accompanying me because she is fluent in Chinese and was helping me conduct research. On this day, our journey took us to The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders in Nanjing. I had been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C., Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, and Auschwitz, the Nazi extermination camp in Krakow, Poland, but nothing had prepared me for this massive complex built to remind the world of the Rape of Nanking. 


The European sites show evidence of mass murder with Auschwitz being the most dramatic. The former death camp had large rooms full of shoes, shaven female hair and suitcases of the deceased. However, here we observed hundreds of skeletons, often with their empty black eye sockets starring at us as if pleading to never forget. The gloomy air vibrated with messages from their shattered bones, relying on the living to recount their stories. The sheer size of the extermination reminded me of Dante’s phrase: “I should never have believed that death could have unmade so many souls.” How could an apparently cultured civilization like Japan unleash soldiers who could commit such atrocities? 


Before and during World War II, Japanese fascists preached that everything Japanese was superior and anything non-Japanese barbaric. Gaijin (or non-Japanese) were viewed as non-human. For decades, Japanese citizens had been indoctrinated with “evidence” that Japan’s enemies, like Caucasians and Chinese “were inferior, even subhuman creatures for whom no respect was possible.” Uno Shintarō, who beheaded prisoners, wrote, “we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you’re winning, the losers look…miserable. We concluded that the Yamato race was superior.” George Orwell wrote that for centuries, the Japanese preached “a racial theory…more extreme” than the Nazis, claiming “their own race to be divine and all others hereditarily inferior.” 


James Young, a former Japanese prisoner, wrote an insightful 1940 book Our Enemy in which he supported Orwell’s conclusions, writing about the Nanking massacre: “[The Japanese] duplicat[ed] all Nazi brutalities, exceed[ed] them, and add[ed] a whole satanic range of their own peculiar cruelties.” This was especially exhibited during the Rape of Nanking, which encompasses for my study the Imperial Japanese military march from Shanghai in November 1937 to the final destruction of Nanking in January 1938. 

The majority of the slaughter happened after the Chinese army of 150,000 (the Nanking Garrison Force) disintegrated under the better led and equipped Japanese by mid-December. 


The majority of Chinese soldiers (approximately 90,000) had laid down their arms, 10,000 had died in battle defending Nanking, and 47,000 had escaped west. Many have asked why the Chinese did not fight more ferociously at Nanking. Chiang Kai-Shek’s men had fought bravely around Shanghai for months, inflicting thousands of casualties on the IJA in protracted urban warfare that started in September 1937, but when his men retreated in November to Nanking, it was an exhausted force and city leaders had not prepared the capital for defensive battle.


 The Chinese commander, General Shengzhi Tang, abandoned Nanking and the majority of his troops. He was ordered to leave by Chiang Kai-Shek (who along with his wife also had abandoned the city), but one would think he and the Generalissimo would have looked out for their troops before leaving. Without effective leadership, the Chinese soldiers showed little initiative and caused much “military confusion.” As a result, the Chinese at Nanking were quickly defeated. 

     Capturing so many prisoners of war, the IJA resorted to wholesale butchery. Military correspondent Yukio Omata provided testimony to the POW executions: 

“Those in the first row were beheaded, those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded. The killing went on non-stop, from morning until night, but they were only able to kill 2,000 persons in this way. The next day, tired of killing in this fashion, they set up machineguns. Two of them raked a cross-fire at the lined-up prisoners. Rat-atat-tat. Triggers were pulled. The prisoners fled into the water, but no one was able to make it to the other shore.”

      It is estimated that out of the 300,000 individuals murdered during the campaign from Shanghai to Nanking in the winter of 1937-38, some 80,000-90,000 were defenseless National Chinese POWs. “It was a slaughter, a massacre” according to many historian Sun Zhaiwei.  IJA commander at Nanking, General Iwane Matsui, “lacked any idea that the killing of POWs was a violation of international law and a grave crime against humanity” to further quote Zhaiwei. At the same time defenseless POWs were killed by Matsui’s 10th Army, rapes were occurring everywhere. A graphic interview given by IJA soldier Shirō Azuma who committed such crimes was stunning:

      “At first, we used some kinky words like Bikankan. Bi means “[Pussy],” Kankan means ‘look.’ Bikankan 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 ‘Bikankan.’ We looked. After a while we would say something like, ‘It’s my day to take a bath,’ and we took turns raping them. It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn’t say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk.”

 Yale University historian Jonathan Spence wrote that Nanking’s “period of terror and destruction” ranks “among the worst in…modern warfare... [It was] a storm of violence and cruelty that has few parallels.” Today in the Chinese consciousness, it is as significant for them as Auschwitz is for Jews. The 200 miles between Shanghai and Nanking in the fall and winter of 1937 was a flotsam of rape and dead bodies, a literal “carnival of death” according to the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas. Horrible executions and gratuitous murder were observed at Soochow, a mid-point between Shanghai and Nanking and its devastation mirrored countless other towns. Similar acts happened in cities surrounding Nanking such as Mufushan, Wuhu, Nit’ang, Wuxi and Suzhou. This Japanese pattern of behavior demonstrates that “these murders followed such a similar pattern over such a wide range of territory and covered such a long period of time, and so many were committed after protests had been registered by neutral nations that…only positive orders from above [like Prime Minister Hideki Tojo and Emperor Hirohito] made them possible” according to historian James Scott.  

As a result of troops being sent to conquer Nanking without supplies, they had to source their own food. In doing so they did not have to destroy thousands of homesteads, but they did so anyway. Victims called the IJA Huang-chün, an “army of locusts.” Japan used this campaign to create fear and submission. Civilians were massacred openly to entertain soldiers and encourage others to conduct themselves similarly. The IJA soldiers acted “beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations” to quote Joseph Conrad from his work "Heart of Darkness."

      Besides seizing more territory and resources for Japan, another reason for taking Nanking was that it was Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang capital. Taking this city was not only a military victory, but also a triumph politically and psychologically, showing the world Japan waged a “war of annihilation.” For destroying and raping Nanking, Hirohito decorated his generals with medals.

      All these Nanking atrocities happened with the encouragement, approval and knowledge of Japanese commanders: General Iwane Matsui (Commander 10th Army), Lieutenant General Hisao Tani (6th Division Commander), Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima (16th Division Commander) and Lieutenant General Prince Yasuhiko Asaka (Hirohito’s 50-year-old granduncle), an ultranationalist on the Supreme War Council. After battle started, Lieutenant General Nakajima lent his sword to help a subordinate fulfill such criminal orders: “Takayama Kenshi visited me at noon today [13 December]. There happened to be seven captives, so I asked him to try to behead them with my sword. I did not expect him to do such a good job—he cut off two heads.” 

When IJA soldiers were not executing Chinese men, they raped women and girls. It became their obsession. “Chinese witnesses saw Japanese rape girls under ten years of age…and then slash them in half by sword.” Australian journalist Harold John Timperley called the Japanese “lust-mad.” In some cases, soldiers would enter a village, round up the men, escort them outside town and place them under armed guard. Then, IJA soldiers took turns returning to the village and raping the women. Chinese men would sit on the side of the road trembling as they heard the screams of their wives, daughters and sisters but could do nothing. In Nanking, two husbands who ran back for their wives to save them were shot by their guards. Women were taken to IJA camps and never heard of again. 

     Japanese went beyond rape and butchered women, killed infants and small children in front of their mothers and buried people alive. IJA soldiers castrated prisoners before using them for bayonet practice, or doused them with gasoline and lit them afire. They tortured the elderly to death. Some Nazis in the International Safety Zone, such as John Rabe, wrote Adolf Hitler to help stop these atrocities, calling the IJA “bestial machinery.” He also wrote the Japanese Embassy along with others for help detailing IJA crimes (the Embassy did nothing). 

Dead women lay naked in the streets, brutally violated. IJA soldiers hunted citizens like rabbits. In fact, the killings would have been more widespread had the expatriate community, led by Nazi Party Member John Rabe who chaired the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, not set up a precinct to protect civilians. These expatriates saved 200,000 by defending a Japanese-free zone and using international pressure to keep IJA forces at bay. Although repeatedly badgered to provide them with women to rape, the expatriates refused to give into their demands, although they could not protect everyone and some were violated. Outside that zone, most Chinese suffered horribly.

 By February 1937 things settled down, but the Imperial Japanese Army’s march to Nanking had added a landmass the size of Connecticut to the Empire and secured one of the most important ports in the world, Shanghai. The Japanese had utterly destroyed the Nationalist capital and devastated the entire population. For the next eight years, this whole region continued to suffer murder, rape and pillage. The Rape of Nanking goes down as not only one of the worst crimes against humanity during World War II, but one of the most horrible chapters in the history of humankind. 

 For more about the Rape of Nanking and the importance of never forgetting this atrocity and its victims, see my book “Flamethrower”: https://www.amazon.com/Flamethrower-Recipient-Williams-Controversial-Holocaust/dp/1734534109/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=flamethrower+bryan+mark+rigg&link_code=qs&qid=1592925332&sourceid=Mozilla-search&sr=8-1&tag=mozilla-20 

#WWII #RapeofNanking #Nanjing #China #warcrimes

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years.

"Sims acquired a total of eleven women slaves with vesicovaginal fistula from their masters by promising to lodge, board, and treat them, and he built a spartan wooden building, where he conducted surgical experiments on them for the next four years.  During the Victorian period, layers of dress signaled sexual chastity, and doctors were not in the habit of viewing women's unclothed bodies; not even their professional stature gave them license to gaze at women's genitalia. When Sims undertook his fistula experiments, even the term 'gynecology' was a few years in the future. Instead, 'women's doctors' averted their eyes in a chivalrous fashion as they knelt to tend to the modestly clothed ladies of their class, relying upon their sense of touch beneath voluminous Victorian skirts.  However, Sims, working with enslaved blacks, was constrained by no such delicacy. He made the women undress completely, then kneel on hands and knees while he and several phys...

Jong Sang Thaek’s brutal execution: Stripped naked and eaten alive by Dogs

Jong Sang Thaek’s brutal execution: Stripped naked and eaten alive by Dogs North Korea, Jan 03:  Unlike previous executions of political prisoners, the execution of Jang Song Thaek on December 12 was reportedly one of the most brutal ones ever conducted by the North Korean regime. According to a detailed account published in Wen Wei Po, a Hong Kong based Chinese newspaper, Jang Song Thaek, Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-Un’s uncle and the second most powerful man in North Korea, was stripped naked and thrown into a cage of 120 hounds who had been starved for three days. During the brutal execution, which was reportedly personally overseen by Kim Jong Un, the hounds were allowed to prey on Jang Song Thaek and five of his closest aides who also had been stripped and thrown into the cage. According to the report, the entire process lasted for about an hour by the end of which they were completely eaten up. This is called "quan je" or "execution by dogs". Political...

A graduate in Biology was having difficulty in finding a job. He saw an advert in one of the daily newspapers for a job at a zoo.🗞️👀

  A graduate in Biology was having difficulty in finding a job. He saw an advert in one of the daily newspapers for a job at a zoo.🗞️👀 In the interview, the manager told him that their gorilla🦍, which had been a tourists attraction has died so they needed someone to dress up and pretend as a gorilla🦍.  The graduate was embarra$$ed, but since the salary was okay, he accepted the job. The first day, he put on the gorilla skin and entered the cage, he started jumping up and down, beating his chest and roared like a gorilla.  The next day, he put on a gorilla skin and started moving around the zoo again and mistakenly entered another cage and found himself staring at a lion🦁.  The lion r0ared and rushed towards him. The scared graduate quickly forgot that he is a g0rilla and started shouting like a human, 🗣️"Help! Help!" The lion leaped onto him, knocked him to the ground and whispered in his ear👂*Dennis*, it's me Mike, your course mate." My brother, No job in thi...

Man s-xu#lly A$$@ults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country.

  Man s-xu#lly A$$@ults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country. Man sexually assaults homeless woman in Brazil. Another demonstration of a shitty third world country. NEWS: In the video images obtained this Saturday – May 4, 2024 – it is possible to see the man touching the private parts of a homeless woman who apparently sleeps on the street. Didn’t she feel touched? The Public Secretariat of São Paulo, Brazil, analyzes the images and asks for public help in identifying the attacker. Rape is a serious violation of human rights and a devastating crime that affects individuals, families, and communities worldwide. To put a stop to rape, we need to address its root causes and work together to create a society that values and respects consent, equality, and the dignity of all individuals. Here are some steps we can take: 1. *Educate and raise awareness*: Teach children and adults about consent, healthy relationships, and gender equality....

World War II as you've NEVER seen it before! Light-hearted photos of nude British and Allied soldiers revealed in eye-opening new book

  World War II as you've NEVER seen it before! Light-hearted photos of nude British and Allied soldiers revealed in eye-opening new book From the horrors of the Blitz to kamikaze attacks in the Pacific, World War II inflicted terrible suffering on troops and civilians alike. But as these photos reveal, soldiers fighting the war, whether in the Far East or Europe, did enjoy some more light-hearted moments. Hidden away in the attics of former servicemen for more than 60 years, the pictures, which show soldiers from the UK, Australia and the USA among others, shed fresh light on the friendships fostered between the men who fought. His extensive collection includes snapshots of soldiers and sailors from Australia, the UK, France, Italy, Poland, Russia, and the USA, cavorting on the sand in the South Pacific, shivering in the snow of Eastern Europe, posing solo in the barracks, and in great happy groups. Many are barely out of boyhood, at their physical peak and are responding to...

DOZENS OF MEN SAY SRI LANKAN FORCES R*P£D AND TORTURED THEM – ABC NEWS

  DOZENS OF MEN SAY SRI LANKAN FORCES R*P£D AND TORTURED THEM – ABC NEWS One of the men tortured in Sri Lanka said he was held for 21 days in a small dank room where he was raped 12 times, burned with cigarettes, beaten with iron rods and hung upside-down. Another man described being abducted from home by five men, driven to a prison, and taken to a “torture room” equipped with ropes, iron rods, a bench and buckets of water. There were bl00d splatters on the wall. A third man described the prisoners as growing accustomed to the sound of screaming. “It made us really scared the first day but then we got used to it because we heard screaming all the time.” R*ped, branded or beaten repeatedly, more than 50 men from the Tamil ethnic minority seeking political asylum in Europe say they were abducted and tortured under Sri Lanka’s current government. The previously unpublished accounts conjure images of the country’s bl00dy civil war that ended in 2009 — not the palm-fringed paradise...

Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973

 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Rape Scene), 1973 "Untitled (Rape Scene) is the documentation of an action that the artist performed in her apartment in Iowa City, while she was a student at the University of Iowa on the innovative Intermedia art course run by the German artist Hans Breder (born 1935).  It was created in response to a brutal and highly publicised rape and murder of a nursing student, Sara Ann Otten, by another student in March 1973. The following month Mendieta invited her fellow students to her apartment where, through a door left purposefully ajar, they found her in the position recorded in this photograph, which recreated the scene as reported in the press.  Some time later, Mendieta recalled that her audience ‘all sat down, and started talking about it. I didn’t move. I stayed in position about an hour. It really jolted them.’ (Quoted in Ana Mendieta, p.127, note 11.) In 1980, she commented that the rape had ‘moved and frightened’ her, elaborating: ‘I think ...

The Effurun POLICE STATION, Wado City, Delta State found four h3ads in a student's bag last night around 11pm.

WHAT A SAD NEWS  😭 😭😭😭😭 The Effurun POLICE STATION, Wado City, Delta State found four h3ads in a student's bag last night around 11pm. A young man, about  30 years, with a large handbag, got into a KEKE NAPEP lastnight. The vigilant driver smelled a strong odor coming from the youngster's bag. The horrible smell made the driver to suspect something. When the driver arrived at Effurun POLICE STATION area , he set off the alarm, held the young guy and alerted  the police to search the young man's bag. Many people were afraid.  One of the Police was shocked when he opened the young man's bag and found four heads in the young man's bag. After examination of the heads, it was found that the heads were well known. It was TECNO CHARGER HEAD,  SAMSUNG CHARGER HEAD, ITEL CHARGER HEAD and ORAIMO CHARGER HEAD and iru (locust beans).  Thank God IPhone Charger head is not there.   I appreciate your efforts to read this.  You can continue with what yo...

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, with 60 inches in the 1980s.

This is the Mitsubishi Dialtone D160, the largest subwoofer ever built, with 60 inches in the 1980s.  Weighing 800kg, it can easily shatter windows and produces small earthquakes that can be felt like ground vibrations within a 2-kilometer range. At the Koriyama factory, the test was conducted at first in the measuring room, but was stopped because the ceiling lamps fell due to vibration. The outdoor test appeared to have a negative impact on the neighborhood. At a distance of about 100 m from the speaker, the sound was felt, but at a greater distance, it was transmitted as vibration and noise on the earth instead of an audible sound.  Within a 2-kilometer radius of the factory, damage such as vibrations, small earthquakes, as well as noises from walls and windows occurred

My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital

  My Shocking Experience With Patient In A Hospital I once cared for a middle-aged patient who presented to emergency with a dildo-related very embarrassing situation. He purchased the toy for one of his sexcapades. Curiosity hit. And he shoved the damn thing in his pooper, high-high up! “Me first” attitude didn’t do him much good. Funny feelings subsided fairly quickly and the horror struck when he couldn’t get it out. His drainage was jammed, the toy was slipping further up and after about 24 hours of wishfully waiting for it to naturally pass, it hurt bad enough to seek medical help. The official party line, that he vehemently iterated, was I just fell onto it, how else do you think it got up there! Needless to say, emergency surgery was necessary and he landed in the ICU with sepsis related post-op complications. It took him loooong before being able to use the toilet normally! Google ** NOT the patient’s X-ray, but it looked similar** Though I have seen some really absurd stuf...