Nanjing

 In 1931, the Japanese Empire invaded China after a false-flag “provocation” and subjugated China’s northeastern provinces, creating a puppet state known as Manchukuo. Japanese rule in these provinces was rooted in the Japanese military (as opposed to the nominal civilian government in Tokyo), but was nominally enforced through a puppet Manchu emperor. Manchukuo’s Chinese civilian population was subjugated, set to labor on Japanese projects, and massive numbers of Japanese and Korean civilian laborers were moved into Manchukuo for economic development. This invasion was contested by the Chinese, but given the feeble Chinese military of the time, the only thing this resistance actually accomplished was increasing body counts and luring Japanese deeper into the interior. Japanese developments in occupied Manchukuo poured much-needed raw materials to factories on the Home Islands, fed Japanese soldiers, and served the desires of the Imperial Army as they constructed what looked a lot like a state within a state.

This state of affairs continued for five long years, until the summer of 1937. Japan exploited the terms of the Boxer Agreement (itself an imposition on Chinese sovereignty) to station a division of soldiers in and around Beijing as “guards” for the Japanese diplomats in the city. The Chinese armies in the area (both Republican and Communist) were already engaged in an uneasy truce, one which the Japanese were eager to exploit. The orchestrated chaos unleashed by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident led directly to the restart of open war between the Chinese and Japanese in mainland China (personally, I like the Chinese “War Against Japanese Aggression” as a label for this one, because it’s very much more accurate). The war was brutal, for both sides. Japanese soldiers were far from soft- remember, they’d been at war since 1931- but war in Japanese-controlled Manchukuo was far easier than war in Shaanxi or the more southernly and heavily-populated regions of China. Even against stiffening Chinese resistance from insurgents and the occasional military reverse, Japanese technological and tactical advantages made the summer and fall of 1937 a season of victory. Key Chinese cities fell- Beijing, Dachang, and ultimately the capture of Shanghai itself after a long, bloody and hard-fought campaign that spanned the autumn of 1937. Japanese soldiers, conditioned to expect an easy win, were frustrated and bloodied by Chinese resistance as they turned their eyes towards Nanjing, the capital city of the Republic of China.

Chinese resistance was desultory after the defeat at Shanghai and those Chinese formations that stood in the IJA’s path were broken and annihilated, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers melted into the countryside and the city. The Nanjing defense was wholly mediocre and unremarkable from a military perspective. Instead, we remember Nanjing for what happened after the Japanese won the battle.

Nanjing was an open city after the evacuation of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Republic government, and the concurrent flight of most of the local officials. In fact, governance of the city had fallen to the German citizen John Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party and humanitarian resident of Nanjing. He attempted to establish a safe zone, to prevent atrocities, and to protect the civilian population of Nanjing and the surrounding regions, with only limited success. In the aftermath of the battle, more than 200,000 Japanese soldiers descended onto the Chinese civilian population in a frenzy of fanaticism, bloodlust and violence. Today, we know it as the “Rape of Nanjing”. 

Killing contests with swords, where officers competed to decapitate people. Baby-impalement contests, where tossed infants were impaled by Japanese soldiers. Mass rapes and murders of civilians, prisoners of war and women and children and the elderly. Recreationally setting children on fire and ripping fetuses from their mothers. The primary spate of violence lasted for at least six weeks and was region-wide- hundreds of Chinese villages were razed and contemporary credible estimates are approximately 300,000 civilian deaths as a result of Japanese savagery. The news broke quickly, and Western reactions to the massacre were enough to provoke the stranglehold of economic sanctions that eventually led Imperial Japan to expand the war to the Americans and Western powers, which ultimately ensured their defeat and the destruction of bushido and the wholesale remediation of Japanese culture.

The veracity and authenticity of Nanjing has never been seriously challenged. As defeat became certain, Japanese leaders took measures to destroy the vast majority of the written and photographic evidence, estimates are that approximately 70% of Japanese records were destroyed prior to their surrender to American authorities post-war. Certainly some Japanese apologists attempted to whitewash and minimize the horrors, but Nanjing was merely the best-known of the early public demonstrations of Japanese savagery, and even its veterans admitted to the commission of incomprehensible evils throughout their lives. The scope of the holocaust will never be known; turns out keeping counts of rapes and impaled babies is hard. Estimates are that approximately 300,000 people were killed; given the known scope of Japanese atrocities at places as diverse as Palawan, Manila, the East Indies, or in China in the wake of the Doolittle Raid; it seems like something of an undercount. Slight measures of justice were achieved post-war with the executions of Japanese officers in command; far more meaningful punishments were doled out to Japan by Communist guerrillas and American flamethrowers and John Moses Browning’s glorious guns and Curtis LeMay’s 20th Air Force and the Manhattan Project. Nanjing is perhaps the modern era’s most blatant example of the truth of the axiom that those who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind…or the succinct 21st Century version, “Fuck around, find out.” Let’s look at the consequences of Nanjing.

News spread globally, both as word of mouth within Chinese society and as dispatches by horrified Western observers. John Rabe himself earned the ire of the Nazi Party by truthfully reporting the butchery to the German government; Australian and American reactions resulted in a near-immediate imposition of stifling trade restrictions. John Magee’s film shocked and enraged Western observers. What had been a long-simmering territorial dispute between Asian peoples was suddenly a literal expansion of barbarism in a sense that made people viscerally angry at Japan. Isolated events like the Dalfram dispute were harbingers of the American Export Control Acts that starved Japan of materials, fuel and markets for their goods. The massacre cost Japan more than their honor or munitions- it directly cost the Japanese industrialists supporting the government money and power in the short term. The loss of the American markets were devastating to Japan, particularly because Japan was nearly entirely dependent on imported oil for its military and domestic needs. Losing that oil wasn’t just economically devastating, it forced Japan into a war for far-flung oil fields that could not be protected against a determined retaliation, instead of an isolated inland puppet state. Even worse, it caused Americans to come to support measures of preparation for war in the Pacific, particularly as Japanese rhetoric targeted American allies and American territories. The eventual Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and other territories was simply the finale of this self-imposed marketing campaign that galvanized the Western world against the Japanese people. After all, if they were capable of impaling babies and bayoneting honorably-surrendered men, where was their humanity? And if they’re not human, why not simply eradicate them as efficiently as possible?  

It had effects on the battlefield too. Domestically, Chinese were horrified by the massacre. Soldiers that previously melted away were galvanized to remain, fighting to the bitter end. Chinese soldiers hadn’t lacked for bravery in their earlier campaigns, but they were facing hundreds of years of lethargic martial traditions; many of their earlier battles had been lost because of infighting and feudal political tensions between leaders. Post-Nanjing, the Chinese fought, increasing their willingness to tolerate heavy casualties in order to close with, engage and destroy Japanese forces. Losses were enormous in the aggregate, both military and civilian, but for the first time, the Chinese started to win. At Taierzhuang, the Chinese annihilated a Japanese army; even in defeat the Chinese forced the Japanese Army into a battle of attrition that they could not win. Nanjing’s scope was far greater than a spasm of atrocities- it was the definitional event of the Pacific War that showed the world that the Japanese Empire was beyond any rational decision. Before Nanjing, the Sino-Japanese war was a war for territory and taxes and resources and the Manchukuo colony. After Nanjing, it wasn’t a war. It was a fight for survival, and those who faced Japan learned a hard lesson. 

In Death Ground, Fight.

November 1937 was the high-water mark of the Japanese Empire. Certainly they had more ships, more planes, more men under arms, more territories and more power in the years to follow- but all of that temporal power could not stand against the outrage of the world that they earned that November. Every Zero, Arisaka, soldier, sailor enlisted or bullet manufactured after Nanjing would ultimately be lost in defeat. Every island, oil refinery, city and village and reef and atoll conquered would be lost; every yen spent on the war would be wasted. Certainly certain events could be changed, but the die was cast. Nanjing was the nail in the coffin for any hope of a peaceful resolution with Japanese expansionism, militarism and culture as a whole. Perhaps the late-war campaigns against the Japanese Home Islands were a form of karmic retribution; certainly the prospect of facing Japanese fanaticism on their home soil guided the plans for Operation Downfall and the decision to try to force a surrender with an unprecedented demonstration of technological overmatch. Compared to the atrocities committed by the Japanese, killing a few hundred thousand Japanese “civilians” at a time was a pretty minor concern that was also entirely consistent with the prevalent attitudes of men who had been facing the worst of Bushido for years; Admiral William “Bull” Halsey was quite succinct in his remarks after Pearl Harbor that "Before we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell." Luckily for anime fans and humanity, it didn’t quite come to that extreme.

How is this Relevant Today?

The Rape of Nanjing has long since ended. The bodies are buried, and nearly four generations have passed since those infants were bayoneted and those prisoners-of-war were burned alive and those villages were razed. The winds and whirlwinds of revenge have subsided and Japanese martial honor  has been condemned to the ash-heap of history. All we can do now is learn from it. 

Today, the horrors of Gaza stand alongside Nanjing. Certainly there are differences; the Israelis are not publicly committing killing contests with swords, mass rapes or recreationally impaling infants on bayonets (those aren’t as common in modern use). Then again, the Japanese did not place a years-long blockade on Nanjing, did not starve the population out, and did not demand Western weaponry and support. There’s also similarities- both the Israelis and Japanese were committing their atrocities with an eye towards the elimination of the native populations of the regions they desired, in part or in whole, whether it be official policy or simply the understanding of those perpetuating the event. Both the Israelis and Japanese have undoubtedly killed vast numbers of noncombatants, to include medical personnel and children; one could ably argue that someone sitting behind a 21st-century optic or aiming a Hellfire is just as capable of seeing a child who will be killed as the Japanese soldier tossing a helpless infant skyward to catch a bayonet on the way down. And of course, the actions at Nanjing and in Gaza are not being committed by the daemons of Chaos or by comic-book supervillains. It is being perpetuated by people who are, by and large, ordinary soldiers and people and ordinary neighbors. Not every Japanese soldier in those 220,000-odd men was a murderer or a rapist, but enough were…and none stepped forward to remind their comrades of the obligations of bushido. Their shame is everlasting. They were all guilty. Nanjing killed the soul of Japan and Bushido as certainly as those impaled infants and mutilated mothers and torched children. And it took the mass slaughter of Japanese civilians to even begin to balance the karmic scale and break the madness that they had caused. 

There’s other similarities too: The casualty counts (if one takes the most optimistic Japanese estimates) are roughly similar in the summer of 2025; if we take the realistic casualty numbers from starvation, exposure, burial under debris, etc, Gaza might actually turn out to be more lethal in an absolute sense than the primary Nanjing campaign. Both perpetrators whitewash evidence of the atrocities in real time; the Japanese were far more proud and open regarding their behavior. Both perpetrators deflect responsibility with “what-about”, the Japanese justified their rapes and murders and executions based on the hunt for alleged fleeing Chinese soldiers whom could become insurgents; the Israelis simply claim every target is a Hamas militant or a “terrorist command and control node”. Both perpetrators are imbued with racial and religious exclusivity that dehumanizes the victims of their atrocities, both perpetrators are in positions of advantage militarily, and both are engaged in fights against a stubborn foe that just won’t die. 

At least the Japanese were honest about their evils, though. There’s something sickeningly false about those who lie about their atrocities that just makes it a little bit worse. 

There won’t be consequences for the individual perpetrators, at least not as we would define them. World War II ended before the majority of the surviving Japanese army in China could be destroyed in battle. Those who survived into the summer of 1945 would likely survive the war. They largely returned home, started families and lived the rest of their lives secure in the knowledge that further consequences would not befall them beyond the token sacrifices of their senior officers to the hangman’s noose or the firing squad. They had their memories and their killing trophies and the knowledge that they sullied the profession of arms so badly that men from the other side of the planet had to invent and deploy artificial sunshine to scourge their sins even a little clean. Today, the Israelis who killed Hind Rajab and who murdered paramedics in a convoy of ambulances and who are shooting starving people queuing for food and water and countless other crimes are sipping lattes in Tel Aviv, under the cover of an American-funded Iron Dome and with our weapons in their hands, heroes of their country. As for the crimes? Most of the time, the IDF simply ignore them; if they get caught, they typically “investigate” and might reprimand someone a bit. No Israelis are in jail for war crimes, none have been executed or turned over to international tribunals. The only Israelis in prison in any meaningful sense are the heroes who refuse to participate. In a very real sense, Israeli society and government have chosen to close ranks around those who have engaged in these crimes, transferring responsibility from the individual to the collective. Thus, to some extent, all are guilty. Did our grandfathers consider which Japanese were guilty of the Palawan massacre or whom was a munitions-plant worker when they were lining up their bombsights on Tokyo or strafing trains? Nope…everyone was fair game, because the Japanese themselves had announced it when they made babies and children and women and the elderly and the surrendered and the civilians into combatants. They made the rules. We just played by them, to some extent. That’s a dangerous slope to run on. It’s only a few steps to extinction. 

Hamas practiced the brutal art of insurgency. Decapitated babies, baked children, confirmed rapes and murders. Revenge is warranted, certainly. (Whether or not that action was provoked is academic, because in this case, it’s been tit-for-tat since 1948). Israel has had its revenge and then some. They aren’t stopping. The consequences will never hit the individuals. 

Instead, the consequences will befall every Israeli, every Palestinian and everyone affected by them (so, every Middle Easterner, European and American). Gaza is an Israeli victory by any metric; Hamas is destroyed. Israel enjoys complete military supremacy and freedom of action in Gaza, and in Lebanon, and in Syria, and can project air power into Iran with relative impunity. Palestinian statehood is dead and they’ll resettle the survivors as broken refugees (we hope) and Israel is “secure” and “safe” and they’ve got a staunch ally in the White House and a confident, strong government willing to do whatever it takes to secure their future. They’ve got a society willing to “do what it takes” to “win” and they’ve got collective sacrifice for victory and they’ve got infrastructure and they’ve got tangible benefits to win and they’ve got a captive little Manchukuo to grow into (style differences aside). It’s 1938 in Tel Aviv, and they’re on top of the world. 

But nothing lasts forever. And when one’s reputation is defined by historic massacres, it’s really hard to change course peacefully. People don’t tend to forget mass slaughters of innocent people, particularly women and children. Revenge is a dish best served cold, and people are unlikely to forgive or forget so long as an aggressor is actively escalating the problem. Israel shows no signs of stopping their campaign and every sign of expanding it. It’s about to be 1939 in Tel Aviv, with more settlements and more money and more weapons and more victory. Then it’ll be 1942, with absolute victory over their enemies and new settlements and new resources. And eventually, it’ll be 1945 in Tel Aviv, and that’s absolutely horrible, because history tells us exactly what’s going to happen then. 

It’s not too late to change that fate…yet. Peace is an option, and political and social leaders on both sides need to realize and embrace that immediately, without preconditions. People should be clothed and housed and fed and shooting and killing should stop. Immediately. But it will be sometime soon, and as humans, we should all want that. Because the horrors of 1937 were not repaid by more horrors in 1945. We know it was all pointless, futile bloodshed. Killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women and children did nothing to bring back hundreds of thousands of dead Chinese and Filipino and Indonesian and Americans. But until those innocent Japanese died and the specter of annihilation was on those cowards who actually committed the Rape of Nanjing, there could be no peace, because the only thing more powerful than their shame and arrogance was their cowardice. I fear that the force needed to instill that same fear in those responsible for Gaza (both Hamas and Israeli) will come with a butcher’s bill far larger than any seen before, that Gaza will not be the only city to be burned and leveled, and that once again, a city-wide atrocity will be the impetus for a global war that consumes millions of lives for no reason whatsoever. And I fear that Israel, by its own actions, has already indelibly stained itself with the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the same way that Imperial Japan did…and that the longer they carry that malignancy, the more it comes to define them. And worse, I fear what that does to us, because unlike the Americans of 1937, we actively support and enable the Massacre of Gaza.

Food for thought.