THE claim that the Nanjing massacre of 1937 was a fabrication, made in early May by Mr Shigeto Nagano, then Justice Minister of Japan, was denounced by a number of Asian nations. Critics questioned Mr Nagano's credibility, since he visited Nanjing in 1942, five years after the horrendous rapes and slaughters.
Mr Kengo Fukamachi also shed doubts on the massacre in a letter to these columns on May 12. He said that census figures showed a Nanjing population of not more than 200,000 at the time of the massacre, therefore, how could more than 300,000 people be killed? It was also claimed that the event was not reported in Time or Newsweek, and that the testimonies in the war crime trials showed little evidence of the massacre. In a response to Mr Fukamachi, Mr Andrew Tu's letter of May 26 cites a wide range of sources testifying to the terrifying scale of the massacre. As an anthropologist and student of Chinese history, I would like to address more directly the questions raised by Mr Fukamachi.
First, the census statistics. It must be remembered that Nanjing was then the capital of the Chinese Nationalist Government. The 1934 government census gives the population of Nanjing as 777,230, distributed over an area of 487 square miles. Another source puts the figure at 1,013,000 by 1935 (Map of China, Shanghai World Geography Press, 1939, p.41). In the months before the Japanese attack on Nanjing, the city was flooded with refugees.
The view that the population of Nanjing did not exceed 300,000 is probably mistakenly based on letters of appeal to various embassies from relief organisations, which report figures of survivors. For example, a letter from the International Committee dated January 19, 1938, mentions that 250,000 people were waiting to be rescued.
Regarding international news reports, I don't know about Time or Newsweek, but there were Western journalists who did report the massacre in 1937, one notable example being Mr H. J. Timperley of the Manchester Herald, who recorded the tragedy in the book What War Means: the Japanese Atrocities in China.
Regarding Far East Military Tribunal war crime trials, Mr Fukamachi says that the witnesses of different nationalities, reveal only isolated instances of minor wrongdoings, and refers to the testimony of Mr J. G. Maggie, an American national.