That’s not in dispute.
But what really happened and, more importantly, how reliable is the ‘evidence’ commonly put forward for it?
This seems to be a reasonable paper by a professional historian which illustrates the range of impossible claims about the numbers killed and, I think rather weakly in some cases, casts doubt on some of the photos commonly used as ‘evidence’. http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China/Nanjing/nanjing2.html That goes back to my earlier comment about the press using representative rather than accurate photos which distort the historical record.
Then again, Hata is a historian not free of controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikuhiko_Hata , but without the usual journalistic looseness in using photos people like him wouldn’t be able to nitpick at the foundations to topple the building most people can see is there.
‘We’ hanged so few of the bastards that it wasn’t worth the national expenditure on the trial or the rope. Only two A class war criminals were hanged on the Nanking charge, and one of them was the Foreign Minister who had no control over what the frequently renegade Kwantung Army was doing. As with some other Japanese tried for alleged war crimes, it’s debatable whether he was a war criminal or a victim of victor’s justice. Meanwhile the bastards who who did all the damage generally escaped any form of justice. It’s like hanging Himmler and letting the bastards who ran the Nazi death camps go free.
In the end the Tribunal connected only two defendants to the Rape of Nanking.
Matsui was convicted of count 55, which charged him with being one of the senior officers who “deliberately and recklessly disregarded their legal duty [by virtue of their respective offices] to take adequate steps to secure the observance [of the Laws and Customs of War] and prevent breaches thereof, and thereby violated the laws of war.”
Hirota Koki, who had been the Foreign Minister when Japan conquered Nanjing, was convicted of participating in “the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy” (count 1), waging “a war of aggression and a war in violation of international laws, treaties, agreements and assurances against the Republic of China” (count 27) and count 55.153
On November 12, 1948, on the basis of a simple majority of the eleven judges, Matsui and Hirota, with five other convicted Class-A war criminals, were sentenced to death by hanging. Eighteen others received lesser sentences. The death sentence imposed on Hirota, who was apparently sent to the gallows on the basis of a bare six votes, shocked the general public and prompted a petition on his behalf, which soon gathered over 300,000 signatures, but to no avail.
http://www.geocities.com/nankingatrocities/Tribunals/imtfe_01.htm
Whatever justice there might have been in the IMTFE exercise, it was rendered a joke for political reasons as most of the defendants served less time than a drunk driver would for killing a pedestrian in Australia.
Two (Yosuke Matsuoka and Osami Nagano) of the twenty-eight defendants died of natural causes during the trial. One defendant (Shumei Okawa) had a mental breakdown on the first day of trial, was sent to a psychiatric ward and was released in 1948 a free man. The remaining twenty-five (25) were all found guilty, many of multiple counts. Seven (7) were sentenced to death by hanging, sixteen (16) to life imprisonment, and two (2) to lesser terms. All seven sentenced to death were found to be guilty of inciting or otherwise implicated in mass-scale atrocities, among other counts. Three of the sixteen sentenced to life imprisonment died between 1949 and 1950 in prison. The remaining thirteen (13) were paroled between 1954 and 1956, less than eight years in prison for their crimes against millions of people.
Two former ambassadors were sentenced to seven and twenty years in prison. One died two years later in prison. The other one, Shigemitsu, was paroled in 1950, and was appointed foreign minister
http://www.cnd.org/njmassacre/nj.html
If the Japanese actions in Nanking in 1937 are so bad, long before WWII broke out, why didn’t ‘we’ prosecute the Italians for their actions in Abyssinia in 1935-36 for using mustard gas contrary to Italy’s subscription to the 1925 Geneva Protocol not to use it?
It’s all very selective as far as victor’s justice goes.
