Nanjing Massacre (1937): Japanese Atrocities in China's Capital

The Nanjing Massacre was a six-week episode of mass killing, rape and looting carried out by Japanese troops after they captured Nanjing (then often written Nanking), the capital of the Republic of China, on 13 December 1937. Tens of thousands to more than 200,000 prisoners of war and civilians were killed. It is one of the best-documented atrocities of the Second Sino-Japanese War and remains central to how China and Japan remember the conflict.

Background: the road to Nanjing

Japan had seized Manchuria after the Mukden Incident of 1931, but full-scale war with China began only after a clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on 7 July 1937. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government chose to fight at Shanghai, and from August to November 1937 the city became the scene of one of the largest battles of the decade.

The Shanghai campaign cost Japan far more casualties and time than its commanders expected. When Chinese lines broke in November, Japanese armies raced up the Yangtze towards Nanjing, about 300 kilometres away, with little regular supply. Units lived off the land, and looting and killing of civilians were already reported along the route.

On 20 November the Nationalist government announced that it would move its seat inland, eventually to Chongqing. Chiang appointed General Tang Shengzhi to defend the capital, but the defence was poorly organised. Chiang himself flew out on 7 December.

The fall of the city

Japanese forces of the Central China Area Army, under General Matsui Iwane, reached the outer defences in early December. Imperial headquarters had formally ordered the capture of Nanjing on 1 December. Because Matsui was ill, the Shanghai Expeditionary Force was commanded in the final advance by Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, an uncle by marriage of Emperor Hirohito.

On 12 December Tang ordered a retreat, but the order reached many units late or not at all. Tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers were trapped against the Yangtze, many discarding uniforms and trying to hide among civilians. The same day Japanese aircraft sank the American gunboat USS Panay on the river nearby, an incident that briefly caused a diplomatic crisis. Japanese troops entered the city on 13 December.

What happened

In the following weeks Japanese units carried out mass executions of captured and surrendered soldiers, often by machine gun or bayonet on the riverbanks and outside the city walls. Men of military age were rounded up from the civilian population on suspicion of being disguised soldiers and killed in large numbers.

Sexual violence was widespread. Women and girls of all ages were raped, frequently by groups of soldiers, and many were killed afterwards. Large parts of the city were looted and set on fire. Japanese newspapers even reported a “killing contest” between two officers, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, said to be racing to kill 100 people with a sword; both were executed after a trial in Nanjing in 1948.

Matsui held a formal victory entry on 17 December. Discipline was not restored for weeks, and serious abuses continued into February and March 1938. Japan set up a collaborationist local administration on 1 January 1938.

The Safety Zone and the eyewitness record

A small group of Western residents, mostly missionaries, teachers, doctors and businessmen, had organised the Nanking Safety Zone, a neutral area of about 3.9 square kilometres around the university and embassy district. Its International Committee was chaired by John Rabe, a German Siemens manager and Nazi Party member who used his status to confront Japanese soldiers.

Other prominent members included the American teacher Minnie Vautrin of Ginling College, the surgeon Robert Wilson, the missionary John Magee, who filmed victims in hospital, and the academics Lewis Smythe and Miner Searle Bates. The zone sheltered an estimated 200,000 to 250,000 people, though troops repeatedly entered it to seize men and women.

Their diaries, letters and reports to Japanese authorities form a key part of the evidence, alongside survivor testimony, burial society records, Japanese soldiers’ diaries, and photographs. This record was used at the postwar trials and is the main reason the event is so well documented.

Key people

• Matsui Iwane – commander of the Central China Area Army; later convicted for failing to prevent the atrocities.
• Prince Asaka Yasuhiko – commanded the Shanghai Expeditionary Force at Nanjing; protected from prosecution by imperial status.
• Tang Shengzhi – the Chinese general who commanded the city’s defence.
• John Rabe – chairman of the Safety Zone committee, whose diary was published in the 1990s.
• Minnie Vautrin – American educator who sheltered thousands of women at Ginling College.

The death toll debate

The number of victims is the most disputed aspect of the massacre. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo concluded that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners were killed in and around Nanjing during the first six weeks. The Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal of 1947 gave a figure of more than 300,000, which is the official Chinese position.

Historians outside China have offered a wide range, from several tens of thousands to around 200,000, depending on the area and period counted and on how soldiers who had surrendered are treated. A small minority of writers in Japan have denied that a massacre took place, but this view is rejected by mainstream scholarship, including most Japanese historians. The Japanese government has acknowledged that killings of non-combatants and looting occurred, while saying the exact number is hard to determine.

Consequences and trials

The massacre did not break Chinese resistance; the government continued the war from the interior until 1945. News of the atrocities, carried by foreign correspondents and missionaries, damaged Japan’s image in the United States and Britain, though Western governments did not act. The wider war in Asia merged with the Second World War after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

After Japan’s surrender, Matsui was convicted at the Tokyo tribunal, not for ordering the killings but for failing to stop them, and was hanged on 23 December 1948. General Tani Hisao, commander of the 6th Division, was tried in Nanjing and executed in 1947.

Legacy and memory

For decades the massacre received limited attention in the West. Iris Chang’s 1997 best-seller “The Rape of Nanking” brought it to a wide audience, though historians have criticised some of its details. In China, the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders opened in 1985 at a mass grave site, and since 2014, 13 December has been a national memorial day. In 2015 documents relating to the massacre were added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

The event remains a recurring point of tension between China and Japan, especially over school textbooks, official statements and the number of victims. It also sits within a longer history of conflict between the two countries that goes back to the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95.

Timeline

• 1937, 7 July: Marco Polo Bridge Incident; full-scale war between Japan and China begins.
• 1937, 13 August: Battle of Shanghai begins.
• 1937, 20 November: Nationalist government announces its move away from Nanjing.
• 1937, 1 December: Japanese imperial headquarters orders the capture of Nanjing.
• 1937, 12 December: Chinese defenders ordered to withdraw; USS Panay sunk on the Yangtze.
• 1937, 13 December: Japanese troops enter Nanjing; mass killings begin.
• 1937, 17 December: Matsui Iwane’s formal victory entry into the city.
• 1938, February–March: The worst violence subsides; the Safety Zone is wound down.
• 1948, 23 December: Matsui is executed after conviction by the Tokyo tribunal.

Why it matters

The Nanjing Massacre showed how a modern army, under weak discipline and permissive leadership, could turn on prisoners and civilians on a vast scale. It is unusually well documented thanks to foreign eyewitnesses, and it still shapes relations between China and Japan nearly a century later.