By 1938, Nanjing had become a ghostland. The city, once the bustling capital of China, was littered with enough corpses to “cover the sky.” Yet there were still innumerable bodies being lowered into pits by bulldozers, piles at a time. Men, women, children, elders, soldiers, civilians–as long as one was Chinese, death found them in the most heinous of ways.
To this day, the Nanjing Massacre has no specific death toll. The official estimate ranges from 100,000 to over 300,000 victims, though so many bodies were burnt, buried in mass graves, or dumped into rivers that a precise calculation is impossible. However, historians have been able to uncover some details of the slaughtering that commenced in December of 1937: Japanese soldiers executed entire families in the most inhumane ways possible, including infants and the elderly; raped and tortured tens of thousands of girls and women of all ages; and looted and burned over a third of Nanjing’s buildings.
The brutality that Nanjing oversaw strayed far from the aggression necessitated by war and was representative of a genocide motivated by pure ethnic hatred–but horrifically, Japan’s human rights violations were far more extensive than just one event. The most infamous accounts of Japanese atrocities in World War II were the abuse of sex slaves, euphemized as “comfort women,” and a series of lethal human experiments conducted by Unit 731, a Japanese research and development unit. During these experiments, the Japanese “researchers” vivisected conscious prisoners; exposed them to biological and chemical agents (like setting 1,800 field rounds of mustard gas onto unclothed men); transfused sheep blood to humans; and fatally injected a variety of diseases like plague, typhoid, and cholera into subjects. Other experiments involved studying frostbite by submerging prisoners into water at subzero temperatures until their limbs were frozen and their skin was covered in ice. Subsequently, the prisoners would be left to thaw over an open fire or doused with boiling water. Open fire was also utilized for the dehydration of prisoners, after which the Japanese discovered that the human body is composed of 70% water. The list of experiments, which affected at least 300,000 people, goes on, and many remain hidden by the Japanese government to this day.
Clearly, Japan carries a dark and terrible past of some of the most barbaric war crimes ever experienced–and it’s a past that is unacknowledged by the government, untouched by an apology, and essentially omitted from the understandings of Westerners and Japanese alike. That is, the Japanese government conducted the most effective historical erasure in the world. While most Westerners have by and large been educated about the Holocaust, details of Japan’s WWII atrocities are largely unknown, a phenomenon that can be attributed to two factors.
Japan’s rebranding campaign plays the primary role in historical erasure. After WWII, the Japanese government ramped up efforts to expand soft power in response to its loss of hard military power. By pouring extensive resources into promoting Japanese pop culture, the government wholly transformed international perceptions of the island nation from imperial powerhouse to cultural sensation. It utilized the widespread consumption of media like manga and anime to steer focus away from the nation’s problematic history and painted a narrative that portrayed Japan as friendly and incapable of aggression. Today, Japan’s cultural rebranding has allowed it to become the third most positively viewed country in the world, behind Canada and Germany. This positive perception will only continue to increase with the popularity of its culture pervading communities globally. For example, anime is an industry that has grown $23 billion in the past decade and is projected to continue expanding.
The second factor is Western countries’ involvement in the coverup of Japanese war crimes. Specifically, the United States granted immunity from war crimes prosecution to a majority of Unit 731 in exchange for the research collected from the human experiments. The US went so far as to provide monetary rewards equivalent to $2.37 million today to obtain this data from former members. As a result, the history of Japanese war crimes has been intentionally omitted from American textbooks. In an examination of the top eight world history textbooks used in middle and high school classrooms, none of the textbooks included any mention of the three major Japanese war crimes. A tangential survey found that only 12 percent of social studies teachers know about the Nanjing Massacre, and zero percent teach about the event.
Ultimately, even when the globalization of culture and technology has increased pressure on many countries like Germany to honestly address their histories, Japan has continued to officially deny the occurrence of their countless WWII crimes against humanity, whether it be in political speeches or textbooks.
Aside from their collaborative tactics of historical erasure, Japan and the US also have an alliance that is considered indispensable for both countries. Currently, Japan hosts over 50,000 US military personnel, more than any other nation, and one-of-a-kind US Navy technology. While the US provides Japan with defensive support for deterrence, Japan acts as an anchor for US presence in the Indo-Pacific, as it is uniquely geographically positioned within 200 miles from the Korean peninsula, China, Russia, and the Taiwan Strait. Japan also boasts the fourth largest economy in the world, adding economic might to the alliance.
Sino-US relations, on the contrary, are not at their best. China is viewed as a threat in every field, from artificial intelligence to electric vehicles to TikTok, exacerbated by tensions in the South China Sea and, of course, the economy. Arguably, sinophobia has spiraled out of control, with fears of China being ridiculously overblown by the media.
All in all, East Asia is splintered. It has to do with Japan’s historical offenses in the region, the legacies of which are still felt in the current geopolitical scene 79 years after the end of WWII. Although China and Japan’s strained relationship involves territorial disputes and Japan’s alliance with the US, their strained relationship can really be traced back to Japan’s lack of acknowledgement and apology for its war crimes, especially the Nanjing Massacre. South Korea, or at least the South Korean public, has a rocky perception of Japan for similar reasons resulting from Japan’s lack of accountability for the enslavement of “comfort women,” though the United States acts as a third-party mediator.
This incohesion inhibits collaboration between South Korea, China, and Japan, which all prefer collaborating with larger world powers over working with each other, limiting possible policy goals. Disagreement over war crimes is the primary driver of tension and possibility for escalation in the Indo-Pacific, making the region inherently unstable and inviting the presence of Western actors like the United States and United Kingdom who feel the need to intervene.
Evidently, Japan’s admission of the past is a prerequisite for any possibility of a peaceful East Asian future. The longer Japan avoids issuing an apology and the deeper this sickening history is buried, the less capacity exists for progress in the region. Cooperation is possible–Germany, for example, is now a crucial NATO member and ally to other Western countries in the region despite its problematic history. Japan may be able to make do with its alliance with the US in the short term, but tensions are bound to escalate in the long term. By refusing to own up to its history, the Japanese government is contributing to geopolitical tensions felt by the entirety of East Asia.
There are only around 34 survivors of the Nanjing Massacre left today. The Japanese government continues to deny that their family’s blood was ever spilled, that their city was ever utterly destroyed. Each is waiting for Nanjing to be a name known to the world.
Written by: Ava Ye Edited by: Iveena Mukherjee