the rape of Nanking

南京暴行简介

The Path to Nanking

In trying to understand the actions of the Japanese, the questions that call out loudest for answers are the most obvious ones. What broke down on the scene to allow the behavior of Japanese soldiers to escape so totally the restrains that govern most human conduct? Why did the Japanese officers permit and even encourage such a breakdown? What was the complicity of the Japanese government? At the very least, what was its reaction to the reports it was getting through its own channels and to what it was hearing from foreign sources on the scene.

To answer these questions we must begin with a little history

The twentieth-century Japanese identity was forced in a thousand-year-old system in which social hierarchy was established and sustained through martial competition. For as far back as anyone could remember, the island’s powerful feudal lords employed private armies to wage incessant battle with each other; by the medieval times these armies had evolved into the distinctively Japanese samurai warrior class, whose code of conduct was called bushido (the “Way of the Warrior”). To die in the service of one’s lord was the greatest honor a samurai warrior could achieve in his lifetime.

Such codes of honor were certainly not invented by the Japanese culture. The Roman poet Horace first defined the debt owned by the young men of each generation to their rulers. But the samurai philosophy went a giant step beyond defining the military service as fitting and proper. So harsh was its code that its most notable characteristic was the moral imperative that adherents commit suicide if ever they failed to meet honorably the obligations of military service—often with the highly ceremonial and extremely painful ritual of hara-kiri, in which the warrior met death by unflinchingly disemboweling himself in front of witnesses.

By the twelfth century the head of the reigning (and thereby most powerful) family, now called the Shogun, offered the emperor, who was worshiped as the direct descendant of the Sun Goddess, military protection of his samurai in exchange for divine sanction of the entire ruling class. A deal was struck. In time the code of the samurai, initially followed by only the Japanese culture and became the model of honorable behavior among all young men.

Time did not erode the strength of the bushido ethic, which first emerged in the eighteenth century and was practiced to extremes in the modern age. During World War II the infamous kamikaze suicide missions, in which Japanese pilots ceremoniously trained to fly their plane directly into American ships, dramatically impressed upon the West how ready the young men of Japan were to sacrifice their lives for the emperor. But it was more than a small elite group that held to the view of death over surrender. It is striking to note that while the Allied forces surrendered at the rate of 1 prisoner for every 3 dead at Saipan and Iwo Jima, the Japanese surrendered at the rate of only 1 per 120 dead.

Another force that gave Japan its peculiar character was its isolation, both physical and self-imposed. By the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa family, who sealed off the island nation from foreign influence. This seclusion, intended to provide security from the wider world, instead insulated Japanese society from the new technology of the industrial revolution taking place in Europe and left it less secure. For 250 years Japanese military technology largely failed to advance beyond the bow, sword and musket.

南京暴行简介

By the nineteenth century events beyond Japan’s control would knock the country out of its cocoon, leaving it in a state of insecurity and xenophobic desperation. In 1852, U.S. President Millard Fillmore, frustrated by Japan’s refusal to open its exports to commerce and taking the “white man’s burden” attitude toward other societies commonly espoused at the time to rationalize European expansionism, decided to end Japan’s isolation by dispatching Commander Matthew and decided to shock the Japanese into submission with a missive display of American military force. In July 1853, he sent two ships belching black smoke into Tokyo Bay—giving the people of Japan their first glimpse of metal-clad, steam-powered ships. Surrounding himself with some sixty to seventy aggressive-looking men armed with swords and pistols, Perry strode through the capital of the Shogun and demanded meetings with the highest-ranking officials in Japan.

To say that the Japanese were stunned by Perry’s arrival would be a gross understatement. “A parallel situation,” the historian Samuel Fliot Morision wrote of the incident, “would be an announcement by astronauts that wield-looking aircraft from outer space were on their way to earth.” The terrified Tokugawa aristocracy prepared for battle, hid their valuables and held panicked meetings among themselves. But in the end, they had no choice but to acknowledge the superiority of American military technology and to accept the mission. With this simple visit, Perry not only forced the Tokugawa to sign treaties with the United States but broke down the doors of Japanese trade for other countries, such as Britain, Russia, Germany, and France.

The humiliation of this proud people left a residue of fierce resentment. Secretly, some members of the Japanese powers elite advocated immediate war with the Western powers, but others counseled prudence, arguing that war would weaken only Japan, not the foreigners. Those taking the latter position urged that the leadership placate the intruders, learn from them, and quietly plan their retaliation.

As we are not the equals of foreigners in the mechanical arts, let us have intercourse with foreign countries, learn their drill and tactics and when we have made the [Japanese] nations as united as one family, we shall be able to go abroad and give lands in foreign countries to those who have distinguished themselves in battle; the soldiers will vie the one another in displaying their intrepidity, and it will not be too late then to declare war.

Although that view did not prevail, the words would prove prophetic, for they described not only the strategy the Japanese would follow but the long-term horizons of those who think of life in terms of the state and not of individuals.

With no clear course open to them, the Tokugawa decided to watch and wait—a decision that signed the death warrant of their reign. The shogun’s policy of appeasement, so different from what it required of its loyal adherents, disgusted many and supplied ammunition for its hawkish opponents, who saw the prudent response of the Shogun as nothing more than kowtowing servility before foreign barbarians. Convinced that the Shogun had lost his mandate to rule, rebel clans forced alliances to overthrow the regime and restore the emperor to power.