The House of Evil has many rooms, and no more so than in the 20th century, which created its own order of horror at Amritsar, Auschwitz, Rwanda and beyond.
All make a claim on our consciousness, inviting us to quantify and classify them. All make a claim on our memory, inviting us to recall their causes, origins and lessons.
The Rape of Nanking is perhaps the least known in the catalogue of 20th-century atrocities. Seventy-five years later, it remains largely unrecognized in the West — and largely unacknowledged in Japan.
On Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops entered Nanking (as it was then called), the newly established capital of the Republic of China. Having recently occupied Shanghai after a long, costly campaign, the Japanese wanted revenge.
That they got. For the next six weeks, they killed, tortured, raped, pillaged and burned. They wove a tableau of medieval bestiality — live burials, castration, beheading, bayonetting (particularly babies), disembowelment, disfigurement and other forms of vivisection done for sport. In Nanking, the demons of a martial society were unleashed with abandon.
Between 260,000 and 350,000 were killed. Between 20,000 and 60,000 women were raped. There were Chinese combatants among them, yes, but mainly the victims were women, children, the elderly and the infirm.
For weeks, the Japanese had been bombing the city and laying waste to the countryside. By the time their troops arrived, most of the Chinese army of 300,000 had fled.
The Japanese soldiers were under orders to “kill all captives.”
No one was safe from the marauding bands of Japanese, now an army run amok. The killing began immediately. The troops shot people at random, many in the back, as they were running away. Having quickly emptied the streets, the Japanese went house to house.
Then there was rape. Coal trucks were sent out to collect women. Age didn’t matter; girls as young as 11 and women as old as 80. Virgins were prized to affirm a warrior’s virility. Twenty soldiers might rape a woman. Or, out of sadism, they might order a father on a daughter.
Later, the Japanese forced women in Nanking into sexual service, as they did with captive women and girls from Korea, China, the Philippines and other theatres of the Pacific.
For all its horrors, history has played down Nanking. Iris Chang, a Chinese-American author and journalist, appalled to find so little published about the massacre in English, wrote a seminal book in 1997. Its unambiguous title: The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
Today there is little physical evidence here to remind us of the massacre. In a country all too familiar with suffering in war, famine and revolution, Nanking doesn’t command the attention it would elsewhere.
But it is commemorated in a park, museum and memorial in the south of the city, on the ruins of the former Jiangdong Gate, where 10,000 Chinese were murdered and buried. It is dark, stark and haunting, evoking Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. The photographs are revolting.
What appalled Chang was Japan’s ambivalence. She argues the country has never fully apologized (its statements of contrition have been tepid, vague and spoken, rather than written) nor offered meaningful reparations to survivors. Modest sums are being given by the Chinese or foreigners to those 200 who remain.
All they want is a meaningful apology. What they get is dissembling from the government and the occasional idiotic outburst of politicians.
Today, Japan remains a society in denial, unable or unwilling to address its past with the brutal, painful honesty of Germany. It is why Chang and others were denounced in Japan by conservative nationalists.
Chang called their acidic reaction “the second rape of Nanking.” Weary and depressed from her work in China, Chang courageously began researching a book on another Japanese atrocity, the Bataan Death March. Whether it was the accumulated sorrow of Nanking, Bataan or something unknowable, she suffered a debilitating mental collapse.
On Nov. 9, 2004, Iris Chang put a gun to her head and killed herself.
Andrew Cohen is a professor of journalism and international affairs at Carleton University.
