Analyzing the “Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking Massacre

Some photos were, however, misused to trump up charges that the Japanese hadmurdered innocent civilians by indiscriminate bombing.(a) Nanking after Japanese bombing?Photo 1, which is printed in RBS, is captioned as a scene in Nanking, which wasallegedly turned into ruins by aerial bombardment. Some sources still use the samephoto with the same caption. Nankin daigyakusatsu: Rekishi no shinjitsu o katarusokuseki to shōgen [The Rape of Nanking: The Evidence and Eyewitness Accounts ThatNarrate the Truth of History (henceforth REKISHI)], which was published in Japan in2003, cited this photograph as evidence showing the “indiscriminate aerial bombingagainst the city’s residential area prior to the land campaign,” and added that thisbombing “burned numerous houses and killed innocent people.” Likewise, the captionof a WMRB photo, which is an enlarged version of a part of Photo 1, describes the sceneas the commercial district of Nanking. ZKH also introduces this image as an “aftermathof the Japanese bombing of Nanking inside its city walls.” So does RON-YY with acaption reading “Downtown Nanking after a Japanese air raid.”Photo 1: Quite a few sources still uses the RBS caption of this scene which explains this scene asthe one from Nanking. This, however, is an image from Guangdong, and appeared in suchcontemporary Japanese publications as Rekishi shashin, October, 1938 and Shina-jihen seisen-shi[History of Holy War in China], December, 1938.58