Rape of Nanking - Page 1
by Jennifer Butt

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The ethics of war, according to Paul Seabury and Angelo Codevilla's War: Ends and Means , can be examined from two perspectives to determine "whether it is right or wrong to fight for a particular cause in a particular circumstance- jus ad bellum [or] whether particular actions taken in the course of a war are right or not- jus in bello " (215). The theory of jus in bello stresses that "the enemy in war is not so much a set of persons-much less whole peoples-but rather a set of evil intentions . . . This rule is identical to the private commandment to hate the sin while loving the sinner" (225). This fundamental essence of jus in bello was grossly violated with the "unjust means of warfare" of indiscriminant killing of noncombatants and Chinese civilians by Japanese soldiers in what has been dubbed "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," or as it is known to the world, the Rape of Nanking. During the Rape, Chinese civilians were slaughtered and women of all ages were raped after the Japanese seized control of China's former capital, Nanking. It is said that if "the dead from Nanking were to link hands" they would "span a distance of some two hundred miles, their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons"; and, "stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building" (Chang, Rape 5). It is, however, not the sheer number of civilians who perished that has caused recent international interest in the Rape, but rather the manner in which these atrocities were committed and Japan's refusal to acknowledge, apologize, or offer reparations to its survivors. For seven weeks, Japanese troops, who were often pictured celebrating and wearing wide smiles while posing next to fresh corpses, saturated victims in acid, impaled infants on bayonets, hung people by their tongues, slashed the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out their fetuses, nailed people to boards for bayonet practices, held publicized decapitation contests, and partially buried victims to their waists so that they might be eaten alive by dogs or trampled to death by horses. In their examination of the ethical nature of war, Seabury and Codevilla pinpoint the "behavior of Japanese troops in World War II toward all their captives [as] another sad fact. Some people simply get satisfaction by making others suffer. The Japanese were not out to exterminate any class or race. They simply went out of their way to kill, rape, maim, starve, and humiliate . . . Asia will remember them for a thousand years" (232-33). While Asia may remember the Rape for thousands of years, the Japanese would like to forget that such a massacre ever occurred, publicly and vehemently denying their involvement in the Rape. Japanese revisionists, members of Japanese society who believe such fabricated "stories" of the Rape serve to tarnish the image of Japan and who seek to preserve an ideal image of their country, lead the movement of denial, which has extended to the elimination of the Rape from students' textbooks, despite the vast evidence of letters, photographs, journals, and oral affirmations of the Rape by Chinese, Japanese, and foreigners present during that time. Although some Japanese progressives have publicly voiced their concern over the awareness of the Rape of Nanking, their efforts are largely overshadowed by the overwhelming sentiment and presence of indifference and ignorance displayed by revisionists, who wish to eliminate the already minuscule and vague references to the Rape in school textbooks. They falsify and misquote original documents, risking their careers in an attempt to rewrite wartime history so as to foster a sense of national pride in Japanese youth and preserve an ideal image of wartime Japan.