Small World, Big City: Rape of Nanjing

Having been an international relations major, I studied World War II extensively, since so much of the current world order is founded based on its aftermath, including the creation of the United Nations. As a result, Berlin was my favorite city in Europe, because it was such a key site for historical events from the end of WWII and the Cold War that followed. Similarly, Nanjing is my favorite city in China. I've always liked history books, because they tell a story. Imagine being able to visit the place where Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones takes place. To me, that is visiting Nanjing.

I read Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking when I was 11 or 12, and it made a strong impression on me then and still does today. The horrors of WWII strike us so profoundly, not only because it is fairly recent, but also because of the technology that finally enabled us to document atrocities. Photographs were published in newspapers and magazines, and at that point the world had grown interconnected enough that there were foreign missions in many countries around the world. War crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are terms coined in the last century, but they are by no means new phenomena. They have been perpetuated long before WWII, but hopefully will no longer continue.

When I wrote my personal essay for law school, I had said that I wanted to go to law school because I wanted to combat impunity, and help prevent and punish the worst expressions of racism, including the three crimes mentioned above. In particular, so much of my extracurricular activities had been devoted to promoting cultural harmony exchange because I grew up as a minority, and definitely experienced racism, but not to such an extreme extent. The idea that people could hate each other so much that they could not only kill, but take delight in torturing, other human beings, is something that I have devoted a lot of academic study to. As a result, I pursued an LLM in international criminal law, and took classes on the law of genocide as well as the work of the tribunals and the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals are a precedence for international criminal law, as it is the first time international military tribunals were established to judge the actions of soldiers and officers during times of war. There had already been laws concerning behavior during wartime, as enshrined in the four Geneva conventions, which were completely violated across the globe during WWII. Rwanda, Former Yugoslavia, the Holocaust, the wars against the Native Americans and other aboriginal peoples, are other examples in recent history. The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, are modeled after the WWII Tribunals, and they also set examples for the Courts for Sierra Leone and Cambodia, as well as the International Criminal Court. I visited the holocaust museum in Washington DC and several holocaust memorials while in Germany, and the memorial dedicated to the Rwandan genocide in Kigali, but the Nanking museum is probably the most extensive and large one that I have been to.

I spent about seven hours total at this memorial, letting the IR, history, and law geek in me go wild over all of the exhibits. This will be a very long post. When you walk into the memorial, there is an enormous statue of a mother in anguish, holding the broken body of her dead child. What I thought was incredibly weird was that people stood smiling to take photos with this statue, that honestly just makes you feel wretched right away when you look at it. Walking towards the entrance, there are numerous other morbid statues, with captions that refer to the "devil" invaders. Notably, the entire memorial strongly promotes peace and forgiveness, though that message comes later on. Right away though, as with all of the other museums dedicated to the victims of international crimes, you feel a heaviness in the air.

A huge monument outside says, in several languages, "300,000 victims." The memorial itself is actually built on top of a mass grave of 10,000 victims. As you walk in, you go through security check, and they make you drink or throw away any liquids that you have. The security guard is rather gruff. Entrance to the memorial is free, so they get a lot of visitors. The guard barks something at me. I can't understand so I say, to verify, "water is not allowed?"

He barks back, "don't you see all these bottles??? We have RULES here." He gets distracted by people taking photos and forgets to keep yelling at me and barks, "stop holding up the line!! No photos in this room!!"

The first room is dimly lit, with only the sound of a Buddhist gong in the background. There are several places in the memorial with lists of victims' names and faces. It does get really crowded in the afternoon, so luckily I had gone in the morning the first time around. I hadn't expected it to be so big, so I had to split up my visit. I had been in there for four hours and was starving. Since entrance was free I had expected to be able to leave for lunch and come back, but found a crazy line to enter when I had returned, so decided to just come back the next day.

The exhibits go into great detail, starting with the beginning of Japan's plans to invade China, and the detailed description of the Marco Polo bridge incident that served as an excuse to launch a full scale invasion of China, and the fall of various Chinese cities before the Japanese had surrounded Nanjing on three sides. There are so many photographs that I had never seen before, and carefully preserved historical items, like the badges on Chinese and Japanese uniforms, careens and cooking ware, munitions and arms, and propaganda fliers for the war. Parts of the exhibits include the capture of various parts of the city wall around Nanjing, and biographies of soldiers on both sides who participated, as well as witnesses to what happened.

There was an enormous civilian population within Nanjing. After the fall of Nanjing and the retreat of the Chinese army, Nanjing became a complete blood bath of slaughter, rape and torture. Under the excuse that soldiers may be hiding among civilians, hordes of men were rounded up and systematically executed. It may have started with the men, but soon it was just everyone. Towards the end of the exhibit, they had something called the 12 second wall, in which every twelve seconds, there was the sounds of a drop of water and a crash, and a different victim's face would light up on a screen, to signify that the rate of killed during that time period was essentially one person every 12 seconds.

In my law of genocide class, we talked about how the first step in genocide is to create "us" versus "them." The more the "other" is degraded, the less human they become, until killing them becomes nothing more than slaughtering a chicken or a pig. The photos are very graphic, and I'm surprised that so many small children were brought in to look at that. Women with swords or other items shoved up their vaginas, lying naked waist down and dead, severed heads lined up, bodies piled up, dead children, injured victims, and people being executed. The museum has many items that were donated to them, many by families of people who were in the war. They have the scissors and other medical items that were used in the Japanese human experimentation program. One of the most upsetting things about this program, aside from the obvious atrocities of humans being experimented on, is that the head of the program was given amnesty in exchange for letting the US have access to all of the data that he gained. He was never punished, though I suppose the data might have helped save lives later...or used in some biochemical warfare program...

They had several exhibits relating to the comfort women. In Nanjing, thousands of women and girls were violently raped, from the ages of 11 to 80. In order to cut down on rape, the Japanese government established "comfort houses," which Chinese, Korean and Taiwanese women were captured as sex slaves for the Japanese soldiers. An average looked woman would be raped about 10 times a day, while a pretty one would be raped about 40. They had talcum powder produced by the Japanese that said things like "glory to the army," etc etc, and coins that comfort woman had to wear, like a badge. There were photographs of these comfort houses, and a model of one, as well as pictures of pregnant comfort women and some of their stories. There was also a sample of the paper that men used--they looked at photographs, and checked the box of which girl they wanted to rape.

Another large section was devoted to foreigners in Nanjing who not only saved many civilians, but also testified later when the Tokyo Tribunals were established. John Rabe kept a diary during his time in Nanjing, which I also read. He is credited for saving 200,000 civilians in a safety zone that he established, under the Nazi banner, since Japan then had been allied with Germany. He was later de-nazified because he did not obey Germany's orders to stop interfering with Japan, and was given the highest honor from the Chinese government (medal or Jade, I forget the name). Many photographs, as well as written and oral testimony from these foreigners, became essential for documenting what happened in Nanjing. They also had a collection of medical flags from the war, including the Red Cross, red swastika, and a flag with the Nationalist Sun on it. They had gauze masks used by volunteers who buried bodies back then. There were so many that they couldn't even burn them all.

One of the most interesting sections for me, having studied international criminal law, was the section on the Tokyo Tribunals. There were many photos of the Tribunal in progress, and they had the original spectacles, brush, and ink pad used by one of the Chinese judges. They also had a replica (I think) of the pen that was used to sign the Japanese surrender in Nanjing--the original is supposedly kept at Nanjing Museum but I wasn't able to find it there. They also had the robe that one of the attorneys wore in a defamation suit of a Chinese witness again people who claimed that she was lying about her testimony. There was also a very morbid, though interesting chain of events. Earlier they had shown two men who participated in a gruesome contest to see who could kill 100 chinese first. One reached 105, the other 106, and it was uncertain who had gotten to 100 first, so they decided to keep going to see who could get to 150 first. They were put on trial, and there were photos of them on trial, and later photos of them having their sentence carried out, which was death by firing squad. There were many photos of various war criminals on trial, as well as interesting information on trials for Chinese traitors.

After this section, they have an area where you can write down the names of any victims of the Nanjing Massacre that you might know, and who might not be in the system.

After this section was an entire floor devoted to general history of Japan's war in China, including the puppet regime in Manchuria, and the initial carving away of Chinese property, including Korea, Port Arthur and Taiwan. They have replicas of many of the treaties, including the Potsdam Declaration. This museum really was history come to life--there was the original table and chair used to sign one of the surrender documents. Some of the photographs included Japan's victory of several Chinese cities, photos of Japanese soldiers celebrating. Later, they had the same collection of photographs of the liberation of China, and the photographs of Chinese celebrating and welcoming in the Chinese army. I really like the one of Nanjing, in contrast to so many of the horrible photos of what happened here.

The identity of the city really is tied to what it experienced during the war, maybe more so than any other Chinese city. Towards the end of the exhibit, were sections devoted to showing efforts to preserve the memory of what happened in Nanjing and promote peace, including peace between China and Japan, though tensions still exist today.

Outside, you can also see excavated sections of the mass grave, human bones.

Behind the memorial is a peace park, with a large statue of a women holding a child and a dove. A large section here is devoted to members of the Japanese community that have helped to ensure that Nanjing is not forgotten. There are a series of chains of a thousand paper cranes donated from Japanese groups. Unfortunately I can't read, so I'm not entirely sure what they say (actually I have no idea at all what they say). I first heard about the 1000 cranes from a book called Sadako and the 1000 paper cranes, about a young girl with leukemia from the atomic bomb who tried to fold these cranes, hoping that if she makes 1000 of them her wish will be granted and she will live. She dies before she can finish folding them. I think, though I am not sure, that now the cranes are, in general, a symbol of peace, and remembrance of the suffering of everyone in WWII.

It is crucial to remember, but for future peace, it is just as crucial to forgive. I think that this is, very much so, why international tribunals exist, and why such work is important, whether in Nuremberg, Nanjing, Rwanda, Former Yugoslavia, or other places. I will end the post with a quote that I liked from one of the Chinese judges of the Tribunal. "I'm no revanchist. I have no intention of settling the blood debt committed by the Japanese militarists with the Japanese people. However, I believe that forgetting the suffering of the past may cause calamity in the future."

Photos: peace statue, one of the photos of the violence, and lastly children welcoming the chinese army into Nanjing after Japan's surrender.