Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Massacre

heard about the Rape of Nanking. I was also able to detect in his demeanor his frustrationover the discrepancy between his own experience and the popularly accepted perception of theincident. Yet, I was still confused, being unable to narrow the gap between Moriō’s accountand the information available in popular published sources.One day, when I finished my lecture at the university, a student caught up with meoutside the classroom and asked me the following question:I would like to ask you this question because you are a specialist in East Germanaffairs. The Mainichi Newspaper reported on the discovery in [then] EastGermany of official diplomatic files compiled by then German embassy in Nankingat the time of the alleged Nanking massacre. These files reportedly contain arecord penned by John H.D. Rabe, head of the Nanking branch of Siemens.According to Rabe’s account, the city of Nanking was littered with tens ofthousands of corpses. Are you familiar with these diplomatic files? If you are,what is your opinion about its content?I was not aware of the existence of such a file then, but I decided to obtain the microfilmedversion of these diplomatic files from Berlin.I did find a passage reading “as many as 30,000 corpses still lie on the Yangzi rivershore of Xiakuan even three months after the fall of the city.” But careful reading revealedthat Rabe did not identify these corpses as those of the victims of a massacre. Also, it wasobvious that he wrote this account based on hearsay and not as an eye-witness.The battle of Nanking was fought as a wartime military campaign. As a consequence,both the Japanese and Chinese suffered military casualties. This fact compelled me to ponderseveral questions: were there really such dead bodies; were these corpses really thosemassacred by the Japanese army; if so, how many of them were there? In order to ascertainthese points, I started reading contemporary primary sources written in English and German.At the same time, I decided to interview as many people as I could who left their footprints inNanking during and after the Nanking campaign.Why was the passage pertaining to the “killing of 40,000” deleted?Another critical turning point was when I interviewed another veteran of the Nankingcampaign. He was Maruyama Susumu, who had been a member of the Japanese army’sspecial service in Nanking. Maruyama cast doubt on Rabe’s account by drawing on his ownexperience. According to him, burial activities in and around Nanking were more or lesscompleted by March 15, 1938. Thus, the 30,000 dead bodies, as recounted by Rabe, wereunlikely to be found in the Nanking area at that time. Also, after careful computation, theactual number of corpses disposed of by that time was estimated to be between 14,000 and15,000—a far cry from oft-mentioned 200,000 or 300,000 victims.At the same time, careful reading of the oft-quoted Documents of the Nanking SafetyZone edited by Xu Shuxi (a book published in 1939 in Shanghai and mostly based on “DailyReports of the Serious Injuries to Civilians” compiled by the International Committee for theNanking Safety Zone (ICNSZ) and filed with the Japanese embassy in Nanking) convinced methat most of the stories listed in that book were hearsays without any source of authentication.Another source that attracted my attention was What War Means: Japanese Terror in3