On the morning of 13 December 1937, Japanese troops entered the Chinese city of Nanjing. The city had been the capital of the Nationalist government, which had fled westward ten days earlier, leaving behind a population of perhaps half a million civilians and a garrison of soldiers who had largely melted away into the city’s streets, stripped of their uniforms. What followed over the next six to eight weeks has been estimated, in careful scholarly work, to have cost between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand lives — the uncertainty is itself a historical problem of the first order — as well as the systematic rape of an estimated twenty thousand to eighty thousand women. That the events happened is not in question; they were witnessed by Western diplomats and missionaries who remained in the city, documented in contemporaneous diaries and dispatches, and recorded in the proceedings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in 1946. What makes Nanjing so historically remarkable is not only its horror but what came after: a sustained, politically motivated effort to minimise, deny, and suppress it that has shaped the politics of East Asia from the end of the Second World War to the present day.
The Road to Nanjing: War and Escalation
The Second Sino-Japanese War, which formally began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident near Beijing, had its roots in a decade of Japanese imperial expansion on the Asian continent. Japan had seized Manchuria in 1931, established the puppet state of Manchukuo, and progressively extended its military and political influence into northern China. The Chinese Nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek had pursued a policy of cautious accommodation, calculating that China was not yet strong enough to resist Japan directly and that time was needed to build a modern army and economy. The policy generated profound internal tensions: the Chinese Communist Party, with which the Nationalists had concluded an uneasy United Front, pressed for active resistance; the broad Chinese public seethed at each new humiliation; and the Japanese military, dominated by officers who believed that China’s weakness invited expansion, pushed ever further.
The full-scale war that erupted in the summer of 1937 caught both sides without clear plans for what a prolonged conflict would look like. Japan expected a short, decisive campaign — as it had experienced in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 — that would force a settlement on Japanese terms. China, or at least its Nationalist government, hoped that determined resistance would draw in international intervention, as the League of Nations had failed to provide over Manchuria but might yet deliver given sufficient provocation. Neither calculation proved correct. The Battle of Shanghai, which lasted from August to November 1937, was a grinding urban struggle in which the Nationalists committed their best German-trained divisions and suffered catastrophic losses — perhaps a quarter million casualties. The city fell in November. Japan’s forces then drove westward toward Nanjing, which fell on 13 December.
The context matters for understanding what happened next. The Japanese army that entered Nanjing was an army that had fought a savage urban battle for three months, that had been pushed beyond its logistical capacities, whose officers had been telling their troops that Chinese resistance was near collapse and who were accordingly furious when it proved otherwise, and whose institutional culture provided almost no constraint on the treatment of enemy combatants or civilians. The distinction between combatants and civilians was, in any case, made more complex by the large number of Nationalist soldiers who had abandoned their uniforms — Japan treated the detection of such men, whether actual soldiers or ordinary citizens of military age, as a military necessity justifying immediate execution without trial.
The Safety Zone: Witnesses in an Inferno
What distinguishes the Nanjing Massacre from many comparable atrocities in the history of modern warfare is the quality of the documentation. The foreign nationals who remained in the city — missionaries, businessmen, professors, and diplomats from the United States, Britain, and Germany — established an International Safety Zone in the weeks before the Japanese arrival, modelled on similar zones that had operated in Shanghai. The zone, centred on Ginling College and several other foreign-owned institutions, eventually sheltered between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand Chinese civilians. Its administration fell largely to a small committee of foreigners who found themselves simultaneously trying to protect the people in their care and documenting what was happening around them.
John Rabe, the German businessman who chaired the Safety Zone committee, left a diary that was not published until 1997 but that constitutes one of the most remarkable documents of twentieth-century atrocity. Rabe was a Nazi Party member who had been in China for thirty years and who used his party membership and the swastika armband as symbols of authority that Japanese officers would respect. His diary records, with the precision of a man who understood that he was witnessing something that would require evidence, the shootings, the rapes, the burning of buildings, the bayoneting of prisoners, and the systematic looting that Japanese troops conducted across the city. Rabe and his colleagues repeatedly confronted Japanese officers and soldiers, occasionally succeeded in driving them away from their victims, and filed hundreds of written protests with the Japanese Embassy that were received and largely ignored.
Minnie Vautrin, an American missionary educator who ran Ginling Women’s College within the Safety Zone, left a diary that is in some ways even more harrowing than Rabe’s. Vautrin spent weeks almost entirely without sleep, positioning herself physically between Japanese soldiers and the women and girls they came to assault. Her diary records not only specific incidents but her own psychological disintegration under the weight of what she was witnessing and unable to prevent. She suffered a breakdown in 1940 and died by suicide in 1941, her mental health destroyed by the memories of Nanjing. Her diary was not widely read in the West until decades later; it is among the most direct records of what mass sexual violence in wartime looks like from the perspective of someone trying to stop it.
These Western witnesses gave their testimonies at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East — the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal — in 1946. General Iwane Matsui, who commanded the Japanese forces that took Nanjing, was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1948, along with six other defendants on other charges. The judgment was explicit: the tribunal found that Japanese forces had murdered prisoners of war and civilians in numbers that it estimated conservatively at over two hundred thousand. The legal record, in other words, was established comprehensively. The problem was not evidence. The problem was what happened to that evidence in the decades that followed.
The War in China: Scale and Character
The Nanjing Massacre was the most concentrated and best-documented single episode in a war of extraordinary brutality and scale. The Second Sino-Japanese War, which merged into the broader Pacific War after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with Japan’s surrender in August 1945, cost China an estimated fifteen to twenty million lives — military and civilian combined — making it one of the deadliest conflicts of the twentieth century. The figure is dwarfed in Western consciousness by the European theatre of the Second World War, and the war is correspondingly less present in Western historical memory despite its scale and the suffering it involved.
The character of the conflict was shaped by several features that distinguished it from the European theatres. Japan’s military strategy rested on the assumption that Chinese resistance would collapse quickly if sufficient violence was applied — an assumption that proved wrong but that shaped Japanese conduct throughout the war. The Nationalist government retreated to Chongqing deep in the interior, where it survived under constant Japanese bombing but could not reconstitute the military capacity to drive the Japanese back. The Communists, operating from their base areas in the rural north, waged a guerrilla campaign that tied down Japanese forces without offering the decisive engagement that might have ended the war. The result was a brutal equilibrium of occupation, atrocity, and resistance that lasted eight years.
Japan’s occupation of eastern China involved a range of practices that were documented by Chinese survivors and foreign observers and later confirmed by Japanese sources. The comfort women system — the euphemistic term for the organised sexual enslavement of women from across Asia, including China, Korea, the Philippines, and other occupied territories — was established as a formal military institution and operated throughout the war. Unit 731, the biological warfare unit based at Pingfang near Harbin, conducted lethal experiments on prisoners — Chinese, Korean, and others — in developing biological and chemical weapons. These specific programmes were suppressed after the war: the United States, in a decision that reflected Cold War strategic priorities over justice, granted immunity to Unit 731’s scientists in exchange for their research data. The full extent of both programmes was not acknowledged by the Japanese government for decades, and the comfort women issue in particular remains a live diplomatic wound between Japan and South Korea.
Denial and Memory: The Postwar Politics of an Atrocity
The story of how the Nanjing Massacre was suppressed, minimised, and eventually became a central site of political conflict in East Asia is inseparable from the Cold War settlement in the Pacific. Japan’s postwar occupation, administered by the United States, was oriented toward building Japan as a stable, democratic, capitalist ally against the Soviet Union and the newly established People’s Republic of China. This strategic priority influenced how the war crimes tribunals were conducted — Emperor Hirohito was not charged, partly to preserve the monarchy as a stabilising institution — and how the occupation authorities handled the question of Japanese responsibility for wartime atrocities more broadly. The result was a peace settlement in which Japan acknowledged war crimes in general terms while many of the specific perpetrators and programmes escaped full accountability.
Within Japan, the postwar decades produced a complex and contested historical culture around the war. The dominant mainstream narrative emphasised Japanese victimhood — particularly the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had the effect of positioning Japan as a victim of wartime violence rather than a perpetrator — while treating the war’s conduct in Asia with relative silence. A progressive intellectual tradition challenged this narrative and produced serious scholarship on Japanese wartime atrocities, including the Nanjing Massacre. But from the 1980s onward, a nationalist revisionist current emerged that challenged the established findings, argued that the death toll at Nanjing had been massively exaggerated, and in some cases denied that a systematic massacre had occurred at all. These arguments appeared in academic publications, popular books, and eventually in the curriculum committees that shaped what Japanese school textbooks said about the war.
The textbook controversies that erupted periodically from the 1980s onward — in 1982, 1986, 2001, and at intervals since — involved Japanese government approval of school history texts that critics in China and South Korea argued minimised or sanitised Japanese wartime conduct. The controversies generated diplomatic crises, boycotts, and a cycle of accusation and denial that has made the history of 1937–45 one of the most politically charged subjects in East Asian international relations. China’s government, which under Mao had largely subordinated the memory of the Sino-Japanese War to the narrative of Communist revolutionary triumph and which had its own complex reasons for managing historical memory of the Nationalist period, became increasingly willing from the 1980s onward to use the Nanjing Massacre as a diplomatic instrument — a claim on Japanese guilt and international sympathy that could be deployed in bilateral negotiations or moments of tension.
Iris Chang and the Return of Nanjing to Global Consciousness
The event that most dramatically returned the Nanjing Massacre to Western consciousness was the publication in 1997 of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. Chang, a Chinese-American journalist and historian, had been galvanised by her family’s connections to the massacre — her grandparents had fled Nanjing — and by the absence of the event from American historical memory. Her book, which drew extensively on the diaries of Rabe, Vautrin, and other witnesses as well as on Chinese survivor testimonies and Japanese sources, became a bestseller and introduced the subject to a mass Western readership for the first time. The book’s title — invoking the Holocaust — was deliberately provocative, and it generated both intense scholarly debate and furious reaction from Japanese nationalist quarters.
The scholarly reaction to Chang’s book was mixed in ways that were instructive about how the field had developed. Historians who had worked on Nanjing for years — Japanese, Chinese, and Western — acknowledged that her contribution in bringing the subject to public attention was significant while raising questions about specific claims and figures in the text. The death toll question, which Chang estimated at the higher end of the scholarly range, was and remains contested: not because there is serious doubt that a massacre of enormous scale occurred, but because the specific numbers depend on methodological choices about which categories of killing to include and which sources to weight. This is the kind of debate that occurs in the historiography of most mass atrocities; what was distinctive about Nanjing was the way in which legitimate scholarly debate about numbers was seized upon by deniers as evidence that the whole event was fabricated.
Iris Chang’s own subsequent history added another layer to the tragedy. She suffered a mental breakdown while researching a subsequent book on the Bataan Death March, and died by suicide in 2004 at the age of thirty-six. The parallel with Minnie Vautrin — another woman who had immersed herself in Nanjing and been destroyed by what she found there — was noted by many who wrote about Chang’s death. The massacre’s capacity to damage those who engaged most deeply with it was not merely metaphorical.
The War’s Long Consequences
The Second Sino-Japanese War’s consequences for East Asian history were profound and ramifying in ways that are still not fully worked through. The war exhausted the Nationalist government militarily and morally, creating the conditions for the Communist victory in 1949. The Communists, who had fought a different kind of war in the rural base areas and had emerged from it with their organisation intact and their political base among the peasantry strengthened, were better positioned than the Nationalists to reconstitute a functioning state in the aftermath of the Japanese surrender. The connection between the Sino-Japanese War and the Communist victory — the way in which one produced the conditions for the other — is one of the clearest causal relationships in the history of modern Asia, though it is sometimes obscured by narratives that treat the Civil War and the Japanese war as separate events.
The war also reshaped the international order in Asia in ways that remain consequential. Japan’s defeat and occupation established a security framework — the US-Japan alliance, the American military presence in the Pacific — that has defined the region’s strategic architecture for eight decades. Taiwan, where the Nationalist government retreated in 1949, remains in a political limbo that is directly traceable to the decisions made in 1945 about how to end the war and manage the peace. The territorial disputes that China has pursued in the South China Sea and elsewhere are entangled with historical claims that derive partly from the wartime period, when Japan controlled vast areas of the Pacific and China’s sovereignty was comprehensively violated.
The question of historical memory and accountability for the Sino-Japanese War has never been resolved in the way that — imperfectly and incompletely — the question of German responsibility for the Holocaust was resolved in postwar Europe. Japan has issued various apologies and expressions of remorse for its wartime conduct, some more explicit than others, but has never achieved the kind of sustained national reckoning that Germany undertook from the 1960s onward. The reasons are multiple and contested: the Cold War strategic context that made full accountability politically inconvenient; the particular dynamics of Japanese domestic politics, in which nationalist politicians have consistently resisted what they characterise as a masochistic historical narrative; and the way in which Japanese victimhood — particularly the atomic bombings — has occupied the emotional space that acknowledgement of perpetration might otherwise have filled. The result is a set of bilateral relationships — Japan and China, Japan and South Korea — that are periodically convulsed by historical grievances that cannot be addressed because they cannot be agreed upon.
The city of Nanjing today contains a vast memorial museum on the site of one of the massacre’s killing grounds. The museum, which has been expanded and renovated several times since its opening in 1985, receives millions of visitors annually and is one of the most visited historical sites in China. Its existence is itself a political statement: the People’s Republic of China uses the Nanjing Massacre as an element of a broader historical narrative about national humiliation at the hands of imperial powers and the Communist Party’s role in ending that humiliation. The museum’s visitor figures spike during periods of Sino-Japanese diplomatic tension. History, here as elsewhere, is not the past — it is the present, conducted by other means.
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