Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Massacre

Photo 30 has also been attached with various captions such as “A Chinesewoman who wore an expression of agony after she had been gang-raped” (RBS), “Awoman who was violated by devil-like Japanese soldiers” (Japanese edition of Timperly’sbook), “A rapist took a souvenir shot of his victim” (Chūgoku no nihongun), “Painfullook after being raped by a Japanese military man (a photograph confiscated form aJapanese POW)” (QINHUA), and “A sexually abused Nanking woman” (SND, whichidentifies this picture as courtesy of the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall). In addition,RON-YY carries this image without any caption.As for Photo 31, WMRB identified the lady as “a woman violated by beast-likesoldiers” while RON-YY credited Marion Fitch as its original owner. When Photo 32made its debut in RBS, a caption reading “Our nationals were gang-raped by beast-likesoldiers” accompanied this image. When it was reprinted in QINHUA, it was captionedas “A woman gang-raped by Japanese military men (a photograph confiscated from aJapanese POW).” SND explained this picture as “Raped women,” and again mentionedthe Memorial Hall as its provider. It was reprinted in RON-YY as well.Photo 33 is another RBS photo which, according to RBS’s caption, depicts arape scene. It reappeared in RON-YY and in RON-I, and the latter, in reference to thisimage, states that “[T]he Japanese bound the young woman to a chair for repeatedattack.”Captions of Photo 34 echo those of Photo 31 as QINHUA describes the womanin the picture as “a woman who was gang-raped by the Japanese and was stripped naked”by identifying it as a photograph confiscated from a Japanese POW. Again, SNDintroduces this as an image of “raped woman” and credited the Memorial Hall as itsoriginal source.In summary, publications in later periods state that four out of these sixphotographs—Photos 29, 30, 32, and 34—were “rape souvenir” shots that fell intoChinese hands from Japanese POWs—a caption that was not found in the two originalsources of the photographs, that is, RBS and WMRB. The fact is, however, that whetherthe rapist himself or his “army buddy” photographed such an image, one had to wait forseveral days for film development. Japanese soldiers who were force-marched from onebattlefield to another were unlikely to have such leisure time.One may reasonably ascribe these photographs to be merely pornographicimages. Observers at the time noted that a number of such pictures were in circulationin the city of Shanghai. One such observer was Sasaki Motokatsu, who graduated fromthe University of Tokyo and entered Japan’s Ministry of Communications in 1927.Sasaki was a civilian staff member of the SEF and held the position of field postal servicechief, witnessing battles in Shanghai and Nanking. In Yasen yūbinki [Field PostalFlag]—his memoir that recounts his experience in China—he noted the following onNovember 22, 1937:We were on our way back on board the truck. Moriyama, who wasdriving the truck, handed me a brown-colored envelope that containedsomething without saying anything. That something turned out to be anextremely obscene pornographic photo. The one I had seen in Jiadingpaled compared with that one. The fact is that dealers who arespecialized in such types of photographs sell them underground in100