"On December 9, the Japanese troops launched a massive attack upon the city. On the 12th, the defending Chinese troops decided to retreat to the other side of the Yangtze River (Yangzi Jiang). On December 13, the 6th and 16th Divisions of the Japanese Army entered the city’s Zhongshan and Pacific Gates. In the afternoon, two Japanese Navy fleets arrived. In the following six weeks, the occupying forces engaged in an orgy of looting and mass execution which came to be known as the Nanking Massacre. Most experts agree that at least 300,000 Chinese died, and 20,000 women were raped. Some estimate the numbers to be much higher - 340,000 and 80,000 respectively. The Japanese government, to this day, maintains that the death toll is greatly exaggerated, and some politicians have even claimed that the Massacre itself is a fabrication."
"Twenty-eight men, including former foreign ministers and high-ranking military officials, were tried in Tokyo by an international jury for their part in the leadership behind the Nanking Massacre. It became clear that Tokyo had known about the atrocities and ignored them, considering them wartime policies. Of the twenty-eight men, two died during the trials, one broke down and was admitted to a mental institution, and the remaining twenty-five were all found guilty on one or more charges. All were sentenced in 1948 either to death by hanging or life imprisonment, but by 1956 every one of them had been paroled.
Decades after the massacre, Japan began to deny much of the history of Nanking. Books were written which offered very different perspectives on the incident, some of which categorically denied that it had ever taken place. Even as late as 1990, there were top officials in the Japanese government who claimed that the massacre was fabricated. While there has since been official acknowledgement of the barbarity of Japanese forces during the war, largely due to international outrage at the Japanese cover-up attempts, apologies and efforts of compensation have not been forthcoming. To this date, Ikuhiko Hata's "Nanking Incident" is considered by the Japanese Ministry of Education to be the definitive historical text on the subject. This book puts the official death count between 38 000 and 42 000, and argues that the killing of enemy soldiers who have surrendered or been captured cannot be considered a massacre."
beasts
"The Japanese authorities were well aware of the horrors being performed by their men, but took no measures to stop them. Their behaviour, especially the attacks on women, was considered an outlet for their animal urges, a boost to the morale of the soldiers. These men made games of torturing their captives and finding new and cruel ways to kill them. In another effort to boost morale and make sport out of murder, the soldiers held contests to see who could rack up the most kills. The most famous example of this was a competition between two sub-lieutenants, Toshiaki Mukai and Takeshi Noda, who decided to race each other to one hundred kills. They had to extend this goal because it was unclear which one had committed his hundredth murder first, and then they eventually lost count."
One of the more shocking atrocities alleged to have taken place at Nanjing was a competition between two army officers called "hyakunin-kiri kyoso," literally "competition to remove 100 heads." As the term implies, the two unsheathed their swords and went looking for suspected stragglers from defeated Chinese army units, who had discarded their uniforms and were mingling with the general population.
Revisionists maintain the decapitation contest was no more than Chinese propaganda and that no such incident took place. This has been echoed in the media: the Sankei Shimbun and other publications have repeatedly asserted that accounts of the contest "were clear fabrications."
But journalist Toru Hoshi, writing in Shukan Kinyobi (April 23), provides what he claims to be new evidence of the atrocity in the microfiche archives of the Kagoshima-Okinawa edition of the Osaka Nichinichi Shimbun (forerunner of the Mainichi Shimbun). Dated Jan 25, 1938, the front-page article notes that the data had been provided by the leader of the "Noda Brigade," and reports that two Japanese army officers, Lt Toshiaki Mukai and Lt Takeshi Noda, had engaged in a competition to decapitate Chinese army stragglers, which ended with Mukai winning by a score of 106 heads to 105.
A photo of Lt. Noda appears with the story. The same article reports that Noda continued swinging his sword in until he had tallied up a total of 253 heads. The headline cites his pledge to continue until reaching 1,000.
The two officers' feats of swordsmanship were to inspire a fellow officer named Muguruma to compose a stirring song entitled "Hyakunin-kiri Nippon-to Kirimi no Uta" or "The ballad of the sharp-edged Japanese sword that could take off 100 heads." The song lyrics, which begin "This evening we part and from our home town, our sword glistening keenly in the moonlight... " are also provided in the text of the article.
The new evidence validates earlier media reports and eyewitness accounts, such as Akira Shishime's recollection of a meeting with Noda that appeared in the December 1971 issue of the monthly magazine "Chugoku" (China).
According to Shishime, when Noda returned to his home prefecture of Kagoshima in 1939, he visited a primary school where he told the students, "I was the warrior from our home district whose 100 beheadings contest was reported in the newspapers."
[ edited by tOMWiii on Aug 5, 2005 07:16 PM ]
[ edited by tOMWiii on Aug 5, 2005 07:21 PM ]
posted on August 6, 2005 04:29:42 AM new
Tom- This is very sad. It's hard to believe that human beings would do these things to others. Especially in a civilized world. We will never know the total figures, I'm sure.
"Fighting at the same intensity (it could not have been less) on Kyushu and Honshu, campaigns which would have lasted some 50 weeks, would have produced 80 to 100,000 American dead, and some 300 to 320,000 wounded. Are these casualties enough to justify Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
If morality is based on numbers, and in this case it must be, then perhaps not. But what is usually overlooked in this numbers game, is the number of Japanese killed on Okinawa, which amounts to a staggering 250,000 military and civilian, about 20 Japanese killed for every dead American. If we conduct the same calculation for an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, we arrive at a figure of at least two million Japanese dead.
The losses in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, but not as terrible as the number of Japanese who would have died as the result of an invasion. The revisionist historians of the 1960s - and their disciples - are quite wrong to depict the decision to use the bombs as immoral. It would have been immoral if they had not been used."
I'm just sick to death of revisionist history -- from deniers of the Shoah, to whiners over the BOMB!
The MANHATTAN PROJECT was the greatest engineering feat in history, and it saved probably 1 million JAPANESE lives!
