And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking, Dachau.
- Auden, W.H. (1950) Read full poem

When and What?
Nanjing (Nanking) was the seat of the Chinese Nationalist government headed by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek during the Nanjing Massacre (Nanjing Datusha 南京大屠殺). Japanese troops entered the capital on 13 December 1937 and for six weeks, conducted a campaign of terror, humiliation and brutality. Civilians and captured military personnel were subjected to looting, rape, torture, decapitation, mass killings and killing practice exercises. From a population of approximately 600,000-700,000 inhabitants in the city before it fell, it is estimated that at least 300,000 were killed and at least 20,000 were raped. [Chang, I. (1998) The Rape of Nanking. NY: Penguin Books, p. 139]

Why Has It Become Symbolic of Japanese Wartime Atrocities?
Of all the atrocities committed in the Asian territories occupied by Imperial Japan between 1937-1945, the Nanjing Massacre is perhaps the most well known. As historian Professor Charles S. Maier (Harvard University) has written:

“Within both Japan and China… the Nanjing Massacre has assumed the somewhat same salience in public memory as the Holocaust in Europe and America….'

'The Japanese army’s killing spree at Nanjing… has become the other emblematic massacre of the Pacific War, and it remains the epitome of the cruelty and aggression that the Japanese military unleashed. The Nanjing rampage seems all the more atrocious in that it involved not what has seemed so horrifying about the Holocaust – its bureaucratized planning and mechanized execution – but the often gleeful killing of perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians by individual soldiers using sword and bayonet as well as bullet. The killings were all the more appalling in that they were unnecessary for the military objective, continued after the victory was secured, and apparently involved such joyful or at least indifferent murder." (Bold mine)
[Maier, C.S. In Fogel (ed.)(2000) The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography, Los Angeles: University of California Press, p. vii-viii]

What does Maier mean by ‘apparently joyful or at least indifferent murder’?
The following quote from a Japanese soldier, published in the newspaper Asahi Shimbun, concerning the atrocities in Nanjing, may provide an insight:

"We had fun killing Chinese. We caught some innocent Chinese and either buried them alive, or pushed them into a fire, or beat them to death with clubs. When they were half dead we pushed them into ditches and burned them, torturing them to death. Everyone gets his entertainment this way. Its like killing dogs and cats."
[History News Network article “ Japanese Textbooks, Koizumi, Sex Slaves, & the Nightmare of Nanking” By Rhawn Joseph  - link: http://hnn.us/articles/14566.html]

Some of the war crimes committed included:

Killing contests

For example, this infamous newspaper article in The Japanese Advertiser (an American-owned and edited English-language daily newspaper in Tokyo) reported on the military prowess of Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Takeshi in their contest to see who could kill 100 men first. Reports about the contest between them was first published on 7 December 1937.

Timperley documents two December 1937 reports concerning this friendly joust between the two sublieutants. The following text is excerpted from one of these reports published on 14 December 1937.

"The winner of the competition between Sub-Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-Lieutenant Iwao Noda [Noda Takeshi is also referred to as Noda Iwao in this and several other sources.] to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with his Yamato sword has not been decided, the Nichi Nichi reports from the slopes of Purple Gold Mountain, outside Nanking. . . . Mukai's blade was slightly damaged in the competition. He explained that this was the result of cutting a Chinese in half, helmet and all. The contest was "fun," he declared, and he thought it a good thing that both men had gone over the 100 mark without knowing that the other had done so." [Timperley, J.H. (1938) The Japanese Terror in China , p.285]

Beheadings and executions

Some soldiers who took part in beheadings took photos of their ‘prize’ as souvenirs. (See below). Further, supposedly, some of these photos were also used as postcards by the troops to send news home. (Third from left)

Sometimes, these decapitated heads were also deliberately and prominently displayed as a means of intimidating the local populace.

Mass Killings and Torture

These included live burials, mutilation, incineration… women, babies or children, as you can see, were not spared. These photos speak for themselves.

Wholesale rape and gang rape

Young girls, elderly women, children and even pregnant women were raped. After which, their bellies were sometimes slashed open and foetuses disgorged.

In the documentary "In The Name of the Emperor" ex-soldier Azuma Shiro spoke about the rapes:

“At first we used some kinky words like Pikankan. Pi means ‘hip’, Kankan means ‘to look.’ Pikankan means ‘Let’s see a woman open up her legs.’… We ‘pikankan..’ We looked. Afterwards, we would say something like, ‘It’s my day to take a bath,’ and we took turns raping them. ..But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don’t talk."

Below: Documentary In The Name of the Emperor.

Produced by: Nancy Tong. Translated and Reproduced by: Yoshiyuki Masaki and Video Press. Language: English and Japanese.

People as live targets for killing practice

Captured civilians and soldiers were also used as live targets for bayonet practice. According to testimonies by Japanese soldiers, this was done to desensitize the soldiers and to accustom them to the horrors of killing.

For example, a soldier named Tajima recounts how his commanding officer Liutenant Ono said to him, "You have never killed anyone yet, so today we shall have some killing practice. You must not consider the Chinese as a human being, but only of something less value than a dog or cat. Be brave!..." When no one volunteers for this 'killing practise,' Tajima and a few others are chosen.

Of this experience, he said:
"I raised my bayoneted gun with tremblign hands, and... I walked slowly towards the terror-stricken Chinese standing beside the pit - the grave he had helped to dig. In my heart, I begged his pardon, and - with my eyes shut and the liutenant's curses in my ears - I plunged the bayonet into the petrified Chinese. When I opened my eyes again, he had slumped down into the pit. 'Murderer! Criminal!' I called myself."

Another soldier named Tominaga Shozo also recounts how at a Chinese detention centre, him and fellow officers are taught to cut off heads and bayonet live prisoners. Of his wartime experience, he says:
"We made them like this... Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months."

[Chang, 1998, p. 57-58]

Multiple atrocities

Soldiers who became desensitized no longer viewed the Chinese they had conquered as deserving of mercy. As such, various atrocities were committed, and in the most cruel and unnecessary ways.

For example, in Nagatomi Hakudo's account:
"I remember being driven along a path that had been cleared through piles of thousands and thousands of slaughtered bodies... ...we stopped and pulled a group of Chinese prisoners out of the back. Then the Japanese officer proposed a test of my courage. He unsheathed his sword, spat on it, and with a sudden mighty swing, he brought  it down on the neck of a Chinese boy cowering before us... The officer suggested I take the head home as a souvenir. I remember smiling proudly as I took his sword and began killing people."

Of his part in the Nanjing massacre, he says:
"Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water. They gang-raped women from the ages of 12 to 80 and then killed them... I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over 200 in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil."

[Chang, 1998, p. 59]

Auden, W.H. (1950) Collected Shorter Poems, 1930-1944. In “Part Four: In Time of War.”London: Faber and Faber, pp. 279-280.

XVI

Here war is simple like a monument:
A telephone is speaking to a man;
Flags on a map assert that troops were sent;
A boy brings milk in bowls. There is a plan

For living men in terror of their lives,
Who thirst at nine who were to thirst at noon,
And can be lost and are, and miss their wives,
And, unlike an idea, can die too soon.

But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:

And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking; Dachau.