December 1937
Sitting peacefully in our own individuals homes with the protection of it from strangers and rain. That is what many of us hope a home would be. But there was an incident in history long forgotten by many people. Many of us will be displeased to hear anything related during the holocaust during the Second World War but there was another heart breaking incident that has made me feel the same type of pain and sorrow that Iris Chang felt. After months of researching and reading online regarding witness accounts and stories this incident has truly horrified me to the point that the roots of my soul have shaken. The topic we will be talking about today is known as the Nanjing Massacre.
The Nanjing Massacre, which was also referred to as the Rape of Nanjing, was seen as one of the most dreadful events in the context of modern history, lasting for six weeks of unprecedented violence, from December 1937 to January 1938, after the imperial army of Japan had taken over Nanjing, then capital of the Republic of China during the Second Sino Japanese War. Once the city surrendered on 13th December 1937 the Japanese forces initiated a series of acts that included the mass slaughter of civilians ranging from the elderly to even children, burning down the city, and the widely spread sexual violence that ruined the city's infrastructure and the people’s spirits. Different historians have come up with different figures for the numbers of people killed, but the majority of the scholars and the International Military Tribunal for the Far East concur that 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese non combatants and soldiers were exterminated in a systematic manner. The execution of victims was mostly performed using bayonets, machine guns, and fire. In some cases, it even became a matter of military "contests" where soldiers would compete in killing the most people.
An estimated 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped including small girls and the elderly, and the majority of the victims were either mutilated or murdered afterwards to get rid of the evidence with a spree of rape and murder happening throughout the city. Pregnant women were also included in the list of victims some of them were raped and then disembowelled with their babies literally ripped from the womb. Families were broken up; men were often shot in front of their relatives and then the women from that family were raped. The city was hit by widespread looting, burning, and destruction, and the mass graves and dead bodies floating in the Yangtze River were the horrible reminders of the calamity. The horror was not only witnessed by the few foreigners from the outside but also by the Chinese people, as the atrocities went on mainly unrestrained. It was seen heartbreaking that there was not any more support for the city of Nanjing and the fact that families had to watch each other get torn apart in front of each other.
By late January 1938, when the killing finally stopped, Nanjing was a city of death and destruction with its population reduced from about 600,000 to some 200,000 survivors. The event shocked the world and is today a highly charged page in Chinese history. It is a point of memory and controversy and represents the horrific human cost of militarism and the imperative need for historical accountability and peace. The event will hold a place in my heart as a rip that could never be sown back again. The heartless nature of the individuals from Japan who committed this atrocity have not yet issued an apology or shown any remorse for their actions. This is a reminder to everyone to value human life, forgiveness will always be the better route but for me this will take a few more years for me to truly forgive the Japanese for what they have done similar with the Nazis in WW2 in Germany.
Xin Yu 11/10/2025
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