Documents on theRape of Nanking

edited by

Timothy Brook

Ann Arbor

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS

Introduction: Documenting theRape of Nanking

All that we are asking in our protests is that you re-store order among your troops and get the normal life ofthe city going as soon as possible.

-John Rabe (Document No. 9)

To deal for a number of days with officers and soldierswho played varying parts in the drama, showing smilesand deference when necessary for the welfare of the tensof thousands brought to the University for registration,was torture.

-Searle Bates (Document No. 50)

If a poor population is robbed for over seven weeks andthe robbing continues and no economic income develops,what will result?

-Lewis Smythe (Document No. 61)

When the Japanese army invaded China in the summer of1937, it launched not just Asians but everyone toward aworld war that would engulf the Eurasian continent andthe oceans around it for the next eight years. Japan's un-declared war on China started in 1931 with its occupationof Manchuria, but the brief attack on Beijing in July 1937set in motion the events that would push the world to war.A month after that incident, the Japanese army opened asecond front at Shanghai. The easy victory in Beijing wasnot repeated in Shanghai, where a better prepared Chi-nese army put up a strong fight. Surprised by this resis-tance, the Japanese advance remained stalled at the pe-rimeter of Shanghai for over two months. In the second

2 Documents on the Rape ofNanking

week of November, however, the Chinese defense brokeunder the logistical pressure that the Japanese brought tobear. The invasion of central China had begun.

The Japanese army was now poised to launch an at-tack on its next, more powerfully symbolic target, China'scapital city of Nanking (Nanjing). Tokyo was not initiallyprepared to make that move, hoping instead that the Chi-nese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would bring his Nationalistgovernment into a negotiated settlement. As Chiang gaveno sign of conciliation, the pressure to use military meansto force an outcome intensified. Finally, on 1 December thecabinet ordered General Matsui Iwane, commander ofJapan's Central China Area Army (CCAA),to proceed toNanking and occupy the capital. The Chinese governmentand its defending army withdrew under heavy fire, andthe soldiers of the CCAAmarched into the city on 13 De-cember 1937.

Many feared what the Japanese army might do whenit entered the capital, but none anticipated the scale of theviolence that the soldiers would unleash on the civilianpopulation. The numbers of people killed, injured, andraped are in dispute, and precise figures will probably neverbe established to everyone's satisfaction. A postwar inves-tigation that the Nanjing District Court completed in April1946 put the death toll at 295,525 people. Men counted for76 percent of the victims, women 22 percent, and children2 percent-although the last were surely the hardest totrace and will always remain sadly undercounted.'

If people did not expect the treatment they received,they knew enough to realize that the Japanese occupationwould be hostile. As early as November, when Japaneseairplanes stepped up their bombing of Nanking, Chinesewho could leave the capital ahead of the retreating gov-ernment and its army did so. But many were too poor ortoo tied by family obligations to take off. Some chose tostay in their homes and hope that the Japanese would re-

Introduction 3

spect their status as surrendered civilians, rather thanface the uncertainties of refugee flight.

Most Westerners in Nanking followed the cue of theirdeparting Chinese associates and chose to leave. Lateevacuees were taken out on American gunboats, though thelast, the Panay, was strafed and sunk on 12 December be-fore it could depart. A small number decided to remainbehind, their motives varying with their situations. A fewbusinessmen stayed on to look out for the interests of thecompanies that had sent them to the capital in the firstplace.They presumed that the Japanese, whatever they did,would not allow third-party nationals to be touched. Theothers, mostly missionaries, doctors, and teachers, felt duty-bound to stand by the Chinese with whom their lives hadbecome linked, regardless of the consequences. Twenty-seven were reported to be in the city when it fell: seven-teen Americans, six Germans, two Russians, one Austrian,and one British."

These men and women believed that their privilegedstatus could be put to best use by organizing a committeeto coordinate relief and provide noncombatants with a ref-uge when the Japanese army entered the capital. Discus-sions to this end started in mid-November, and on thetwenty-second of that month the International Committeefor the Nanking Safety Zone held its first meeting. The or-ganizers elected German businessman John Rabe as chair.It soon became apparent that the committee would haveto shoulder tasks beyond the already huge anticipated bur-den of organizing relief for the city's residents. After meet-ing on 27 November with Chiang Kai-shek and T'angSheng-chih, the general in charge of Nanking's defense, andagain on 1 December with Mayor Ma Ch'ao-chiin, it becameclear to the International Committee that it would have tostep in as the city's administration once the mayor and hisstaff were gone-and they were gone within a week of thatlast meeting."

4 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

The International Committee kept busy during thefirst two weeks of December: assembling the supplies pro-vided by the mayor and others, marking out the SafetyZone and making its existence known to city residents,and trying to establish contact with the Japanese militaryauthorities to win their agreement not to violate the Zone.The International Committee proposed a three-day armi-stice on 9 December, but Chiang Kai-shek did not wish toappear to be making concessions to the invaders, and theJapanese were bent on clutching the victory they could al-ready taste. On 13 December the first Japanese soldiersmade their way into the city,and the havoc began.

The following day, 14 December, John Rabe in his posi-tion as chair of the International Committee addressed aletter to the Japanese commander of Nanking seeking toestablish a working relationship between his group andthe new occupying force. Rabe's letter marks the begin-ning of the documentary record of the Rape of Nankingthat political scientist Hsu Shuhsi preserved in Docu-ments of the Nanking Safety Zone, which was publishedduring the war in 1939. This slim volume, which is stillthe best source on what happened to the people ofNanking between December 1937 and February 1938, isreprinted as the first set of documents in part 1 of thisbook. It is reprinted in its entirety and without alter-ation.!

The collection starts with Rabe's letter of 14 December(Document No. 1) and finishes with his letter of 19 Febru-ary, written four days before his departure from Nanking,in which he informs the American embassy that the com-mittee had reconstituted itself more modestly as theNanking International Relief Committee (Document No.69). Over this nine-week period the documents chart thecourse of the Japanese army's occupation of Nanking andsubjugation of its residents. Aside from two of the docu-

Introduction 5

ments (No. 23, a Japanese proclamation, and No. 60, aChinese memorandum from a nearby Buddhist monas-tery), the collection consists of three streams of texts: oneof letters and statements issued by the InternationalCommittee to external parties, a second of internal memo-randa on security and food supply matters, and a third ofrecords of atrocities.

Most of the documents in the letters and statementsstream were addressed to the Japanese embassy inNanking, that being the agency through which the com-mittee members as foreigners were supposed to handletheir relations with the Japanese. Committee membershad contact with Consul-General Okazaki Katsuo, butthey dealt more frequently with two junior officials, Sec-ond Secretary (later Acting Consul-General) FukuiKiyoshi and Attache Fukuda Tokuyasu. Fukuda was "anambitious, intelligent, and presentable young man," in thewords of one American consular official,"whose fluency inEnglish frequently placed him in the role of translatorand mediator. The International Committee presented theletters to these men to protest Japanese military conductand urge that ways be found to bring the chaotic situationin the capital under control. As of 10 January, this streamof documents included letters to the American consul JohnAllison, the British consul H. 1. Prideaux-Brune (both ofwhom had recently returned to the city), and the Germanconsul Dr. Georg Rosen (who had never left). With theseletters the International Committee created a paper trailthat explained its work and enlisted consular assistanceto gain cooperation from their Japanese counterpart. Mostwere written by the committee's genial and dedicated Ger-man chair, John Rabe. Rabe was qualified for this post notonly because he had lived in China for thirty years andhad a canny sense of how to conduct himself but also be-cause he was a member of the Nazi Party and therefore, it

6 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

was felt, someone to whom the Japanese would have to ex-tend some courtesy.

The second stream of documents consists of textsheaded with the title "Memorandum." These texts, writtenat critical points in the operation of the Safety Zone, arewhere the International Committee reviews its work andstrategizes its next move on paper. To give a few examples,the first of these memoranda offers a point-form summaryof the committee's first meeting on 15 December with thehead of the Japanese Special Service Agency, which theCCAAcreated to handle the task of restoring order in thecapital (Document No. 6). The second has to do with theJapanese removal and execution of Chinese soldiers foundin the refugee camps, which they did without much con-cern as to who was a soldier and who wasn't (DocumentNo. 11). To leap to the end of the collection, the last pro-vides an overview of relief problems as they stood on 10February (Document No. 68). The lead author of thesememoranda was the committee's sardonic and steadfastlypractical American secretary, Lewis Smythe. WithoutSmythe's memoranda we would know so much less aboutwhat happened in Nanking during the first two months ofJapanese occupation than we now do.Smythe continued thework of the International Committee past the period cov-ered by the documents, after it was recast as the Interna-tional Relief Committee, and compiled a survey ofwar dam-age in the capital region up to June 1938.6

The third stream of documents consists of summariesof hundreds of cases of Japanese infractions, major andminor, against Chinese rights and foreign privileges. Com-mittee members recorded every incident of Japanese mis-conduct as soon as they heard of or witnessed it, andSmythe wrote up the cases, both large and small, in chro-nological order. These the committee submitted in briefs

In trod uction 7

regularly, often daily, to the Japanese consulate." The in-tent was to ensure that the consular side knew exactlywhat the military side was doing, with the hope that thediplomats might intervene to alleviate the situation.These briefs first appear under the title "Cases of Disor-der." After 4 January they are renamed, more benignly,"Notes on Present Situation." For ease of reference all ofthe cases are numbered consecutively, from 1 to 444.8(Forty-eight of these cases are missing, as the three briefscontaining Case Nos. 114-43, 155-64, and 204-9 werelost.) They chronicle the full range of acts and atrocitiesvisited on the Chinese of Nanking: verbal and physicalabuse, theft, damage or expropriation of property, arson,rape, and murder. The first case (which appears in Docu-ment No. 8) reports Japanese soldiers entering a house on15 December and bayoneting seven Safety Zone streetsweepers who were living there, killing six. The last case(in Document No. 65) records the nonfatal shooting of a la-borer on 6 February, as a result of which Dr. Robert Wil-son had to amputate the man's arm. Between Case No. 1and Case No. 444 runs an inventory covering the fullgamut of wartime excesses, chronicled with numbing re-petitiveness and on a scale that defies the imagination.

These cases of disorder constitute an important bodyof evidence regarding Japanese conduct during the take-over of Nanking. Even so, they reveal only part of whatwent on and that only in those areas to which foreignershad access or from which they were able to obtain reliableinformation. It bears noting that the cases are not evenlydistributed over time but tend to bunch at certain mo-ments when, it would appear, the intensity of violencepeaked. Two periods of violence stand out in the chrono-logical profile of these cases. The first large bunching oc-curs from Case No. 16 to Case No. 113, covering a seven-

8 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

day period from 15 to 21 December. These cases were pre-sented to the Japanese in three separate briefs (DocumentNos. 15, 17, and 19) and were followed by an appeal to theJapanese embassy from the entire foreign community tointervene (Document No. 20). This was the first wave ofviolence in the wake of the Japanese occupation of thecapital, when soldiers were left free to run wild in a panicof rape, theft, and incendiary violence.

The second period of intensity is the seven-day orgybetween 28 January and 3 February (Case No. 220 toCase No. 406, in Document Nos. 57,58,61, and 62). Thiswave of violence, when almost half the incidents that theInternational Committee catalogued took place, occurredover six weeks after the capital fell. The excuses of battlestress generally used to explain Japanese troop miscon-duct-hunger, fatigue, lack of supervision, fear, frustrationat discovering that they would not be returning homesoon-hardly apply so long after the initial capture of thecity. The occasion for this outbreak was a proclamationthat the Japanese military authorities issued on 28 Janu-ary ordering the people to return to their residences. Therefugee camps where they had huddled were to be closeddown on 4 February. Over half the housing stock in thecity had been destroyed by the end of -Ianuary,?but thosewho had homes to return to began to do so, hoping thatthe worst was over and that they could reclaim the liveli-hoods that the assault on the city had taken from them.The International Committee chose to cooperate with theJapanese authorities after seeking assurances for thesafety of the returnees and posted notices encouragingpeople to follow the order. But those who tried to return totheir residences found themselves unprotected once out-side the Safety Zone. Japanese soldiers swooped down onthem like birds of prey in an outbreak of rape and robberythat went on for a week. The International Committee

Introduction 9

protested by collecting and submitting four "Notes onPresent Situation." At the end of the second brief (Docu-ment No. 58) Lewis Smythe added an emphatic note de-claring, "This List is Incomplete," and reminding the Japa-nese consul-general, "This is the longest list of cases wehave ever had to file." The reminder appears to have ac-complished nothing, as the attacks continued for severalmore days. The briefs did achieve one thing, however: theycreated a documentary record of a wave of violence thatwe might otherwise have failed to notice.

This observation brings us to the historical significanceof Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone. First of all, thepublication attests to the International Committee's suc-cess in creating a refuge to protect and relieve civilians.This it did despite constant pressure from the Japanese todisband and hand over its resources to Japanese manage-ment. Chinese who survived the Rape and escaped to un-occupied China wrote glowingly in the following months ofthe committee's work.'? But it is worth noting that not ev-eryone thought the Zone had been a good thing. As earlyas April 1938, an American consular official from Tokyo,Coville Cabot, visited Nanking and reported back to Wash-ington that "the Nanking safety zone was a mistake. Nomi-nally for civilian protection, it was really for American, Ger-man, and wealthy Chinese property." Given his insistencethat the sinking of the American warship Panay duringthe Japanese aerial attack on Nanking was the shipcommander's own fault, and his confident prediction thatthe Japanese were overextended and would soon face de-feat in China, his judgments in hindsight are not persua-sive.But he was not alone among foreign critics. He appearsto have picked up his jaded view of the Zone from P. R.Shields, a British businessman who had remained inNanking until 23 December and then escaped temporarilyto Shanghai. Shields had actually been a member of the

10 Documents on the Rape of Nanking In trod uction 11

International Committee until mid-December. DuringCabot's visit to Nanking, Shields complained that the In-ternational Committee had only pretended to have humani-tarian regard for Chinese civilians. The Zone had reallybeen laid out to serve partisan (i.e.,American and German)interests. Worst of all, it had failed to include the Britishegg-packing plant that he managed for the InternationalExport Company. The loss of his factory subsequentlycaused him to reject what it had done. According to Cabot,Shields "feels that the Japanese were fully warranted inrejecting the zone, and his opinion is that the proposal wasa dishonorable one, meriting the Japanese scorn which hebelieves it received. He regrets that his name was in anyway associated with the project."!' It would seem thatShields's condemnation rested on an aggrieved sense of fi-nancialloss (egg exports had collapsed) and isolation as thesole remaining Brit surrounded by Germans and Ameri-cans.

This jaundiced view of the International Committee asan agent of German and American interests was resur-rected by the Chinese government in 1951, when propa-gandists raked through every historical incident involvingAmericans in China in search of evidence to whip up anti-American sentiment during the Korean War. The particu-lar event they latched onto was the committee's notifica-tion to the Japanese that Chinese prisoners of war hadtaken refuge in the Safety Zone (which is laid out clearlyin Document Nos. 1,4, 10, and 11).The committee did thisto deflect any claim by the CCAA that it had the right toenter the Safety Zone to ferret out undeclared soldiers. Itassumed that the Japanese would handle captured Chi-nese soldiers according to the international conventions ofGeneva and The Hague regarding prisoners of war. Thatthey didn't came as a bitter shock, as Searle Bates indi-cates in his lengthy memorandum on the issue (Document

No. 50). The incident was nonetheless held up as an ex-ample ofAmerican willingness to sacrifice Chinese to pro-tect its own interests. This inverted view of the Rape asan example ofAmerican perfidy has not prevailed, though.A glowingly positive assessment of the committee's workis now enshrined in Chinese public opinion."

The International Committee's work to protect humanlife and dignity during those two months in Nankingcounts for half of its achievement. The other half is theauthoritative documentary record that it left behind.Many of the committee's members understood that theywere witness to an event of historical significance and feltcompelled to assemble a record of what they saw. As JohnRabe noted in his diary toward the end of January, "we'reall writing reports.'?" These reports have proven to be oftremendous importance in helping to make possible thememory of the Rape in the detail that we now have. Get-ting the story of Japan's conduct out to the world at thetime was not easy. Diplomatic concerns about handlingJapan with kid gloves during the early months of the warresulted in a ban on publication from the Chinese side be-fore Nanking fell, to Rabe's great distress. "It's a cryingshame that the European war reporters who are still herecan't tell the whole truth," he wrote in his diary on 10 De-cember." That ban was then followed by another, imposedthis time by the Japanese, who did everything they couldto prevent both foreign and Japanese reports from reach-ing the international media. Three American journalistsslipped out of Nanking on 15 December and broke thestory of the massacre in the international press threedays later, yet the depth of Japanese barbarity seemed soextraordinary that many readers were inclined to doubtthe reports. Then silence followed. Reporters could not getback into Nanking, Japanese journalists were muzzled,and the foreigners who remained there were unable to get

12 Documents on the Rape of Nanking In trod uction 13

any reports out. The latter also feared that to do so wouldonly cause them to be expelled from the city, thereby mak-ing things worse for the Chinese they strove to protect.

The first extended account of the Rape of Nanking wasput together by Harold John Timperley of the ManchesterGuardian and published late in 1938.15 But it was thepublication of Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone in1939 that placed before readers a thorough and relativelydispassionate account of the conduct of the Japanesearmy in Nanking. The book's compiler, Hsu Shuhsi, was apolitical scientist and advisor to the Ministry of ForeignAffairs. He edited the documents on behalf of the Councilof International Affairs, an officially sponsored public in-terest organization operating in the wartime capital ofChungking." Hsu had included some of these documentsin The War Conduct of the Japanese, published the previ-ous year," but in Documents he provided a more completerecord of the International Committee's work. The bookwas distributed widely by the Chinese government imme-diately after publication in the hope of garnering inter-national support for its struggle against Japan. IS

Hsu does not intervene in what the book presents orhow it presents it. The book's voice remains exclusivelythat of the documents' foreign authors. The Western voicein which the documents speak deserves some attention.Did the Westerners play up their own role in the workof securing the safety of the citizens of the capital, to theneglect of Chinese efforts? A tendency to celebrate theirown work would not be surprising. (Bear in mind thatthe other side of celebration was anguish: several of theWesterners most active in the rescue effort sufferedbreakdowns after leaving China; one, Minnie Vautrin,committed suicide.) Yet only Westerners had the luxury ofspeaking. Chinese are credited in the early misconductbriefs as informants, their names appearing in parenthe-

ses following the cases they reported, but that practicewas discontinued after 26 December (Document No. 25 be-ing the last). Such disclosure proved to be a liability. AsSmythe reveals much later in a note at the end of Docu-ment No. 58, "The names of the Chinese reporting thecases are not given, because we have had one such workerkilled and another seriously threatened." Chinese diddedicate themselves to the work of helping ordinarypeople survive, but for the most part their efforts had tobe kept out of sight. Hints of their activism and braverysurface from time to time in the internal memoranda thatmake up the second stream of documents. One unusualexample is Wang Ch'eng-tien, or "Jimmy Wang" as he wasknown to the foreigners. Wang is named in several memo-randa, most conspicuously in Document No. 49. In theeyes of many he should have been thoroughly discreditedfor being a member of the Self-Government Committee,the puppet administration that the Japanese set up to col-laborate with them. Yet, as Document No. 49 attests,Jimmy Wang made strenuous efforts to secure food for therefugees, despite difficulties imposed by the Japanese."

One other aspect of the documentary voice, particu-larly in the first stream of letters and statements, is itspolite, even obsequious, tone. John Rabe understood thathe was in a weak position, whatever credit he might beable to claim as a foreigner, as a German, and better still(in Japanese eyes, at least) as a Nazi. He had to playlargely a bluffing game in which the Japanese held all thecards and could act however they wanted with impunity.His only hope was to minimize all possible extraneousfrictions, especially with the Japanese consular officials,and to phrase his appeals in the language of generosity,reason, and gratitude-even when he knew that none ofthese civilities applied." It was, as Searle Bates put it sovividly, "torture" to deal with these people. But Rabe felt

14 Documents on the Rape of Nanking Introduction 15

that he had no choice but to close his letters, as he some-times did, by sending his "kindest personal regards." TheAmericans in Nanking tended to resist Rabe's pragmaticapproach to cooperation, creating a degree of tensionwithin the committee."

However much the roles, motives, and self-representa-tions of the International Committee might seem conten-tious, the real controversy surrounding the Japanese occu-pation of Nanking today is the refusal of some Japanese toacknowledge the scale, even the existence, of the atrocity.Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone constitutes one ofthe surest bodies of evidence that Japanese misconductwas widespread, that it was unnecessary (there havingbeen no significant resistance to the Japanese once theyentered the city), that Chinese soldiers were treated with-out respect for international rules of conduct in war, andthat Chinese civilians suffered in the extremity. Still,there is much that Documents of the Nanking Safety Zonedoes not show and cannot resolve. Two of the leading is-sues in the controversy over the Rape of Nanking are theaccountability ofthe Japanese high command for the mas-sacre and the numbers of people the Japanese soldiers ac-tually killed. The book reveals nothing regarding how de-cisions were made on the Japanese side, beyond exposingthe impotence of the consular staff to intercede with theCCAA.And it is a poor source for mortality statistics: indi-vidual and group murders were recorded as they hap-pened, and numbers were assigned to these incidentswhere possible, but final figures were not to be had. Laterthat spring, in a written text submitted to Adolf Hitler,Rabe would estimate the death toll of civilians within thecity at between 50,000 and 60,000. He did not includemilitary casualties or the executions of prisoners of war,nor did he have any access to information regarding the

extent of the killing that went on beyond the city wallsand out of the foreigners' sight."

In recent years the unpublished writings of severalmembers of the International Committee have beenbrought to light to supplement the record that Documentsof the Nanking Safety Zone provides. John Rabe's diary,published for the first time in 1997, offers the most de-tailed account by a committee member. But other mem-bers produced written records too. One of them was Dr.Robert Wilson. Wilson was one of three American medicaldoctors (along with C. S. Trimmer and James McCallum)who remained at the University Hospital to care for thewounded and the only surgeon left in the city when theJapanese took over. In a letter written to his family on 15December, Wilson wrote: "The slaughter of civilians is ap-palling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape andbrutality almost beyond belief" And this is precisely whathe did, in a series of twenty-three letters written between9 December 1937 and 13 February 1938, plus a summarytwenty-fourth letter of 7 March. Although Wilson waswriting these letters for his family, he realized that he wascut off and could not send the letters out as he wrotethem. He continued writing them nonetheless, producingthe equivalent of a diary through the worst weeks of theoccupation. The information in these letters not only con-firms but augments the record in the official Safety Zonedocuments. (In the last letter of 7 March Wilson offerswhat he calls a "conservative estimate" of the number whodied in the city, 100,000.)Wilson's writing also conveys thedistress of living through the Rape that does not perhapscome through as clearly in the more detached tone of theofficial documents. The International Committee hashanded down sparely worded documentation about thework that it undertook; Robert Wilson shows us suffering

16 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

at close range. The letters, reproduced here as the secondset of documents in part 1, remind us that no statisticalcalculation or policy analysis can do justice to an experi-ence that most of us will never know and can barely imag-ine."

At this point in the book we move from the records ofthe Rape of Nanking to the postwar judgments. The con-nection from the one to the other is direct, for the experi-ences of the International Committee would prove to be ofmore than just historical interest. When the InternationalMilitary Tribunal for the Far East (lMTFE) convened inTokyo after the war to try selected Japanese for warcrimes, the prosecution read substantial portions of Hsu'sbook into the record." It examined Searle Bates and JohnMagee as witnesses and filed affidavits by Lewis Smythe,George Fitch, and James McCallum, among others."(Robert Wilson was also called on to testify, although, as itturned out, he did not appear.) Given this input, it ishardly surprising to discover that the committee hadgreat influence in shaping the tribunal's perception ofJapanese military conduct during the occupation ofNanking. That perception was sufficient to convict CCAAcommander General Matsui Iwane and Foreign MinisterHirota Koki of war crimes.

Matsui was excused on all counts up to and includingcount 54, which charged the accused with "having con-spired to order, authorize or permit" his subordinates to"commit breaches of the laws and customs of war." But hewas found guilty of count 55, the last in the Tokyo indict-ment. Count 55 charged him with being one of the seniorfigures in the Japanese government who "recklessly disre-garded their legal duty by virtue of their offices to takeadequate steps to secure the observance and preventbreaches of the laws and customs of war.?" By makingfailure to prevent war crimes a crime against humanity,

Introduction 17

the IMTFE set a new precedent in international law, onethat had not been invoked at Nuremberg, where the sin ofomission was not an indictable offense. On this count, andon this count alone, Matsui was condemned and executed.The IMTFE also found Hirota guilty of omission undercount 55, among others. In justifying its decisions, the tri-bunal reconstructed the occupation of Nanking by closelyfollowing the account that the International Committeemembers provided, as one can see from the concise narra-tive of the event that appears in the judgment. The por-tions of the judgment relating to the Rape of Nanking areexcerpted here as the first of the two documents makingup part 2.27

Many of the death sentences delivered at Tokyo in1948 passed by only a bare majority, and several membersof the tribunal produced dissenting opinions. The mostextensive by far was the 1,235-page judgment byRadhabinod Pal, a highly respected member of the HighCourt of Calcutta. From the beginning Pal was out of sym-pathy with what he regarded as the vindictive orientationof some of his colleagues on the bench. With great legalcare and in extraordinary detail, Pal laid out a host of ob-jections: to the constitution and jurisdiction of the tribu-nal, to the concept of aggressive war on which it based itsfindings, to the tribunal's loose rules of evidence and pro-cedure, and, finally, to the arguments put forth to find theaccused guilty, especially the argument of omission incount 55. He regarded the judgment as victor's justice andrejected all convictions on every count. The sections ofPal's copious opinion bearing on the Rape and the indict-ments of Matsui and Hirota appear as the second docu-ment in part 2 of this book."

The Rape of Nanking attracted Pal's attention not onlybecause of its importance in securing the indictment oftwo of the twenty-five Class A war criminals at Tokyo. Pal

18 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

also observed that the prosecution put the Rape to explicituse in order to make its larger case against Japan as hav-ing conducted its war criminally. Not surprisingly, theAmerican-dominated prosecution was concerned to exposeand punish the Japanese who had severely mistreatedAmerican servicemen in the Pacific without regard for thestandard protections usually extended to prisoners of war.Wanting to bring convictions for those acts, the prosecu-tion used the Rape of Nanking as the moment of origin fora long series of "similar atrocities" stretching out acrossSoutheast Asia and into the Pacific. By tying the treat-ment ofAmerican soldiers to the treatment of Chinese ci-vilians, the prosecution could present Japan's "atrociousconduct" (Pal's characterization of the prosecution's view)as an unbroken chain of incidents, the continuity of whichproved that the conduct was consistent and thereforemust have emanated from the central government. Byfailing to respond adequately when it learned of the Rape,the Japanese government conspired in inviting furtheratrocities. The Rape of Nanking anchored that chain ofcriminality for the prosecution, and Pal doubted that itwas fair to burden the incident in this way.

Pal did not dispute that the Japanese soldiers who en-tered Nanking committed criminal acts. He accepted that"the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities wereperpetuated by the members of the Japanese armed forcesagainst the civilian population." Injury was done. But hewas unhappy with the extra moral burdens that he feltthe prosecution laid on the event. Even the name of theevent, the Rape of Nanking, was part of this burdening,and Pal sought to dispute the discursive work it did by de-clining to capitalize the term and in most instances in-stalling the word rape in quotation marks. The burdenNanking was meant to carry was only made more prob-lematic by what he regarded as the tribunal's credulous

Introduction 19

acceptance of all accounts of atrocities that the prosecu-tion brought forward (he singled out the testimony ofJohn Magee, among others, in this regard). More signifi-cantly, he disagreed with the criminal responsibility forthe Rape that Matsui and Hirota were made to bear. Paldid not find that Matsui had omitted to regulate the con-duct of his troops, stressing that both the general and hisgovernment attempted on several occasions to bring theunruly soldiers to heel. Nor did he believe that ForeignMinister Hirota was criminally liable for his failure to in-tervene with the War Ministry. Their failure he attributed,rather, to a breakdown in the "machinery" of military or-ganization; in neither case was it the outcome of studiedinaction-though he was in any case in disagreement withthe legal validity of count 55 in introducing omission inwar crimes.

Pal's judgment has been praised by those who insistthat the IMTFE victimized Japan rather than dispensedjustice. For that very reason, however, it has been assailedfrom other quarters for dismissing the notion that Japanshould be made to bear any responsibility for the war," Infact, Pal's judgment has been largely ignored outside Ja-pan. This is unfortunate, for his lengthy reflection on thedifficulties of assigning war guilt deserves a more carefulassessment than either side of the controversy has beenwilling to give. We might make best sense of Pal's objec-tions by recognizing that he went to Tokyounwilling to ac-cept the assumption governing the tribunal, which wasthat the issues raised by the war could be resolved byfinding individuals only on the losing side guilty. As bothsides had committed atrocities, both should be indicted forwar crimes-though to do that assumes, as Pal did not,that the international law in place before the war was ad-equate to hear this sort of case in a court of law.His largerargument, however, was against the applicability of the

20 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

charge of "aggressive war." The West had been engaging inaggressive war in Asia for centuries; until an accountingwas made there, there could be no "even justice" for Ja-pan." The more urgent issue for world peace in any casewas not how to gratify the West's desire for vengeance buthow to make justice feasible in the shadow of atomicweapons and the Cold War that such weapons were inten-sifying.

Pal's opposition to the guiding assumptions of the tri-bunal was evident to the rest of the bench. The Dutchjudge, B. V.A. Roling, when he was interviewed three de-cades later, recalled that Pal had "resented colonial rela-tions. He had a strong feeling about what Europe did inAsia, conquering it a couple of hundred years ago, andthen ruling and lording it from so far way." Roling saidthat Pal accepted Japan's slogan of ''Asia for the Asians"and regarded the war as just because it was waged "to lib-erate Asia from the Europeans,"!' On a separate occasionRoling worried that Pal's endorsement of Japan's right toliberate Asia blinded him to the more important purposeof the Tokyo trial, which in Roling's view was to demon-strate that inherited injustices could no longer be re-dressed by war." Yet from a different point of view-thatof one of the Japanese defense lawyers who served at theIMTFE-Pal's refusal to join in punishing Japan by mak-ing it alone responsible for the war crimes of the preced-ing decade marked him as the only true advocate of genu-ine world peace on the tribunal." As it happens, Rolingalso filed a dissenting opinion, though he dissented onlyin part. Like Pal, he argued that Foreign Minister Hirotacould not be held responsible for what had happened inNanking. Unlike Pal, however, Roling did not disagreewith the judgment on Matsui: the IMTFE had been cor-rect in finding the commander of the army criminally li-able for not acting sufficiently or effectively to alleviate orredress the Rape of Nanking.

Introduction 21

There is no record of what Pal made of the youngChinese judge on the Tokyo bench, Mei Ju-ao. Mei was aChicago-trained lawyer, but he was a foreign affairs politi-cian loyal to the Nationalist Party rather than a judge.Roling quickly spotted him as one of those who "stood forvery severe punishments."34 Mei appears to have re-stricted himself simply to supporting the majority deci-sion on all matters, particularly executions. One canreadily imagine that the notion of "Asia for the Asians"would have been anathema to him, since in practice itprecluded "China for the Chinese." What, then, was thelikelihood that he could have accepted a legal decisionthat relieved Matsui of responsibility for the Rape ofNanking?

But Mei was not the only partisan on the bench. Pal inhis closing "Recommendations" expresses a principled con-cern about the political purposes that the Tokyo trialended up serving, yet as it turns out his principles alsohad their partisan aspect. According to Roling, who cameto know him well, Radhabinod Pal had been involved dur-ing the war with the Indian National Army.'" This was themilitary force that the Japanese recruited from Indiantroops after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and sent againstBritish forces on the India-Burma border in 1943. As aneducated Calcuttan and a supporter of the Indian Na-tional Army, Pal shows himself to have been among thelarge Bengali following of the radical Indian nationalist,Subhas Chandra Bos. A prominent leader of the IndianNational Congress, Bos broke with Mohandas Gandhi af-ter World War II got under way. Bos turned first to Ger-many, then to Japan, to seek support for India's strugglefor independence. He saw the Indian National Army asthe revolutionary force that would drive the British out ofIndia. Like Bos, Pal accepted Japan's claim that it wagedwar to liberate Asia for Asians, and he arrived in Tokyowith that conviction fully formed. Nor did Pal's sympathy

22 Documents on the Rape of Nanking

waver over the course of the trial. After it was over, he vis-ited the condemned men in prison to express his respectfor what they had done. "Youwere the leaders of Japan,"he told them. "Through that leadership Asia was liber-ated.?" And in a sense this was true: World War II didbreak Europe's colonial hold over Asia, and some Japa-nese after the war felt entitled to congratulate themselvesfor their part in bringing about that emancipation."

Yet one might wish to temper the glory that Pal wouldshed on that achievement by considering this irony: that,while warring on Asia's behalf, Japanese ended up killinginfinitely more of the Asians they sought to liberate thanthe Westerners they wanted to drive out. Whatever inten-tions the leaders of the military Japanese state espoused,their practice was war against Asians. Or is this morethan irony? Does it give the lie to the claim of Asia forAsians? Does it reduce Pal's lofty ideal of "even justice" tosomething that simply justifies any means along the way?

If the verdicts on the Rape of Nanking that were madein Tokyo seem unstable, so too must our own. Like Pal andthe other judges on the Tokyo bench, we make judgmentson historical events that are at least as deeply tangled inour own concerns as they are in the circumstances inwhich the events originally occurred. Being separated at agreater distance in time may make untangling them evenharder to do, because we are at a remove from the pres-sures that shaped the moral judgments of that time. Wehave only texts to work with. Texts almost never speakunambiguously, nor do they speak in the same way to dif-ferent listeners, and oftentimes that polyphony is beyondresolution. However powerful or disturbing the survivingaccounts of the Rape of Nanking may be, they are onlytexts, pale and partial transcriptions of events that hap-pened long ago. For them to persuade us in one directionor another, we must have already gone a certain distance

Introduction 23

in stablishing the reasons for their persuasion. Thosewho feel strongly about redressing past injustices mightconsider that no pile of documents can ever be largenough to account for, or explain with any sense of moral

completion, a sequence of events as gruesome as this. Noarchive, however full, and no transcript, however long, cancompletely hold the Rape of Nanking nor bear the fullweight of its significance nor provide a ready-made resolu-tion to the moral issues we see within it.

The memory of the Rape will never go away,but nor willthe ambiguities that have attached themselves to its judg-ment. Perhaps the best we can assert is simply this: thatthe more broadly we read the records of the past, the moreself-aware we may become in our negotiations with thepresent and the better equipped to approach the moralquestions through which we struggle to define and assertour humanity. Thinking in this vein, it might not be com-pletely amiss to invoke the spirit with which RadhabinodPal closed his dissenting judgment:

When times shall have softened passion and prejudice,when Reason shall have stripped the mask from misrepre-sentation, then justice, holding evenly her scales, will re-quire muchofpast censure and praise to changeplaces."

Notes1. Reprinted in ZhongguoDi'er Lishi Dang'anguan (China

Number TwoHistoricalArchives),ed., Qin Hua Rijun Nanjingdatusha dang'an (Documentson the Nanking massacre by theJapanese army that invaded China) (Nanjing: Jiangsu GujiChubanshe, 1987),524.After investigating the burial recordsofcharitable groups, the Nanking District Court submitted a re-duced estimate of 250,800dead to the Tokyotribunal on 4 No-vember1946;ibid., 553.