Nanjing Massacre

Nanjing Massacre
Part of the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War II)
The bodies of massacred Chinese beside the Qinhuai River with a Japanese soldier nearby
Date December 1937 – January 1938 Location Nanjing, China Result 40,000–300,000 dead (say historians)[1][2][3] 300,000 dead (says the Chinese government[broken anchor])[4][5][6] 20,000 raped[7]p.1012

The Nanjing Massacre was a massacre (an unjust killing of many people) that happened in Nanjing, China, in December of 1937 and January of 1938. It was part of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which was the part of World War II between China and Japan. At the time, Japan was trying to take over China and Nanjing was the Chinese capital. The Japanese Army reached Nanjing on 13 December 1937 and began killing and raping thousands upon thousands of people.

Some Japanese claim the fighting in Nanjing was the same or not much worse than fighting in other places and in other wars. That is simply untrue. There is a lot of evidence from the Chinese, from outsiders who were there, from outsiders who have studied it, and from the Japanese themselves that things were much worse. There were many, many war crimes: soldiers without weapons were killed; people who were not soldiers were killed; many were tortured (hurt very badly), mutilated (hurt in ways that can never be fixed), or killed in very cruel ways; many were raped (forced to have sex) or forced to work and treated like things. We have the orders from the soldier's leaders telling them to do these kinds of things and not to follow rules against them. The Nanjing Massacre was so bad that some even think of it as a kind of genocide (trying to wipe out an entire group of people).

The memory of the Nanjing Massacre—and anger at attempts to deny that it happened or to honor the soldiers who led it at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo—still cause difficulty between the Chinese and Japanese governments and between Chinese and Japanese people.

1. ↑ Ikuhiko, Hata (August 1999). The Nanking Atrocities: Fact and Fable. Japan Echo 25 (4). Archived from the original on February 28, 2011. Retrieved April 14, 2016.
2. ↑ Kajimoto, M. (2000). "Nanking Atrocities – In the Early 1990s: I. The Death Toll – Early Estimates". The Nanking Atrocities. University of Missouri-Columbia, Graduate School of Journalism. Archived from the original on November 28, 2007. Retrieved April 13, 2016.
3. ↑ Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi, ed. (2008). The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture. Berghahn Books. p. 362. ISBN 978-1845451806.
4. ↑ "论南京大屠杀遇难人数 认定的历史演变" (PDF). Modern China Research. Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 22, 2014. Retrieved March 16, 2016.
5. ↑ "近十年" 侵华日军南京大屠杀"研究述评" (PDF). Modern China Research. Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 4, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2016.
6. ↑ "新发现南京大屠杀埋尸资料的重要价值" (PDF). Modern China Research. Institute of Modern History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 6, 2016. Retrieved May 30, 2014.
7. ↑ Cite error: The named reference judgment was used but no text was provided for refs named (see the help page).