Rape Of Nanking Essay Research Paper Although

Rape Of Nanking Essay, Research Paper

Although many people thought that the World War II started in Europe, it actually had roots in Asia with the rape of Nanking. Between December of 1937 and March 1938, at least 369,366 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war (POWs) were slaughtered by the invading Japanese troops. An estimated 80,000 women and girls were raped; many of them were then mutilated or murdered. Thousands of victims were beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled. To this day the Japanese government has refused to apologize for these and other World War II atrocities, and a significant sector of Japanese society denies that they took place at all.

It all started in the early 1930s when Japan began its industrial revolution. They were made up of 142,270 square miles, much of it barren, and they had to feed over 6 million mouths. What they couldn t understand and believed was unfair was the fact that other countries such as Australia and Canada have more than 3 million square miles to feed 6.5 million people each. They fought the injustice of it all since these countries weren t even making the most of the land that they had like the Japanese were. The Japanese felt China their manifest destiny as America did the west many years ago. They felt they needed to free Asia and allow them to prosper, since they were considered the 3rd largest power in the world at the time. With all the new technology that Japan has now, the Japanese government found itself anxious to use it to build a better society. But there was great influence by the people to use the nation s military superiority over its neighbors. They wanted to start a foreign conquest. And so it was. Every economical and political obstacle to Japan s divine mission was destroyed and the plan to free Asia was underway.

In 1932, a group of naval officers launched a terrorist attack in Tokyo that killed Prime Minister Inukai Tsuyoshi and attempted to settle in the Martial Law. With this done, the people of Japan who were supporting the duty of Japan to become a dominant force in Asia knew they had to move fast. Earlier that century, Japan and China had many wars between each other and China was just beginning to recover from the damages. They were still weak and Japan knew that they could carry out their plan without any resistance from the Chinese government.

By the 1930s, the Japanese had launched an undeclared war with China. It was on September 18, 1931, the Japanese army blew up the tracks of a Japanese owned railway in southern Manchuria, hoping to incite an incident. Many Chinese rebelled against the Japanese for this but Japan was not going to allow the rest of the world to know about the incidents that were occurring so they took the necessary tasks to be sure of the secrecy. Japan isolated themselves from the international community and withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933.

It wasn t now that the Japanese had to prepare their country for war, for they had done it for decades before. Toyshops became virtual shrines to war, selling arsenals of toy soldiers, tanks, helmets, uniforms, rifles, antiaircraft guns, bugles, and howitzers. Schools taught their male students to hate the Chinese, how to use guns, and their textbooks became vehicles for military propaganda; one geography book even used the shape of Japan as justification for expansion: We appear to be standing in the vanguard of Asia, advancing bravely into the Pacific. At the same time we appear ready to defend the Asian continent from outside attack.

It wasn t until the summer of 1937 that Japan finally succeeded in provoking a full-scale war with China. But conquering China seemed to me much more of a task than Japan expected. Their first setback occurred when they were bringing 35,000 troops into China as reinforcements. Hidden was Chinese artillery, which opened fire killing several hundred men. Yet still the Japanese boasted that they would be able to conquer all of China within three months, but little did they know that the petite city of Shanghai would take them almost nine months to defeat. All hopes of an easy capture of China held by the Japanese were crushed. It was after this battle that the Japanese really felt their hate for the Chinese and their plans became ugly and revengeful as they headed for Nanking.

It was on the morning of December 13, 1937 that Japan, under Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, entered into China and the forgotten holocaust had officially begun. About 50,000 soldiers from Japan occupied China s capital, Nanking, and for six to eight weeks, many horrible events took place. It was noted in one man s diary that each Japanese soldier took four hundred heads a day in Nanking which was enough to leave the them exhausted at the day s end and many Japanese soldiers had to take a break midday to rest their arms. But the worse of it was the methods that the Chinese were killed.

In Nanking, men, women, and children were tortured and raped daily by the Japanese. Babies were thrown in the air and used as target practice as they came down. People were buried alive, sometimes only waist deep so the Japanese German Shepherds could rip them into pieces. Women s breasts were cut off and men were castrated. People were burned, frozen, mutilated, shot, decapitated, medically experimented on (without anesthesia), blown up with dynamite, and killed in every imagin