Brutal truths of Nanking

THE RAPE OF NANKING by Iris Chang (Penguin, GBP 8.99) THE GOOD GERMAN OF NANKING: THE DIARIES OF JOHN RABE edited by Erwin Wickert, translated from the German by John E Woods (Little, Brown, GBP 18.99) FOUR years ago I was in Japan to write about how the Japanese regarded the 50th anniversary of the end of the War. I was curious to meet any Japanese army veterans who were willing to talk about the past, and through a nationalist politician I was put in touch with some. One of them -Shizua Myamoto, who had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Imperial army - received me in his house in a Tokyo suburb. He had served in Java during the War, but - more interestingly for me - he had also served as a Captain in Manchuria during the Japanese invasion of China. He had been Commander of the chief military academy in Tokyo. His best friend assassinated the Japanese Prime Minister in a coup attempt by nationalist army officers in 1936.

He was unshakeable in defending Japanese efforts in Manchuria. He was an ardent believer in the nationalist idea that the Japanese, Koreans and Manchus were all racially connected and should all live "under one roof" - the Japanese phrase for rule by the Japanese Emperor. The proof of that (in his eyes) was that the Chinese fought pitiably in Manchuria and showed no sign that they felt they were defending their homeland until the Japanese went on to invade China proper, within the Wall.

So I asked about that as well, expressing myself with the elaborately polite understatement that I assumed would go down well with a traditional Japanese: "Some people - foreigners and the Japanese Left - accuse Japan of not behaving well in China. They say unfortunate things happened in Nanking." This opened the floodgates: "It was my soldiers - I educated them - they were the first into Nanking. They were my boys, my students. These atrocity stories are all a lie they never happened. "But if women and children were killed, it was the fault of the other side. My boys had to fight. At a war front when something moves, you have to shoot at it. It is unthinkable that the enemy commanders could have left women and children at the war front. It was their responsibility - criticise them, not our soldiers." YET what actually happened in Nanking? After it was occupied by the Japanese on 13 December 1937 there began six weeks of atrocities scarcely matched in history since Ghengis Khan. About 250,000 civilians were massacred. People were buried alive, decapitated, mutilated, burned to death, frozen to death in the Yangtze, eaten alive by dogs, raped and tortured with every circumstance of inventive cruelty and then murdered. There were 80,000 cases of rape. There is strong evidence that much of the killing was carried out from motives of pure sadism by a Japanese army that was completely out of control - men not under the control of their officers, officers who ignored the wishes of their Commander in Chief, Matsue Iwane (who was later hanged as a war criminal). There was not even any rationale for the savagery. Iris Chang gives the standard account of Japanese fears for their supply of raw materials before the incursion into China and their desire for increased Lebensraum - but none of that accounts for the slaughter and cruelty after Nanking actually fell. Iwane had called for his troops to conciliate Chinese civilians by "exemplary behaviour" - a hideous irony in the light of what happened. All one can say is that the consistently brutal and brutalising training both of the officer class and the men, along with the mixture of contempt and inferiority they felt towards the Chinese (who were "insects" and "subhumans" to the nationalists) made an outbreak like this inevitable. The fact that the Chinese had fought stubbornly in Shanghai was the immediate spark. In the midst of the horror was the extraordinary behaviour of one man - a European, a German, a Nazi. His name was John Rabe, and he out-Schindlered Schindler. The Chinese elected him de facto mayor of Nanking, and he organised a safety zone and may have saved up to 300,000 Chinese lives. His unbelievable tenacity, courage and ingenuity as he roamed the streets preventing rape and murder by sheer force of personality (plus timely flashings of his swastika armband) make him the most unexpected unsung hero of modern times. Rabe's diaries - objective and yet engaged - give, day by day, matter of fact detail of atrocities that Chang tries to put into historical context. One extraordinary thing is that Rabe from time to time cabled Hitler with details about what was going on, and Hitler may even have persuaded his Japanese friends not to bomb the Chinese in the safety zone. This is presumably the unique case of Hitler succumb-Japanese schoolchildren are not taught anything about the events in Nanking, and few people outside Asia have any but a dim sense of what happened there. Much as love Japan and the Japanese, I am sure that they - unlike the Germans - will never face up to the dark horror of their iniquities in China. By the way, at the end of our conversation, Lieutenant Colonel Myamato asked me: "Would you like to come cherry-blossom viewing?" He marched smartly with me through a park full of blossoms, which had been spoiled by rain the night before. His 87 years had not much reduced his large, rugged frame, nor spoiled his military swagger.

Copyright 1999
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