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Unit 10—Handout 9
Japan’s last vets of Nanking massacre open up
France: International News 16 May 2010
AFP—Sawamura broke into a cold sweat when he was ordered to bayonet a Chinese peasant as soldiers
crowded around the spectacle, taunting him to execute the captive.
“You captured him, so you get rid of him,” his lieutenant barked, yanking the 21-year-old soldier toward
his writhing victim, only days after Japanese troops had overrun the Chinese city of Nanking in December
1937.
“I stumbled forward and thrust the blade into his body until it came out on the other side,” said Sawamura,
who is now 94 years old. “We were told not to waste bullets. It was training for beginners.
“I have told myself for the rest of my life that killing is wrong,” said the veteran of the Imperial Japanese
Army, who declined to give his surname, in an interview with AFP at his home in Kyoto.
Sawamura is one of a fast-dwindling number of Japanese former soldiers who took part in the Nanking
massacre, considered by historians the worst wartime atrocity committed by the Japanese army in China.
Historians generally estimate about 150,000 people were killed, thousands of women raped and thousands
of homes burned down in an orgy of violence until March 1938 in what was then the capital of the Chinese
Nationalist government.
In a joint study by a Japan-China history research committee released this year, China said the true
number was above 300,000 victims, while Japanese scholars estimated that anywhere between 20,000 and
200,000 were killed.
Sawamura—who now spends his days tending his plants and decorating his house with his grandchildren’s
pictures—is one of the last Japanese alive who played a part in the massacre in the city now called Nanjing.
Few veterans have ever spoken about what in Japan remains largely a taboo subject, and most have taken
their testimonies quietly to their graves.
But this year, in a last-ditch effort to keep their dark memories alive, Japanese activist Tamaki Matsuoka
released a documentary, Torn Memories of Nanjing, in which veterans speak for the fi rst time on fi lm about the
mass killings and rapes.
Assignment:
In a brief essay of one or two paragraphs, respond to this article about Sawamura, a former
Japanese soldier who participated in the Nanking Massacre. Share your response with a group
of three or four.
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