The Rape of Nanking – The Other Face of Colonial Violence

 

 

Host: Hello, everyone! We in South Asia are intimately familiar with the brutal story of European colonialism—the trading companies, the extraction, the long-term imposition of political and racial control. But today, we turn our gaze eastward to examine a different, arguably more ferocious, model of imperialism that emerged in Asia itself: the Japanese expansion. Joining us is Dr. Sharma (a fictional character), a distinguished historian of 20th-century warfare. Dr. Sharma, thank you for being here.

Dr. Sharma: Thank you. It is crucial for us to understand this history because it illuminates the full spectrum of colonial violence.

 

Host: Let’s dive straight into the heart of darkness: The Nanking Massacre. For those unfamiliar, what happened in Nanking (or Nanjing) in December 1937?

Dr. Sharma: The Nanking Massacre, often referred to as the Rape of Nanking, is the darkest embodiment of this contrasting imperial model. In late 1937, after capturing the then-Chinese capital of Nanking, the Imperial Japanese Army unleashed six weeks of unparalleled atrocity. This was not just a battle; it was a systematic campaign of terror designed explicitly to crush the Chinese spirit.

The scale of the horror is difficult to grasp. Conservative estimates suggest that 200,000 to 300,000 civilians and disarmed soldiers were slaughtered. We also estimate that somewhere between 20,000 and 80,000 women were raped. The city was utterly looted and burned, and in some cases, entire families were exterminated.

 

Host: That scale of death is staggering.

Dr. Sharma: It is. To help imagine it, one historian calculated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch about two hundred miles, from Nanking to the city of Hangchow. Their blood alone would weigh twelve hundred tons. This was fast, concentrated violence.

 

Host: Many of us assume that colonialism only happened because Europeans were expanding. But what led Japan, itself a non-Western nation, down this path of expansionism and extreme violence?

Dr. Sharma: Japan’s drive was certainly contextualized by the increasing expansion of European colonial powers. The British, French, and Portuguese were not only relentlessly expanding their presence and extracting resources from colonized regions, but they were also posing a mortal threat to the very existence of local forms of governance, social structure, and political ideologies in the name of “progress” and “civilizing mission.” Japan, during the Meiji era, mobilized human and material resources and emerged as a superior power after wars with China and Russia. However, its expansion was fundamentally driven by the same economic and political pressures that fueled Britain’s empire in India.

Firstly, Economics: Japan underwent rapid industrialization but was deeply resource-poor. Unlike British India, which Britain systematically drained for materials like cotton and opium, Japan had no colonies to exploit initially, making expansion an absolute economic necessity for raw materials like iron, coal, and oil. The Great Depression of 1929 only intensified this need, leading Japan to look for resource-rich areas like Manchuria—similar to how Britain tightened control over Indian agriculture during its own economic crises.

Secondly, Politics and Ideology: By the 1930s, the military effectively controlled Japan’s government. Crucially, they promoted the idea of the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.

 

Host: This phrase promised "Asian solidarity" against the West, didn't it?

Dr. Sharma: Precisely. Japan claimed it was liberating Asia from Europeans. Yet, as we saw in China and Korea, this rhetoric simply replaced Western domination with Japanese imperial rule—extraction, repression, and extreme violence, much like the British exercised in India.

Finally, Demographics played a role. Japan’s population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1930. Expansion was viewed as a "safety valve" for overpopulation, encouraging settlement in places like Korea and Manchuria, often by seizing land from locals. This mirrors British colonial migration schemes, such as sending Indians as indentured laborers across the globe to alleviate population pressures at home.

 

Host: We understand the political and economic drivers. But how did the Japanese state turn its citizens and soldiers into people capable of committing atrocities on this scale? How was this “modern, expansionist military machine” built psychologically?

Dr. Sharma: It was a comprehensive system of militarized indoctrination that penetrated the home, the school, and the military.

In education, the state aimed to mass-produce warriors, not clerks or officers. Children were taught loyalty, filial piety, and that dying for the Emperor was the highest honour. The Imperial Rescript on Education (1890) read: “Should emergency arise, offer yourselves courageously to the State; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity of Our Imperial Throne.”

Textbooks became vehicles for military propaganda; arithmetic problems involved military calculations (“If a shell travels 3 km per second…”), and history glorified war.

We have chilling accounts of teachers instilling hatred. One historian relates the story of a 1930s schoolboy who burst into tears when told to dissect a frog. He was slapped and told: “Why are you crying about one lousy frog? When you grow up you’ll have to kill one hundred, two hundred chinks!”. This prepared them psychologically for invasion and violence.

 

Host: And how did this translate once they reached the barracks?

Dr. Sharma: Japanese military training was deliberately designed to crush individuality, instill blind obedience, and foster violence. Recruits endured constant beatings and humiliations, which historian Saburō Ienaga notes: “Military life was deliberately designed to harden men by crushing individuality, instilling obedience, and fostering violence.” They were conditioned to displace this rage onto civilians and prisoners. One soldier confessed that by the time they reached China, they were eager to beat others as they had been beaten.

This was coupled with the dehumanization of the enemy. Soldiers were told the Chinese were subhuman—"slaves of slaves"—meaning killing them was not murder, but duty. The ancient Samurai code, Bushidō, was revived, promoting loyalty and the idea that surrender was shameful, while justifying the expenditure of civilian lives for imperial destiny.

 

Host: So, by the time they entered Nanking, the soldiers had no moral brakes?

Dr. Sharma: Absolutely. They were trained to obey without question and taught that cruelty was loyalty, while mercy was weakness. When discipline inevitably broke down after the city fell, the combination of rage displaced from training and the ideology of dehumanization made cruelty routine. One soldier later confessed that once they entered Nanking, killing had already become a habit, like "killing insects". This mirrors the mindset seen in colonial conflicts, such as British troops viewing Indian rebels as vermin during the 1857 uprisings.

 

Host: The accounts of violence in Nanking go beyond simple execution. Can you describe the specific nature of the atrocities and how they relate to the militarist ethos?

Dr. Sharma: The methods used surpassed the limits of human comprehension. The violence was intimate, personal, and sadistic, often treated as entertainment.

We saw extreme torture methods:

Live burials – Soldiers forced Chinese captives to dig graves and bury themselves alive. In some cases, victims were partially buried and then hacked apart or run over by tanks.

Mutilation - People were nailed to boards, crucified to electrical posts, had their eyes gouged out, or were used for bayonet practice.

Death by fire – Prisoners were tied together and pushed into a pit where they were sprayed with gasoline and torched. In some cases, Japanese soldiers would force prisoners to move to the top of a building and then set it on fire.

Death by ice – Soldiers forced prisoners to strip naked and plunge into frozen ponds, only to be shot as "floating targets".

Death by dogs – Burying prisoners to their waist, soldiers amused themselves by unleashing dogs, ripping victims apart.

The historian Iris Chang mentions other forms of violence: “The Japanese saturated victims in acid, impaled babies with bayonets, hung people by their tongues. One Japanese reporter who later investigated the Rape of Nanking learned that at least one Japanese soldier tore the heart and liver out of a Chinese victim to eat them. Even genitals, apparently, were consumed: a Chinese soldier who escaped from Japanese custody saw several dead people in the streets with their penises cut off. He was later told that the penises were sold to Japanese customers who believed that eating them would increase virility.”

 

Host: And the sexual violence was systematic, not random?

Dr. Sharma: It was mass and systematic. The estimated 20,000 to 80,000 rapes in six weeks represents an extraordinary concentration of sexual violence. Women were viewed as the spoils of war, and the act of rape was a way of symbolically conquering the enemy’s future, rooted in the idea that the Chinese were less than human. Some of the most sordid instances involved the degradation of entire families, with Japanese soldiers forcing Chinese men to commit incest against their own relatives.

The psychic toll was immense. We know that many women who survived found themselves pregnant, and sadly, many such children were secretly killed at birth due to the guilt and shame endured by the mothers.

 

Host: When we hear these accounts, we must ask: How does this level of atrocity compare to the war crimes committed by European colonial powers, crimes we are acutely aware of, such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre or the Bengal Famine?

Dr. Sharma: This is a crucial comparative question. We must acknowledge that European colonial powers perpetrated horrific mass atrocities, driven by similar ideologies of racial superiority. The Belgian Congo, where systematic mutilation occurred, or the British use of concentration camps in the Boer War, and of course, General Dyer’s defense of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, show similar levels of dehumanization.

Crucially, European administrations used engineered famines as a weapon of control. The Bengal Famine of 1943 killed 3 to 4 million people while Britain continued exporting food from India. These were systematic use of starvation as a tool.

 

Host: So, if the brutality was systemic in both cases, what is the key distinction?

Dr. Sharma: The distinction lies in concentration versus dispersion. European colonial violence was often:

1. Dispersed over centuries (like the 200+ years of British rule in India).
2. Indirect, achieved through economic exploitation, policy-induced famines, and disease.
3. Administratively mediated, creating distance between the perpetrator and the victim.

Nanking, however, was concentrated, intimate brutality over six weeks. It was characterized by face-to-face violence, sadistic entertainment like the killing contests, and a complete, systemic breakdown of military restraints. As British historian Niall Ferguson noted, while British imperialism killed millions, it was often through the "invisible hand of the market"—economic conditions—whereas Nanking was direct slaughter. Nanking represented violence as an end in itself—terror designed to break resistance.

For South Asians, understanding Nanking reveals how imperial powers employed both “slow violence” (economic exploitation, famines) and “fast violence” (concentrated military terror) as complementary tools of domination.

 

Host: Finally, let’s talk about memory. How is the Nanking Massacre remembered today, and what lessons does this hold for how we remember, or often forget, colonial violence here in South Asia?

Dr. Sharma: In China, Nanking is a living wound and a national trauma. China has built the Nanking Massacre Memorial Hall, records survivors’ testimonies, and observes a National Memorial Day every December 13th. This ensures the atrocity cannot be denied.

This stands in stark contrast to South Asia. Do we have unified national memorials for the 1943 Bengal Famine or the countless village massacres of 1857? Largely, no. These tragedies often reside in regional or family memory, not state-led commemoration.

 

Host: And in Japan?

Dr. Sharma: Japan’s memory is highly contested. While some Japanese scholars acknowledge the crime, sections of the government and right-wing groups deny, downplay, or relativize the atrocity. School textbooks sometimes soften or omit the event.

This mirrors the postcolonial silence in Britain, where schoolchildren historically learned little about the Bengal Famine or the Amritsar Massacre; instead, empire was framed as a "civilizing mission".

For South Asia, the critical lesson from Nanking is this: China remembers Nanking as a single, powerful symbol of victimhood and resistance. In India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, colonial atrocities—though numerous and scattered—are often overshadowed by Partition or framed by colonial powers as necessary for "modernization". Nanking reminds us that without deliberate, active memorialization, the violence of empire risks being erased and justified as “necessary sacrifice”.

 

Host: Dr. Sharma, thank you for providing this sobering and essential comparative insight.

Dr. Sharma: My pleasure.