battle, or were they killed after being taken prisoner? Or were they slaughtered civilians?
I remember there was a pond just outside Nanking. It looked like a sea of bloodâwith splendid colors. If only I had color film . . . what a shocking shot that would have been!
Sasaki Motomasa, a Japanese military correspondent at Nanking, observed, âIâve seen piled-up bodies in the Great Quake in Tokyo, but nothing can be compared to this.â
THE RAPE OF NANKING
Next, the Japanese turned their attention to the women.
âWomen suffered most,â Takokoro Kozo, a former soldier in the 114th Division of the Japanese army in Nanking, recalled. âNo matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks from Hsiakwan to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse.â
Surviving Japanese veterans claim that the army had officially outlawed the rape of enemy women. But rape remained so deeply embedded in Japanese military culture and superstition that no one took the rule seriously. Many believed that raping virgins would make them more powerful in battle. Soldiers were even known to wear amulets made from the pubic hair of such victims, believing that they possessed magical powers against injury.
The military policy forbidding rape only encouraged soldiers to kill their victims afterwards. During an interview for the documentary In the Name of the Emperor , Azuma Shiro, a former Japanese soldier, spoke candidly about the process of rape and murder in Nanking:
At first we used some kinky words like Pikankan. Pi means âhip,â kankan means âlook.â Pikankan means, âLetâs see a woman open up her legs.â Chinese women didnât wear underpants. Instead, they wore trousers tied with a string. There was no belt. As we pulled the string, the buttocks were exposed. We âpikankan.â We looked. After a while we would say something like, âItâs my day to take a bath,â and we took turns raping them. It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldnât say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies donât talk.
Takokoro Kozo shared Azumaâs bluntness in discussing the issue. âAfter raping, we would also kill them,â he recalled. âThose women would start to flee once we let them go. Then we would âbang!â shoot them in the back to finish them up.â
According to surviving veterans, many of the soldiers felt remarkably little guilt about this. âPerhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman,â Azuma wrote, âbut when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.â
This behavior was not restricted to soldiers. Officers at all levels indulged in the orgy. (Even Tani Hisao, the senior general and commander of the Japanese 6th Division, was later found guilty of raping some twenty women in Nanking.) Some not only urged soldiers to commit gang rape in the city but warned them to dispose of the women afterwards to eliminate evidence of the crime. âEither pay them money or kill them in some out-of-the-way place after you have finished,â one officer told his underlings.
THE ARRIVAL OF MATSUI IWANE
The killing and raping subsided when Matsui Iwane, still weak from his illness, entered the city on the morning of December 17 for a ceremonial parade. After recovering from his bout of tuberculosis, he traveled upriver on a naval launch and rode by car to the triple archway of the Mountain Gate on the east side of Nanking. There he mounted a chestnut horse, wheeled it to face the direction of the imperial palace in Tokyo, and led a triple banzai for the emperor for Japanâs national radio broadcasting company: âGreat Field Marshal on the Steps of Heavenâbanzaiâten thousand years of