How China Started the Second Sino-Japanese War:Why Should Japan Apologize to China?
By Moteki Hiromichi

Society for the Dissemination of Historical Facts ©

1

Introduction
In the so-called "apology issue," which concerns Japan's conduct in China during theSecond Sino-Japanese War, there exists two opposing points of view:"I guess the only thing we can do is to keep on apologizing until China tells us, 'The
problems between us may not be settled, but for now you have sufficiently
apologized.'" -Murakami Haruki1"A grateful China should also pay respect to Yasukuni Shrine." -Ko Bunyu2
Mr. Murakami's opinion is based on the belief that Japan waged an aggressive war against
China, a belief shared by many Japanese even if they don't know the reason why. Thisbelief holds that the Japanese should be completely repentant over that act of aggression forthe sake of clearing our own conscience.
There are two major problems with this point of view.
First of all, it rests on the conventional wisdom that Japan was guilty of aggression towards
China. Many people will perhaps respond to that by saying something like, "What are you
talking about? The Japanese Army invaded continental China and waged war there. Surelythat constitutes a war of aggression."
However, let's imagine the following scenario. What if the Japan Self-Defense Forces
launched an unprovoked attack on American military units, which are stationed in Japan inaccordance with the provisions of the US-Japan Security Treaty, and a war broke out on
Japanese territory? Because the fighting would be taking place in Japan, does that mean
that, in this scenario, the US Army is undeniably the aggressor? No matter how distasteful aperson might find the US military presence to be, under international law, Japan would be
deemed the aggressor here.
Therefore, the most important question we ought to be asking is not "Where did the Second
Sino-Japanese War take place," but rather "Which side started the Second Sino-Japanese
War?" The present work shall attempt to answer that question, and I hope to demonstrate to
the reader that the reality is utterly contrary to the conventional wisdom.

1

Quoted in the column “Sankeisho” (Sankei Shimbun, April 25, 2015) from an interview Mr. Murakamigave to Kyodo News on April 17, 2015. Murakami is an internationally known novelist, said to be a
candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
2
Ko Bunyu (Huang Wenxiong) was born in Taiwan in 1938. He is an active commentator on current
and historical events and also a visiting professor at Takushoku University. He is the author of more than
300 books.

2Secondly, this issue is tied into postwar peace treaties. The war between China and Japanwas brought to an official conclusion through the Treaty of Taipei, which was signed with
the Republic of China, and the Joint Communique and Treaty of Peace and Friendship,
which were signed with the People's Republic of China. As with any war, it can be
expected that each side will have its own grievances, and that some ill feelings will remain.
Nevertheless, reopening old wounds time and time again serves only to make it moredifficult to rebuild normal relations between two countries after a war. Therefore, I believethat one of the most important lessons we have learned from human history is that conflicts
should be settled definitively through peace treaties.
Mr. Murakami's thinking, that Japan should continue to apologize until China is satisfied,
flies in the face of the lessons of history. This seems to me to be a very simplistic way of
thinking, showing scant concern for anything other than demonstrating an emotional
response. I don't think that this will help to clear anyone's conscience.
One might say that, even if a conflict is settled through a peace treaty, ill feelings of certain
people will still exist. However, in that case, it won't be a one-sided problem, because there
are quite a few Japanese people who personally feel that China's lawless acts during the war
were also entirely unforgiveable. If we go down that path, there will be no end.
This is all the more true if personal ill feelings become entangled in international level
politics. If these matters engulf Japan, rather than stay at the individual level, then the letterand spirit of a peace treaty will be meaningless. Therefore, even if we leave aside the firstproblem of whether or not Japan waged aggressive war on China, the concept of eternallyapologizing would remain, not an act of good conscience, but rather an atavistic principle indefiance of the wisdom acquired through history.
Ko Bunyu's opinion, which comes from the title of an essay he contributed to the magazine
Rekishitsu,3 might seem extreme, biased, or eccentric on first glance. Nevertheless, this is
the conclusion he reached in an essay grounded on sound logic and backed with a wealth ofhistorical facts.
Ko Bunyu wrote the following at the beginning of the essay:"China has alleged that the Japanese Army was responsible for aggression, massacres, rape,and pillage directed against the Chinese and other Asian peoples, and since the end of the
war this is also what people in Japan have generally believed. However, this is not what
people think in Taiwan 4... Thankfully, the people of Taiwan were never indoctrinated by3

See Rekishitsu, special issue of March 2015. An English translation of this article is available at thewebsite of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact. A Grateful China Should Also Pay
Respect To Yasukuni Shrine(http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/China-Should-Pay-Respect-To-Yasukuni-.pdf)
4
A Grateful China (http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/China-Should-Pay-Respect-To-Yasukuni-.pdf)

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the version of history promoted at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Because of this, thepeople of Taiwan lamented that Japan lost the war, and we had no problem in accepting thehistorical fact that Japan's true objective in fighting the war was to take back Asia and rid itof the invasive colonial powers.” 5
The people of Taiwan were not indoctrinated by the version of history promoted at theTokyo War Crimes Trials. In other words, they were not brainwashed by the War Guilt
Information Program6 and thus they learned the uncensored historical facts. Ko Bunyu asks
the question, "what is it exactly about the Second Sino-Japanese War that Japan and theJapanese people are supposed to repent?” 7
He concludes with, "Stopping the civil war, famine relief and relief for farmers, preventing
China's dismemberment by the great powers... No matter how you look at it, China shouldbe thanking the Japanese rather than criticizing them. Accusing Japan of waging a war of
aggression on China is nonsense. Instead China should show gratitude to Japan, a country
which was burdened by its foolish neighbor."8The part about "stopping the civil war" might make one pause, but as Ko Bunyu explains,tens of millions of Chinese people perished in internal conflicts which continued until 1950.
China's state of civil war continued after the Xinhai Revolution,9 and, in fact, was stopped
only through the intervention of the Japanese Army. Over a seven year period, extending to1930, internal wars involving the Chinese Nationalist Party, which are barely known tomost people today, including the Zhili–Anhui War, the Zhili–Fengtian War, and the Central
Plains War, left a total of thirty million people dead according to the estimates of Lin
Yutang.10 Japan's activities in China were not a unilateral intervention in the affairs of apeaceful nation.
Ko Bunyu's assertion that Japan undertook "famine relief and relief for farmers" in Chinamight surprise the reader, but, as he explains, "the Japanese, far from plundering China,
instead created agricultural production plans similar to those already implemented in
Taiwan, Korea, and Manchukuo. In China, the Japanese guided and supported production,p.1.
5
Ibid., p.1-2.
6

The War Guilt Information Program was a propaganda operation put in place by the Supreme
Commander for the Allied Powers (General MacArthur) in order to rob Japan of its spirit ofindependence and implant a war guilt complex in the minds of the Japanese people. For more
information, see Sekino Michio's book, "Nihonjin o Kuruwaseta Senno Kosaku" [The Brainwashing
Operation that Robbed the Japanese of Their Sanity](Jiyuu-sha, Tokyo, 2015).
78Ibid., p.1.
Ibid., p.1.

9

The Xinhai Revolution of 1911 brought down the Qing Dynasty and resulted in the establishment of
the Republic of China by Chinese republicans.
10Lin Yutang was a writer, linguist, and commentator of the Republic of China. He was nominated as a
candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1940 and 1950.

4

ended oppressive taxation by landlords, protected villages from local bandits, andenthusiastically helped farmers and made their food supplies secure." 11
One of the leaders providing guidance in farming communities was Ozawa Kaisaku. His
son is the famous conductor Ozawa Seiji, whose given name was formed by taking one
syllable from the given names of two prominent Japanese army officers, Itagaki Seishiro
and Ishiwara Kanji.12 Ozawa Kaisaku did creditable work in farm relief in Manchukuo andstrived to do the same for the farmers of mainland China.
Ko Bunyu's opinion is the product of an honest acceptance of the historical facts, without
the propaganda of the victors' view of history promoted by the Tokyo War Crimes Trials.
For this reason, I believe that he is right.
That is the premise on which I wrote this book. My focus will be to determine which side
provoked the war by examining the circumstances of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident 13 andthe Battle of Shanghai14 (and the subsequent Battle of Nanking), which are regarded as the
beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. That will be the subject of Part 2, the mainpart of this book.
Still, because the Tokyo War Crimes Trials deemed the Manchurian Incident15 to be thestart of the Japanese invasion, and because China also regards it as the start of the"Fifteen-Year War," I must begin with a concise overview of that as well. The Manchurian
Incident will be the subject of Part 1.
It needs to be made clear from the outset that Manchuria was the cradle of the Manchu
people, who founded the Qing Dynasty, and after the Manchurian Incident it was ruled byEmperor Puyi, who was also the last Qing emperor. Therefore, China has no right to callthe Manchurian Incident an act of aggression.
Still, because the Republic of China somehow became internationally recognized as the
successor to the Qing Dynasty, China's unjust claims have gone unchallenged. I shall11

Ibid., p.10.

12Itagaki Seishiro and Ishihara Kanji initiated the Manchurian Incident.
13
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident was a clash between the Japanese China Garrison Army and China's
29th Route Army, which took place at Marco Polo Bridge in southwest Beijing on July 7, 1937.
14
The Battle of Shanghai began on August 13, 1937 when the Chinese Army launched a sudden attackon the Japanese naval landing force which was protecting Japanese residents of the Shanghai concession.
On August 14, China called out its air forces as well and launched a full-scale offensive, which led toall-out war between China and Japan.
15
On September 18, 1931, Japan's Kwantung Army attacked the forces of Zhang Xueliang, which wereaffiliated with the Republic of China, in response to an explosion along the South Manchuria Railway at
Liutiaogou on the north side of the city of Mukden. The Kwantung Army, with a force of a mere 10,000
men, routed Zhang's army and quickly drove it out of Manchuria. In March of the following year, the
new nation of Manchukuo was proclaimed.

5

briefly explain the unreasonableness of this position and the misconception that
Manchukuo was a Japanese puppet state.
Finally, in Part 3, I want to touch on the subject of Japan's policies toward China at thattime, particularly Japan's efforts to resolve the conflict and the peace terms Japan offered.
What I hope that the reader will take from this book is that Japan's war guilt complex,
alongside the theory that Japan waged aggressive war on China, are fundamentally wrong
and contrary to all facts.
This book will refer to the war between Japan and China as the Second Sino-Japanese War,even though the government of Japan officially named it the "China Incident" following theoutbreak of the Battle of Shanghai. I made this decision for two reasons. Firstly, theChinese government's general mobilization order escalated the conflict beyond the level ofa mere "incident". Secondly, I concluded that it was the only appropriate term I could use torefer more generally to the big picture of Sino-Japanese conflict following the Manchurian
Incident. It seemed to me that the term "China Incident" referred to a conflict with a more
specific span of time.
I would be happy to hear from readers who have further questions about the issues
presented in this book.
-September 1, 20156

Table of Contents
Introduction
Part 1 - The Manchurian Incident
Chronology
How did 10,400 Japanese soldiers occupy Manchuria?
The appearance of local committees and Manchuria's declarations of independence
The Lytton Report
Zhang Jinghui's speech to the Greater East Asia Conference
Achieving the world's highest rate of economic growth
The myth of the Fifteen-Year War
Part 2 - The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Battles of Shanghai and Nanking
The Battle of Shanghai: The true starting point of the war
The unmistakable aggressor was China
China's orchestration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
China's need to attack JapanThe outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
The smoking gun: The CCP's "7-8 circular telegram"
The CCP's plans to escalate the crisis
The North China Incident and the Tongzhou Incident
The Tongzhou Massacre
What about the Nanking Massacre?
Japanese outrage and the rise of the "Punish China" slogan
The Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and secret military agreement
China's all-out attack: The struggle of the naval landing force and the dispatch of two
divisions
China's deadly bombing of the foreign concessions
The order to capture Nanking
Why do people say that a massacre happened in Nanking?
Nationalist China's silence on the "Nanking Massacre"
Open questions for President Hu Jintao
Japan's peace terms after the fall of Nanking and the First Konoe Statement
Part 3 - Japan's Policies Toward China
Was the North China Separation Strategy an act of aggression?
Peace talks after the Battle of Shanghai and the Trautmann Mediation
Japan's China policy after the First Konoe Statement

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The Japanese Army's attitude towards China as seen in Orders for Officers and Menof the Expeditionary Force
Afterword
The military parade of September 3
The shameful act of the world's leaders
The historical fabrications of the movie Cairo Declaration

8

Part 1 - The Manchurian Incident
Chronology
1911 October 10 - Xinhai Revolution
1922 February 6 - Nine-Powers Treaty (Washington Naval Conference)
1931 September 18 - Manchurian Incident
1932 March 1 - Manchukuo is founded
September 4 - Lytton Report is released
1933 March 27 - Japan withdraws from the League of Nations(effective 1935 March 27)
May 31 - Tanggu Truce
1935 June 10 - He-Umezu Agreement
1936 December 12 - Xian Incident
1937 July 7 - Marco Polo Bridge Incident
July 11 - Local ceasefire agreement
July 29 - Tongzhou Massacre
August 9 - Murder of Sublieutenant Oyama
August 13 - Battle of Shanghai
August 15 - Chiang Kai-shek issues general mobilization order
August 21 - Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
October 2 - Landing of Japan's 10th Army at Hangzhou Bay
leads to the collapse of the Chinese Army in Shanghai
November 5 - Japan makes peace offer through German
Ambassador to China Oskar Trautmann
December 1 - Order to capture Nanking is issued
December 13 - Fall of Nanking, the Japanese Army enters
Nanking
December 22 - Japan reissues its peace terms throughTrautmann
1938 January 16 - First Konoe Statement cuts ties with Chiang Kaishek's regime
November 3 - Second Konoe Statement declares a new order in
Asia
December 22 - Third Konoe Statement enunciates the principles
of friendly relations with neighbors, anti-communism, andeconomic cooperation
1940 March 30 - Establishment of the Republic of China in Nanking
1943 November 5-6 - Greater East Asia Conference is convened in
Tokyo

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How did 10,400 Japanese soldiers occupy Manchuria?
On September 18, 1931, a line of the South Manchuria Railway at Liutiaogou, about eight
kilometers north of the city of Mukden, was blown apart. Japan's Kwantung Army assumed
this to be the work of Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang,16 and so it launched an
immediate attack on Zhang's headquarters of Beidaying. By the following morning, theKwantung Army had routed Zhang's army and occupied Beidaying.
This incident is said to have been secretly engineered by a group of Kwantung Army staff
officers led by Ishiwara Kanji, but circumstances in Manchuria left them with little otherchoice. Zhang Xueliang was actively persecuting the Japanese residents of Manchuria,
including even disavowing their leases which had been recognized by treaty. His promotionof anti-Japanese education touched off a series of attacks on Japanese people, with twelve
such incidents occurring between July and September alone. The most significant were theback-to-back Wanpaoshan and Nakamura Incidents.
(1.) Over two hundred Korean farmers who had moved to the village of Wanpaoshan in
Manchuria were building an irrigation ditch when, suddenly, the Public Safety Officeordered a halt to construction. Chinese soldiers were dispatched to demand the immediate
withdrawal of the farmers and arrest of their ringleaders. The Japanese consulate sought toprotect the Korean farmers, who had been Japanese subjects since the annexation of Korea
in 1910, by sending in armed police, who stood off against thousands of Chinese rioters.17(2.) While travelling to Mongolia, Captain Nakamura, an active duty army officer, andthree attendants were massacred by Chinese regulars. The Chinese attempted to cover up
the incident, but when the truth became known, it sparked an angry outcry in Japan. This
provocation alone was serious enough to have started a war. Ishiwara Kanji's decisive
action was a response to the government's failure to take any effective countermeasuresagainst these repeated illegal acts.
In 1931, Zhang's Northeast Army was a massive force of 250,000 soldiers18 equipped withmodern weaponry. And yet, it was crushed in no time by a mere 10,40019 Kwantung Armysoldiers. The Kwantung Army quickly occupied key cities in southern Manchuria,
including Changchun and Jilin, and, in November, took Qiqihar in northern Manchuria.
16

Zhang Xueliang was the son of Zhang Zuolin, warlord ruler of Manchuria. In December 1928, Zhang
Xueliang swore allegiance to the government of Chiang Kai-shek.
17
Infuriated Koreans attacked the Chinese quarters of cities in Korea such as Seoul, Pyongyang, andSinŭiju, leaving 109 people dead.
18
There were 250,000 regular soldiers and 80,000 irregulars. See Kojo Tanehide's essay "Manchu Jihen
no Genin to Keika" [The Origins and Unfolding of the Manchurian Incident] in "Manshu Jihen no
Keika" [The History of the Manchurian Incident], p. 10.
19
The total of 10,400 included a resident division, composed of about 5,400 soldiers, plus the
Independent Garrison, composed of about 5,000 soldiers. By treaty, Japan could station fifteen soldiersfor every kilometer of the South Manchuria Railway's 1,100 kilometers of track. Therefore, the actual
number of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria was considerably fewer than the 16,500 permitted by treaty.

10Within only two months, all strategic sites across the vast territory of Manchuria had been
captured with a military force of just over 10,000 men, plus a few reinforcements from theJapanese Korean Army.
Although one might be tempted to ascribe this to the elite training of the Kwantung Army,
we should recognize that, in the end, victory was possible only thanks to the support of thepeople of Manchuria. A look at Manchuria's financial situation fully reveals just how
extreme the rule of Zhang Zuolin and Zhang Xueliang had been. In the year 1929, annual
revenue amounted to 121 million yuan, but annual expenditure reached 148 million yuan, adeficit of 27 million yuan. One-hundred and two million yuan, or eighty percent of annual
revenue, was spent on maintaining the military. By doing this, the government could
maintain its oversized military, but the costs were borne on the backs of the Manchurian
people. Really, there was probably no one on earth who would be willing to sustain such anarmy.
The appearance of local committees and Manchuria's declarations of independence
September 24, less than a week from the outbreak of the Incident, saw the establishment of
the Mukden Local Self-Government Preservation Committee, which was later reorganized
as the Liaoning Province Local Preservation Committee. This was soon followed on
September 27 with the establishment of the Harbin Special Administrative District Peace
Preservation Committee. On September 28, Liaoning Province, Jilin Province, and Taonan
District all issued declarations of independence.
In this manner, the campaign to found a new country surged in all parts of Manchuria. In
February 1932, the All-Manchuria Joint Convention to Found a New Nation was convened,
which led to the formation of the Northeastern Administrative Committee. Seven men were
elected to serve on the committee, including its chairman, Zhang Jinghui.20 Finally, on
March 1, Manchukuo declared itself an independent nation. Puyi, who had escaped from
Tianjin to Lushun in November, was appointed Chief Executive and later, Emperor.21
The Kwantung Army coordinated the Manchurian independence movement by establishing
new administrative bodies and persuading key leaders to join them with army backing, but
this was not in any way a military government. To create a military government in such avast land with just 10,000 soldiers would have been an impossible task because theremnants of Zhang Xueliang's 250,000-strong regular army and 80,000 irregulars were stillpresent in Manchuria.

20

The six other members of the committee were Zang Shiyi, Xi Qia, Ma Zhanshan, Tang Yulin, Ling
Sheng, and Qi Wang.
21
Puyi (February 7, 1906 - October 17, 1967), of the twelfth generation of the Qing Dynasty, reigned as
the last emperor of China between December 2, 1908 and February 12, 1912.

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Well before the Manchurian Incident, Manchuria was already a latent hotbed ofpro-independence sentiment, epitomized by the slogans baojing anmin22 and lianshengzizhi.23 As soon as the burden of the warlord government was removed, the independence
movement flourished. The Kwantung Army was seeking to protect Japan's interests, butthese interests coincided with the aspirations of the Manchurian people.

22
23

A regionalist concept literally meaning "defend the borders of Manchuria and keep the people safe".
A federalist concept literally meaning "united but autonomous provinces".

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The Lytton Report
The famous Lytton Report24 on the Manchurian Incident documented all thesedevelopments in a very accurate manner.
Nevertheless, when addressing the question of whether or not the establishment ofManchukuo reflected the will of the people, the report concluded that popular opinion was
opposed to Manchukuo on the basis of 1,550 letters which the Lytton Commission had
received from ordinary residents. In fact, these letters were the product of a campaign byanti-Manchukuo elements who had not been able to directly present their views to thecommission. That is the reason why the contents of every one of the letters, save two, were
hostile to Manchukuo. The speech of Manchukuo Prime Minister Zhang Jinghui, which I
will quote at length, leaves little doubt that the large majority of Manchurians were notopposed to Manchukuo. Indeed, the only thing that the letters demonstrate is how badly the
Lytton Commission was fooled by the Nationalist and Communist Parties' skillful,mass-organized propaganda campaign.
Even so, the Lytton Report did acknowledge that, "This is not a case in which one country
has declared war on another country without previously exhausting the opportunities for
conciliation provided in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Neither is it a simple caseof the violation of the frontier of one country by the armed forces of a neighbouring country,
because in Manchuria there are many features without an exact parallel in other parts of theworld."25 The report never accused Japan of aggression.
Zhang Jinghui's speech to the Greater East Asia Conference
The following speech by the second prime minister of Manchukuo, Zhang Jinghui, shouldmake it clear to anyone that the letter-writing campaign aimed at the Lytton Commission
was completely fraudulent. Zhang was serving as Mayor of Harbin in 1931, and on
September 27, soon after the outbreak of the Manchurian Incident, he formed the Harbin
Special Administrative District Peace Preservation Committee. Harbin declared its
independence on January 1, 1932. Zhang delivered this speech26 on November 5, 1943
while serving as Manchukuo's official representative to the Greater East Asia Conference inTokyo:27

24

This report on the Manchurian Incident was produced by a League of Nations commission. Its official
title was the “Report of the Commission of Enquiry of the League of Nations into the Sino-Japanese
Dispute”. The chairman of the committee was Earl of Lytton from Great Britain, and its other members
included Count Aldrovandi of Italy, Lieutenant General Henri Claudel of France, Major General Frank
McCoy of the United States, and Dr. Heinrich Schnee of Germany.
25
Quoted from p. 124 of the Lytton Report.
26
The full English text of this speech is available on the website of the Society for the Dissemination ofHistorical Fact. (http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/Chang-Ching-hui-address.pdf)
27
Delegates from Japan, Manchukuo, the Republic of China in Nanking, the Philippines, Thailand,
Burma, and the Provisional Government of Free India attended the conference.

13

"Now I am looking back over the foundation of the country of Manchuria, ten years ago, as
the first country ever founded which is confident of being Asian in the true sense of theword. Deeply excited, I feel proud of our new country. Luckily, I too took part in thefoundation with irresistible passion. I am reminded that what was missing in Manchuria atthat time was a political system based on moral justice. That is why the public has not beenorganized toward any idealistic goal. The land was devastated and the people wererandomly and lawlessly exploited. The military clique played feudal politics and imposed
heavy, unjust taxes. In fact, such a situation was nothing but a symbol of ill-treated Asia,
which was without any freedom or creativity. It was the militaristic clique of Zhang
Xueliang that practically assumed control of the district of Manchuria, cruelly squeezing
the people. The dictator was inspired by Americans and Britons with their policy to disturb
Asia, which led him to be hostile to Japan. Japan decisively launched a counterattack until,
at last, the Zhang government broke down. As a result, it was no wonder that thirty million
people got together to give support to the new country of morality and autonomy. They
knew the new government had a doubtless and firm intention of making much of thewelfare of the people and the development of the land."Zhang Jinghui's proud declaration about Manchukuo's thirty million people joining in
unison certainly rings true when one considers the spectacular growth the new nation was
experiencing at that time. Zhang continues:"As to the achievements of the newly established country of Manchuria during the first ten
years, the entire world is paying special attention. I am taking advantage of this occasion to
explain several basic problems regarding our achievement. The first is the friendly relation
among the races. In our country of Manchuria, there are many races, including Japanese,
Manchurian, Mongolian and others, living in peace and stability. Traditionally, when morethan one race lived together, it was usual that one race controlled and exploited others. In
Manchuria, however, each of the races is able to display its own ability and play animportant part in carrying out the idealistic goals of the country... The third is thestabilization of the life of the people and the training of a strong and righteous people. No
sooner had the country been founded that the government standardized the monetarysystem, which had been complicated and thought to be difficult to deal with. As a result,prices have been stabilized and the people are able to enjoy their lives. At the same time,
we made every effort to maintain public peace and order. At the time of the foundation of
the country, the land was infested with three thousand bandits. Now there are few, if any,such people seen anywhere in the territory... Lastly, what is most important is thedevelopment of industry... Now I give some figures. The scale of national finances was, atthe time of the foundation of the country, two hundred seventy million or so yen. It has
rapidly expanded by sixteen times in ten years. It now exceeded four billion and four
hundred and fifty million. Railway mileage has been lengthened from six thousand
kilometers to twelve thousand. The number of elementary school students increased fromhalf million to two and a half million. Let me talk about production increases. The output of14

coal has grown by four times and that of pig iron by five times. It is no exaggeration to saythat we have pulled off a coup." 28
Achieving the world's highest rate of economic growth
An expansion of public finances by sixteen times in ten years is a truly remarkable feat.
One might assume that GNP was rising at almost the same rate, but actually the annual rateof GNP growth was an even more astonishing thirty percent. This was not just the fastest
economic expansion in the world at that time, it was also the fastest economic expansion
the world had ever seen. Ko Bunyu believes that, if Manchukuo had survived the war, it
would have become an even more industrialized and economically developed nation thanJapan.
Manchukuo's economic development received high praise in a book written by Dr.
Elizabeth Schumpeter, the wife of the famous economist Joseph Schumpeter.29
In addition, the five-fold rise in elementary school enrollment demonstrates that education
was becoming universally accessible to all of Manchuria's "five races". 30
Yanaihara Tadao, former Chancellor of the University of Tokyo and a specialist in colonial
policy, emphasized that all the levers of political, economic, and military power inManchukuo were held by Japanese citizens, and on that basis condemned Manchukuo as a"Japanese puppet state".
However, it was surely quite normal for a new developing nation like Manchukuo to seek
the aid of Japanese citizens with experience working in a modern country. The more
important question is whether or not the Japanese were attempting to entrench themselves
as a privileged, ruling elite. In fact, as is shown in Zhang's speech, the Japanese placed
great importance on racial harmony and adopted no discriminatory policies. Manchukuo's
dramatic expansion in school enrollment is proof of this. As the Manchukuo people’s levelof education rose due to this policy, it would have been natural for them to take over the
positions once held by Japanese citizens.
As Zhang Jinghui emphasized in his speech, "I can pride myself on the prosperity of mycountry. We owe this happiness to the chivalrous spirit with which Imperial Japan
constantly give us their support."31 He was expressing gratitude to Japan, but that does notmean that he was a puppet of Japan. His speech was delivered at the Greater East Asia
Conference, which today many Japanese academics assume to have been a gathering of
28

Address of His Excellency Chang Ching-hui, Prime Minister of the Empire of Manchuria(http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/Chang-Ching-hui-address.pdf), p.3-5
29
See The Industrialization of Japan and Manchukuo by Elizabeth Boody Schumpeter.
30
The five races were the Manchus, Mongolians, Han Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese. The
fundamental policy of the government of Manchukuo was "five races under one union".
31
Ibid., (http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL/Chang-Ching-hui-address.pdf), p. 5.

15

"Japanese puppet states". However, journalist Henry Stokes,32 former Tokyo bureau chief
for The New York Times, responded, "The Japanese who believe that are themselves like
puppets who have sold Japan's soul to foreign powers." Stokes seems to understand thesituation quite well.
In short, the assertion that Japan conquered Manchuria does not stand up to scrutiny.
The myth of the Fifteen-Year War
The official view of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) designates the war between Japanand China as a "Fifteen-Year Sino-Japanese War," beginning with the Manchurian Incident(1931) and continuing through the Marco Polo Bridge Incident (July 1937), the Battle of
Shanghai (August-November 1937), the China Incident (1937-1941), and the Greater Asian
War (1941-1945). This belief is also popular among Japanese historians, and it evenappears in Japanese history textbooks.
However, this view was concocted by the CCP, and it has no basis in historical fact. The
Manchurian Incident began on September 18, 1931, and following the fall of Qiqihar on
November 19, the occupation of Manchuria's three northeastern provinces was largely
complete. The fighting stopped with the fall of Jinzhou, in Jehol Province, on January 3 ofthe following year, and then, in March, the state of Manchukuo came into being. That was
the end of the war.
Having said that, from the perspective of the CCP, it was on April 26, 1932 that the
Chinese Soviet Republic, founded in Ruijin in Jiangxi Province, issued a "declaration ofwar" on Japan in the name of the central government. If that declaration had beenrecognized internationally as a serious act of war, then Japan would have had the right torespond by invading communist-held regions of China. In fact, it was not deemed to be
anything more than a symbolic move and was completely ignored by other countries. The
Chinese Soviet Republic was itself destroyed in October of 1934 during Chiang Kai-shek's
encirclement campaigns, but from the perspective of the communist cause, China continued
to be officially at war with Japan since the declaration was issued. And yet, in that case theconflict should have been called the Fourteen-Year War, not the Fifteen-Year War.

32

Henry Stokes was born in Great Britain and is a graduate of Oxford University. He worked, in
succession, as Tokyo bureau chief for The New York Times, the Financial Times, and the London Times.
He is the author of the book The Life and Death of Yukio Mishima, as well as works published inJapanese including "Eikokujin Kisha ga Mita Rengokoku Sensho Shikan no Kyomo” [The Lie of theAllied Powers' Victors' View of History as Seen by a British Reporter], "Gaikoku Tokuhain Kyokai
Juchin ga Hannichi Chukan no Sagi o Abaita" [A Veteran of the Foreign Correspondents' Club Exposes
the Anti-Japanese Deception of China and Korea], "Naze Amerika wa Tainichi Senso o Shikaketa No
Ka" [Why Did America Start a War with Japan?] (co-authored with Kase Hideaki), and "Rengokoku
Sensho Shikan no Tettei Hihan [Complete Rebuttal of the Allied Powers' Victors' View of History](co-authored with Fujii Genki).

16

The CCP's "anti-Japanese resistance" did involve guerrilla raids, but the fact that thedeclaration of war was actually merely a slogan is clear enough from the following
directive issued by Mao Zedong:33"The fighting between China and Japan is an excellent opportunity for expansion of ourparty. Seventy percent of the policies we have decided upon will be aimed towards
self-expansion, twenty percent towards dealing with the Nationalists, and ten percent
towards fighting Japan."In other words, the CCP saw anti-Japanese resistance as a tool to bolster its own power.
The armed confrontation which did occur between Japan and the Nationalist Governmentof China was effectively ended with the establishment of Manchukuo, and then was
officially resolved with the signing of the Tanggu Truce on May 31, 1933.34 There were nofurther armed clashes of significance until the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. Far from that, infact, direct rail traffic between Beijing and Mukden resumed immediately after the signingof the truce, and then, in 1934, a postal agreement normalized mail service, telegram
delivery, and telephone communication between China and Manchukuo. In 1935, customs
came into effect on the border of Manchukuo and China, permitting the resumption of
normal international trade. The same year, the Japanese and Chinese legations were
upgraded to the status of embassies as the culmination of the improved relations and mutual
friendship between the two countries.
All this should leave little doubt that the phrase "Fifteen-Year War," suggesting continuous
fighting between Japan and China from the time of the Manchurian Incident and onwards,
is ridiculous and in flagrant contradiction to historical fact.

33

This famous instruction was handed down by Mao Zedong in September 1937 as the Independent
Regiment of the 8th Route Army's 115th Division was going into action against the Japanese Army in
Shanxi Province. See "Dui Rikang Zhan Qijian Zhonggong Tongzhan Celue Zhi Yanjiu" [Research on
the Chinese Communist United Front during the War of Resistance against Japan] by Liangmei Mei.
34
The Tanggu Truce was a ceasefire agreement signed by Major General Okamura Yasuji, the Deputy
Chief of Staff of the Kwantung Army, and Lieutenant General Xiong Bin, the Chief of Staff of the
Republic of China Beiping Branch Military Council. According to the main terms of the agreement, theChinese Army was to withdraw west and south of a line stretching through Yanqing, Tongzhou, andLutai, and not undertake any provocative actions. In exchange, the Japanese Army was to withdraw
north of the Great Wall.

17

Part 2 - The Marco Polo Bridge Incident andthe Battles of Shanghai and Nanking
The Battle of Shanghai: The true starting point of the war
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident is usually considered to be the start of the Second
Sino-Japanese War. There is no mistake that this incident served to trigger the
Sino-Japanese conflict, but the incident itself was only a small skirmish—it cannot becalled the start of a full-blown war. Consequently, it would be inaccurate to claim that thefighting at the Marco Polo Bridge "spread" to Shanghai.Chi
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, the Japanese Army sent three divisions from Japanand units of the Kwantung Army to northern China in the hopes of restraining the nonstop
ceasefire violations of Chinese soldiers in the area. Japanese forces occupied Tianjin, butthey did not advance beyond, or make any attempt to advance beyond, the city of Baoding,just southwest of Beijing. Furthermore, on August 5, the Japanese government made alandmark peace proposal with the Chinese and planned to hold its first meeting with
Chinese leaders in September. Therefore, the Chinese Army's attack on Shanghai, carriedout on August 13, can hardly be called a natural extension of the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident. Rather, the Chinese attack on Shanghai should be seen as a dramatic new crisis
sparked by Chiang Kai-shek's determination to wage full-scale war against Japan.
Rather than a clash of local units, an all-out, state-dictated military offensive constitutes“war” under international law. The existence of an official declaration of war is not thedefining factor. On August 13, 1937, Chiang's regime launched a full-scale offensive
against the Japanese naval landing force, which was stationed in Shanghai to protect
Japanese residents, with an army of 30,000 regular soldiers. On August 15, ChiangKai-shek issued an order of general mobilization and was appointed commanding chief of
the Army, Navy and Air Forces. This, therefore, should be considered the official starting
point of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Historian Edwin Reischauer concurs that the Battleof Shanghai was the engagement which marked the beginning of World War II.
Who, then, caused the actual war between China and Japan?
The following report by The New York Times special correspondent Hallett Abend was
published on August 31, 1937:
Foreigners Support Japan - Official foreign observers and officials of various foreign
governments who participated in various conferences here in seeking to avoid theoutbreak of local hostilities, agree that the Japanese exhibited the utmost restraint underprovocation, even for several days keeping all of the Japanese landed force off thestreets and strictly within their own barracks, although the move somewhat endangered
Japanese lives and properties. 'Opinions may differ regarding the responsibility for the
opening of hostilities in the vicinity of Peiping early in July,' said one foreign official

18

who was a participant in the conferences held here before Aug. 13, 'but concerning theShanghai hostilities the records will justify only one decision. The Japanese did not wanta repetition of the fighting here and exhibited forbearance and patience and did
everything possible to avoid aggravating the situation. But they were literally pushed
into the clash by the Chinese, who seemed intent on involving the foreign area andforeign interests in this clash.'
The tenor of The New York Times article was critical of Japan and sympathetic toward
China in accordance with the general trend of the time. Nonetheless, the article confirmsthat the start of the fighting in Shanghai was due to a unilateral attack by the Chinese Army.
The unmistakeable aggressor was China
As was reported in The New York Times, there can be no question that it was China thatembarked on an unprovoked war against Japan.
In the Shanghai International Settlement35, there were over 30,000 Japanese citizens
working in a variety of businesses and industries protected by a 2,200-man Japanese naval
landing force. When the naval landing force realized that the Chinese Army had infiltrated
a large number of soldiers into the demilitarized zone outside the settlement, in violation of
the ceasefire agreement,36 it was rapidly reinforced with another 2,000 men. When thepreviously mentioned article noted that Japan was "keeping all of the Japanese landed force
off the streets", it was referring to these roughly 2,000 reinforcements.
On August 9, the Chinese Army murdered two members of the Japanese naval landing
force, Sublieutenant Oyama Isao and Seaman First Class Saito Yozo, who were carryingout an inspection while in their car. The Chinese insisted that they had been attacked andreturned fire, dragging out the body of a Chinese Peace Preservation Corps soldier as“evidence”. However, the corpse clearly indicated that it had been shot at from the Chineseside, a fact also confirmed by multiple foreign reporters on the scene. The criticallyacclaimed biography, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, explainsthat the incident was orchestrated by General Zhang Zhizhong in order to force ChiangKai-shek to attack Japanese forces. Zhang, who was the defensive commander of Nanking
and Shanghai, was also a member of the CCP who had infiltrated Chiang's highcommand.37
35

The International Settlement was a settlement of foreign residents in China which had the rights ofself-government and extraterritoriality. In addition to the International Settlement, where British, American,
Japanese, and other foreigners lived, there was also the French Concession.
36
The Shanghai Ceasefire Agreement was approved by Japan and China on May 5, 1932 following theShanghai Incident. A joint committee was formed of American, British, French, and Italian members working
alongside Chinese and Japanese members to observe that the terms of the treaty were carried out. The location
for stationing troops of both Japan and China was decided by the agreement.
37
According to page 198 of Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Anchor Books, 2006), "But on 9 August,at Shanghai airport, an army unit hand-picked by ZZZ [Zhang Zhizhong] killed a Japanese marine [sic]lieutenant and a private [sic]. A Chinese prisoner under sentence of death was then dressed in a Chinese

19More than 30,000 Chinese regulars surrounded the concession. The core of the Chinese
force was the elite 88th Division, which had been trained by German military advisors. On
August 13, the offensive began, and on the 14th the Chinese began simultaneous aerial
bombardment as well. Later, I will show how these attacks led to the outbreak of full-scalewar.
In any case, it is clear that the Chinese were the ones who set the course for war, and that
the Japanese were dragged into a war they did not desire.38 The launching of aconcentrated attack by regular army troops against civilians and soldiers stationed inaccordance to a previously established treaty is an "act of aggression" under internationallaw, regardless of where the troops are stationed, whether inside or outside their homecountry. Therefore, we must conclude that, even though it took place on Chinese territory,
the Second Sino-Japanese War was a Chinese war of aggression.
China's orchestration of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
The article in The New York Times stated: "Opinions may differ regarding the responsibility
for the opening of hostilities in the vicinity of Peiping early in July." It stated this because,at that point, the facts about the clash at Marco Polo Bridge, which was the impetus forwhat followed, were not yet sufficiently known. In reality, this too was undoubtedly an
incident orchestrated by the Chinese.
China's responsibility was unambiguously recorded in the local ceasefire agreement signed
four days after the clash on July 11 by Qin Dechun, Deputy Commander of China's 29th
Route Army, and Matsui Kyutaro, Chief of the Japanese Army Beijing Special Service
Agency. The three clauses of the ceasefire agreement were:(1.) The representative of the 29th Route Army expresses regret and will punish those
responsible. He affirms his intention to take responsibility for preventing further such
incidents in the future. (2.) The overly close proximity of the Chinese Army to Japanesesoldiers stationed in Fengtai has increased the likelihood of such incidents. Therefore,
China will station no soldiers on the east bank of the Yongding River in the vicinity of
Marco Polo Bridge and the Peace Preservation Corps will maintain security there. (3.)
Because this incident was in many ways inspired by the work of anti-Japaneseorganizations, including the Communist Party and the so-called Blue Shirts Society,39
China will undertake countermeasures and a thorough crackdown against them.

uniform and shot dead at the airport gate, to make it seem that the Japanese had fired first. The Japanese gave
every sign of wishing to defuse the incident, but ZZZ still bombarded Chiang with requests to launch an
offensive, which Chiang vetoed."38
See the book The Reluctant Combatant: Japan and the Second Sino-Japanese War (Lanham, Maryland:
University Press of America, 2014) by Kitamura Minoru and Lin Siyun.
39
The Blue Shirts Society was a terrorist and espionage organization under Chiang Kai-shek's direct control.

20People still ask the question of who fired the shots at Marco Polo Bridge, but the answer
should be obvious based on the terms of the ceasefire agreement which were published incontemporary newspapers. Because this was an agreement, it was approved by mutual
consent and does not represent the view of the Japanese side alone. The agreement statedclearly that responsibility for the incident laid with the Chinese.
It has been said that the ceasefire agreement was forced upon China due to pressure fromJapan, but that is an untenable argument which ignores basic facts. The 29th Route Army,commanded by Song Zheyuan, was a force of roughly 150,000 men which dominatedNorth China. The opposing Japanese China Garrison Army40 numbered a mere 5,600 men,so one could not possibly describe the Japanese as an overwhelming force in a position to
impose an unreasonable ceasefire deal. China would later stridently insist that there had
never been a ceasefire agreement, but the document itself leaves little doubt of its existence.
The work of putting the particulars of the three-point ceasefire agreement into operation
went forward later, and a fleshed-out version of the pact was concluded on July 19. In fact,
Japan labored throughout this time to observe the terms of the agreement, even while
frequent violations were taking place. However, nothing could be done about China's
repudiation of the existence of the agreement. In other words, not only did the Japanesemilitary not provoke the fighting, all of the blame for escalating the crisis rested squarelyon the shoulders of the Chinese.
China's need to attack Japan
In the first place, Japan had absolutely no reason to attack China. It goes without sayingthat it would have been sheer folly for the 5,600 Japanese troops stationed there to attack
the 150,000-man 29th Route Army. The full might of the Japanese Army in mainland Japan,
Manchuria, Korea, and China would have been roughly 250,000 men. Compared to this,
China had about 2.1 million men, 500,000 of which formed modernized units trained andequipped by German military advisors. What's more, Japan's greatest potential enemy was
the Soviet Union, and the Soviets had a large military force of 1.6 million, 400,000 ofwhich were deployed in the Soviet Far East. Given all these conditions, it would have been
insane for Japan to open hostilities in northern China. Japan had no reason, much less plans,
to do any such thing.
In China at that time, however, those who advocated war against Japan dominated.
Excluding the peasantry, the urban residents of China had a burning desire for war andwere confident of victory. The idea that Japan invaded a weak China and that the war
40

The Boxer Protocol, signed in 1901 following the Boxer Rebellion, permitted eight countries includingFrance, the United States, Great Britain, and Japan to station soldiers in China in order to protect their citizens.
At the time, the United States had 1,200 soldiers and France had 1,800 soldiers stationed in China. Japan had
5,600 soldiers because the Japanese were, with 33,000 people, the largest foreign community in the vicinity ofBeijing. In terms of the ratio of civilians to soldiers, Japan was 6:1, America 2:1, and France 1:3.
Proportionally speaking, of the eight countries, Japan stationed the smallest military force.

21

expanded from there is a highly distorted view of history—entirely refuted merely bylooking at any contemporary Chinese newspaper. The book, The Reluctant Combatant:
Japan and the Second Sino-Japanese War, provides a detailed account of this.
The sabre rattlers of the time can be broadly broken down into three groups. First, there
were the radical intellectuals, students, and urban citizens, second, members of the CCP,
and third, provincial military cliques. The objective of the CCP and the military cliques inadvocating war was to enhance their position vis-à-vis Chiang Kai-shek by currying favorwith radical public opinion leaders such as the intellectuals.
The CCP in particular used its anti-Japanese stance as its most powerful political weapon.
The Chinese Soviet Republic, which was established in November 1931 in Ruijin, Jiangxi
Province, issued a proclamation of war against Japan in the name of the central government
on April 26, 1932. For good measure, a so-called "official" proclamation of war was alsoannounced by telegram on September 18. In addition, the CCP issued a declaration ofanti-Japanese patriotism in August of 1935 in accordance with the Comintern's order toorganize "anti-fascist popular fronts". Then, in December 1936, the Xian Incident took
place.41 While setting out to urge his soldiers to fight more vigorously in the subjugation of
the CCP, Chiang Kai-shek was detained by Zhang Xueliang, the commander of theNortheast Army. Zhang, who had been plotting with the CCP, pressured Chiang into
working with the communists to fight Japan. Consequently, the Nationalist Party dropped
its confrontational line toward the CCP, and in its place grew anti-Japanese resistance.
The outbreak of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident
Given the circumstances, it was only a matter of when and where the attack would come.
The first shots were fired on July 7, 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge.
The 135 men of the Japanese China Garrison Army's 8th Company, having given priornotice to the 29th Route Army, conducted manoeuvres on the dry riverbed near the Marco
Polo Bridge. As the map (attachment 1) shows, they began their manoeuvres in front of thebridge at a position about 400 meters distant from the Marco Polo Bridge wall (theWanping Fortress wall) and an embankment studded with Chinese pillboxes. At around10:40 PM, just before the manoeuvres were to end after a 400-meter advance, several shots
were fired into the Japanese positions. After that, ten-odd shots were fired from thedirection of the embankments, and a few hours later at 3:25 AM, there were three more
shots. At 5:30, after taking fire a fourth time, the Japanese forces finally responded with
their own fire. This was seven hours after the first shots had been fired.
It was, therefore, only natural that the 29th Route Army would admit total culpability in theceasefire agreement signed on July 11.
41

In December of 1936, Chiang visited the city of Xian in order to encourage Zhang Xueliang and Yang
Hucheng to make an all-out attack on the communist Red Army's headquarters, but the two of them instead
switched sides and proceeded to kidnap and imprison Chiang.

22

23

As noted earlier, the third clause of this ceasefire agreement stated, "Because this incident
was in many ways inspired by the work of anti-Japanese organizations, including theCommunist Party and the so-called Blue Shirts Society, China will undertake
countermeasures and a thorough crackdown against them."
The commanders of the 29th Route Army were also not entirely certain who had really
fired the shots, but the text of the ceasefire agreement implies that they suspected the CCP.
It was natural that the CCP, which continued to cry for full-scale anti-Japanese action,
would continue to provoke clashes, but the truth was that at the time the CCP found itself
facing a serious predicament. To be sure, with the Xian Incident, Chiang Kai-shek ceased
attacking the communists and promised to forge a cooperative relationship with the CCP.
However, Chiang proceeded to thrust strict conditions, one after another, at the CCP, andhalf a year later, around June 1937, relations between the Nationalist and Communist
Parties were on the verge of breakdown.
Edgar Snow42 wrote, "Following Chiang's release the Communists were in fact soon again
placed at his mercy... By June, 1937 Chiang Kai-shek... again was blockading the Reds...
Once more they now seemed to face the choice of total surrender or encirclement anddisaster, or retreat to the northern desert."43
The CCP secretly implemented a bold scheme to escape their existential crisis. The idea
behind their strategy was very simple. Basically, the CCP would provoke a conflict
between the Japanese Army and Nationalist China while keeping their own role in the plot
hidden. In case of success, the Nationalists would have no choice but to leave thecommunists alone and divert the brunt of their military to the war with Japan. It is now
known from publications released in China that the CCP had infiltrated many party
members into the 29th Route Army, including staff officers such as a battalion commander,
the chief of intelligence, the deputy chief of propaganda, and, most importantly, Vice Chiefof Staff Zhang Kexia.44

42

Edgar Snow was an American journalist. Thanks to a letter of introduction from Song Qingling, Snow wasadmitted into the CCP's base in Yan'an in 1936. Gaining Mao Zedong's trust, Snow was able to interview him
and ended up writing a series of articles and books reporting favorably on the Chinese communist movement
led by Mao. Representative works of Snow's include Red Star Over China, a favorite book of Franklin
Roosevelt, and The Battle for Asia.
43
See Random Notes on Red China, 1936-1945 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1957)
by Edgar Snow, page xiii.
44
See Zhongguo Gongchandang Zuzhishi Ziliao Huibian [Collected Documents on the History of theStructure of the Chinese Communist Party] (Beijing: Hongqi Publishing Company, 1983) edited by Wang
Jianying and Zhonghua Renmin Gongheguo Zhiguanzhi [List of Official Positions in the People's Republic ofChina] (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Publishing Company, 1993) edited by He Husheng.

24

The CCP's secret plan was to use these infiltrated agents provocateurs to incite
anti-Japanese sentiment within the units of the 29th Route Army and to provoke shooting
incidents while mingled into crowds of regular soldiers. This is what happened at 10:40
p.m. on the night of July 7.
The smoking gun: The CCP's "7-8 circular telegram"
We now have the “smoking gun” that leaves no doubt that it was the CCP that engineered
the incident at Marco Polo Bridge.
On the 8th, the day after the shooting, the CCP sent a long telegram from Yan'an in thename of the Central Committee to those affiliated with the Nationalist Government, thearmy, the newspapers, various other organizations, and all persons in positions of power in
China from Chiang Kai-shek on down. In official CCP histories, the telegram is given
special mention, as the "7-8 circular telegram". Moreover, on the same day, the same kindof telegram was sent under the names of Mao Zedong and six other military leaders to
Chiang Kai-shek, General Song Zheyuan, and others.
As mentioned before, the Japanese Army first began to return fire at 5:30 on the morning of
the 8th. Until that point, the Japanese had begun negotiations at Marco Polo Bridge walland other locations, and had made preparations to respond to repeated shootings, but no fire
had yet been returned.
Even though Japan's counterattack began on the 8th, due to the circumstances oftransmission there is no way that the 7-8 circular telegram could have been prepared thesame day. After having received word of the Japanese counterattack, the communists would
still have had to write up their lengthy appeal to arms in the form of an official telegram,include all the details of the counterattack within it, gain the approval of the Central
Committee, and transmit it across China.
The only way the telegram could have been distributed so quickly is that it was prepared inadvance. The CCP must have written an outline in advance, confirmed that everything hadgone according to plan, and then finalized it in the form of an official message.
In fact, we have evidence proving that this was indeed the case.
Colonel Akitomi Jujiro, the Chief of the China Expeditionary Force Intelligence
Department Beiping (Beijing) Office, told the newspaper Sankei Shinbun, as reported in its
September 8, 1994 evening edition, that, "Late at night immediately following the incident,
the Tianjin Special Intelligence Section radio operator intercepted an urgent wirelesstransmission from a transmitter believed to be on the grounds of Beijing University to the
CCP military headquarters in Yan'an. It repeated 'Chenggong-le [success!]' three times."
Akitomi stated that, at the time, they had no idea what the transmission might have meant.
It is clear now. The transmitter informed Yan'an that the stratagem at the Marco Polo25

Bridge succeeded. Immediately afterward the circular telegram was drawn up in Yan'an.
Then, on the morning of the 8th, after having confirmed that Japan had begun firing back, it
was wired en masse to locations across China. Thus, the group responsible formasterminding the Marco Polo Bridge Incident was none other than the Chinese
Communist Party. An alternative theory, which holds that the incident happened by
accident, assumes that the communists were fools who would never have attempted such ascheme. However, this theory really gives the communists too little credit.
Edgar Snow wrote about the Marco Polo Bridge Incident as if the Japanese Army had
caused it, thus incidentally rescuing the CCP from its great predicament of June. Snow
wrote, "Now a second stroke of luck opened up the broadest and most fertile opportunities
for them [the communists]. For it was in the following month that they were extricatedfrom their precarious position only by Japan's 'providential' major invasion of China, whichgave Chiang no choice but to shelve any and all plans for another annihilation drive."45
Snow should have known that the incident was staged by the CCP, but he nonethelessrepeatedly referred to the Japanese attack as "providential". To reiterate, it was the Chinese,
specifically the CCP, who caused the incident. Above all, there is no way that a Japaneseforce numbering a mere 5,600 could have launched a "major invasion" of China—which is
not what happened. Snow could write these sort of lies plausibly by claiming that the facts
were not yet known, but because President Franklin Roosevelt was a fan of his book, Red
Star Over China, he was appointed in 1942 as an unofficial intelligence provider. What was
truly outrageous was that Roosevelt exploited Snow's false reports to wage war on Japan.
Although a ceasefire agreement was signed on the 11th, the agreement was repeatedly
broken by the Chinese, either by the Chinese Army itself or by persons unknown. This soon
culminated in large-scale violations by the Chinese Army such as the Langfang Incident46
and the Guang'anmen Incident.47 On July 27, the Japanese government, which had
consistently followed a non-expansionist policy since the Marco Polo Bridge Incident,
finally made a decision to dispatch three army divisions into the Chinese interior. On the
28th, Japan sent notice to the 29th Route Army that a state of war had begun.
The CCP's plans to escalate the crisis
Though the so-called "major invasion" of the Japanese Army never took place, Snow let it
slip in his writings that such an invasion was exactly what the communists had wanted.
They were delighted that Chiang Kai-shek had had no choice but to abandon his operations
to wipe them out, but, going beyond that, their true goal was to have Chiang fight the45

See Snow, op. cit., page xiii.
In the vicinity of Langfang, Japanese units had gone to repair a severed army telegraph line, but eventhough they had notified the 29th Route Army in advance, they were attacked and suffered fourteen
casualties.
47
Japanese Army units were attempting to enter their barracks inside the walls of Beiping after having
received permission from the 29th Route Army. However, after two thirds of the Japanese troops had entered
the city, the gates were abruptly shut and the Japanese were attacked. They suffered nineteen casualties.
46

26

Japanese for them. A Comintern order issued after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident included
the following two instructions:48"1.) You must staunchly avoid localized resolutions and instead lead the way to a full-scale
confrontation between China and Japan. 2.) You must use every possible measure toaccomplish the above goal, and eliminate leading figures who are betraying the liberationof China through localized resolutions and compromises with the Japanese."
From this, one can see clearly that, in addition to their immediate objective of extricating
themselves from their precarious position, the true goal of the communists was to use the
Marco Polo Bridge Incident to cause a full-scale outbreak of hostilities between Japan and
China. Even though the leaders of the CCP were calling for resistance against Japan, they
had no intention of directly engaging with the Japanese military themselves. Rather, theirtrue goal was to cause a full-scale war between the Japanese Army and Chiang Kai-shek’sarmy.
By doing this, the communists could achieve their objective of weakening the JapaneseArmy and guaranteeing the security of the Soviet Union. This was all part of theirlong-term strategy of winning power by having the armies of Japan and China wear down
and destroy one another. Needless to say, the Comintern's global strategy, which waspromoted by the CCP to further its ultimate goals, finally came to fruition in 1949. For allof these reasons, the CCP was hell-bent on provoking and escalating war between China
and Japan.
The North China Incident and the Tongzhou Incident
The conflict in China expanded just as the CCP had planned. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist
Government went ahead with plans to send its army north, and as I have previously noted,
Japan was also forced to alter its policy of non-expansion of hostilities by dispatching threedivisions on July 27 and notifying the 29th Route Army on the 28th that a state of war
existed. Though outnumbered, Japan's forces received some reinforcements from theManchurian Kwantung Army and the Japanese Korean Army, and they soon gained total
control of the Pingjin area (the vicinity of Beijing and Tianjin).
48

Below is a full copy of the Comintern order of July 1937, as recorded in the book Kominterun ni Kansuru
Kihon Shiryo [Basic Documents on the Comintern] (Tokyo: Koain Seimubu, 1939).
"1.) You must staunchly avoid localized resolutions and instead lead the way to a full-scale confrontation
between China and Japan. 2.) You must use every possible measure to accomplish the above goal, andeliminate leading figures who are betraying the liberation of China through localized resolutions andcompromises with the Japanese. 3.) You must undertake operations to stir up a mass movement among thelower classes which will leave the Nationalist Government with no choice but to launch a war against Japan.
4.) The CCP must extend its anti-Japanese boycott throughout China and also threaten with boycotts any
third-party nations aiding Japan. 5.) The CCP must recruit common people, as well as ordinary soldiers,
noncommissioned officers, and low-ranking leaders from the army of the Nationalist Government, in order toachieve a party strength exceeding that of the Nationalists."

27

However, soldiers from the Chinese Peace Preservation Corps took advantage of theredeployment of Japan's outnumbered forces in order to carry out a massacre of Japanese
residents in Tongzhou.
The town of Tongzhou, located some twelve kilometers east of Beijing, was home to 420
Japanese residents. Because its Japanese garrison had launched an offensive on nearby
Nanyuan on July 29, less than 110 Japanese soldiers remained there. The men of the local
Peace Preservation Corps, affiliated with the pro-Japanese autonomous government of Yin
Rugeng, seized the opportunity to turn their guns on unarmed civilians and the few
remaining Japanese soldiers in Tongzhou. They suddenly swooped down on the town andsavagely massacred them.
It was later established that Zhang Qingyu, the First Unit commander of the Peace
Preservation Corps, and Zhang Yantian, the Second Unit commander, had been in contact
with the Nationalist Party before the massacre. Many books have claimed that the rebellionof the Peace Preservation Corps was sparked when the Japanese accidentally bombed them,but, in fact, that incident was dealt with after it had taken place. The true cause of themassacre was the treachery of Zhang Qingyu and Zhang Yantian, who had been waiting forsome time for their chance to strike.
All manner of brutalities, including looting, beatings, rape, and murder were directed
toward a great number of innocent people, including the old, the young, and women. The
number of the slain totaled 223.
Unlike the mythological but highly publicized "Nanking Massacre," this dreadful atrocity
actually did happen. (I will discuss the "Nanking Massacre" in more detail later.) In spite ofthis, for a long time Japanese history textbooks mentioned only details of the "Nanking
Massacre," in line with the Chinese government's outlandish wartime propaganda, but theysaid nothing about the real-life Tongzhou Massacre. This bizarre situation continued until
the year 2015 when a proper history textbook, which finally corrected this fault, wasapproved for use in middle schools. That textbook was the New History Textbook: Revised
Edition, published by Jiyusha. Unfortunately, the problem remains uncorrected in othertextbooks.
The Tongzhou Massacre
I will now recount some of the horrible events of the Tongzhou Massacre, as recorded insworn affidavits of witnesses summoned to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials who were at thescene of the massacre.
Firstly, there is the following excerpt from the testimony of Kayajima Takashi, who at thetime of the massacre was commander of the Tianjin Infantry Unit and the 2nd Infantry
Regiment of the Japanese China Garrison Army. After having joined the Battle of Nanyuan,
he rushed to rescue the inhabitants of Tongzhou on the afternoon of July 30.

28

29

30

"In Asahiken (a Japanese restaurant), there were seven or eight women between the ages offorty and seventeen or eighteen who had all been raped. They had been shot dead and were
naked with their privates exposed. Four or five had been stabbed in their privates withbayonets. Almost all of the Japanese men's bodies left in businesses and government offices
showed signs of having been strangled with ropes. Blood spattered the walls. It beggars
description."
Katsura Shizuo, acting unit commander in the 2nd Infantry Regiment in charge of relieving
Tongzhou, gave this testimony.
"At the entrance to Kinsuiro (an inn), I saw the body of a woman who looked to have been
the proprietress. Her legs were pointed toward the entrance, and only her face was covered
with a newspaper. I remember that it seemed as if she had resisted considerably. The upperand lower parts of her body were exposed, and stab wounds from four or five bayonet
thrusts were visible. It looked like her privates had been gouged out with an edged weapon,
and there was blood everywhere... The bodies of four Japanese women, who appeared to bemaids, lay in the maid-servants' room. It looked like they had all died in agony. They had
died lying on top of one another, and only one of the women was turned upwards with her
privates exposed. At the front desk and pantry there were two women and one man who
had died face up, face down, and sprawled sideways. There was clear evidence that they
had fought their killers. The man's eyes were gouged out and the upper half of his body
appeared to have been riddled with bullets. Both of the women had bayonet wounds in theirbacks... In the house of a Japanese family behind it, two people, a parent and child, hadbeen butchered. All the fingers of the child had been cut off. At the store of a Japanesecitizen near the South Gate, the body of what seemed to have been the proprietor had beenleft in the street with his ribs exposed and his organs scattered."
Sakurai Fumio was a platoon commander in the 2nd Infantry Regiment who arrived inTongzhou with the main force of his regiment on July 30. According to Sakurai,"As soon as we came through the garrison's East Gate, we were enraged to see the bodies ofmurdered male and female civilians sprawled out on the ground every several meters infront of us. We went around checking each house, while shouting out 'Are there any
Japanese people here!' In trash cans and ditches all over the place, we kept on finding
corpses, including a child with a wire run through his nose like a cow, an old woman with
one of her arms cut off, and a pregnant woman whose belly had been ripped with a bayonet.
In one restaurant, a whole family had been slaughtered with their hands and heads chopped
off. Every woman older than fourteen or fifteen years of age had been raped. The sight of it
was unbearable... In a pond near the East Gate, there were the bodies of six family memberswith ropes around their necks and hands pierced together with barbed wire. There was clear
evidence on the bodies that they had been strung together and dragged over the ground."31

Since my readers may be getting sick to their stomachs, I will leave it at that. However,other eyewitness accounts have been written by Japanese women who married Chinese men
and were living in Tongzhou at the time of the massacre. I wanted to reprint them here, butultimately chose to omit them because they are rather long and might be traumatic to myreaders. Those who are interested in reading the accounts can consult the book Tenno-samaga Naite Gozatta [Tears of the Emperor] by Shirabe Kanga.
What about the Nanking Massacre?
Some readers might find the preceding descriptions of unspeakable horror and fiendish
violence in Tongzhou to be eerily familiar. Indeed, these same scenes appear in accounts of
the Nanking Massacre. The writings of Iris Chang and like-minded individuals containcountless similar examples.
Nevertheless, as I will explain later, the so-called "Nanking Massacre" is an illusion,nothing more than war propaganda. Throughout its history, Japan has never had the same
sort of "massacre culture" as China. Japanese people may kill one another, but it would befair to say that no large-scale, indiscriminate slaughters have ever occurred in Japanese
history. By contrast, massacres of tremendous scale are not at all unusual in Chinese
history.
By reading the book A History of Massacres in China: What Makes the Chinese Such
Lovers of Murder? by Shi Ping,49 a graduate of Beijing University, we learn that in China
massacres far exceeding anything in Japanese history were frequent occurrences in ancient,medieval, and modern times, extending to present day communist China. Particularlyinteresting is the fact that there was a Nanking Massacre in Chinese history, not in 1937,
but in 1864 during the Taiping Rebellion. Nanking, then the capital of the Taiping
Heavenly Kingdom, was conquered by an army commanded by Zeng Guofan. After Zeng's
death, one of his staff officers, Zhao Liewen, described what happened after the city's fallin his book Nengjin Jushi Riji [Diary of a Capable, Quiet Gentleman]:"Children also became the targets of killing and many soldiers wildly engaged themselves
in killing children as if they were playing a game. Regarding women, those who were under
40 served as instruments of carnal pleasure for the soldiers but most of those who wereolder or very ugly were randomly killed by the sword."50
Ghastly mass killings, a million slaughtered at the massacres in Sichuan, Yangzhou, Jiading,and so forth, fill page after page. Shi Ping's book is a must-read to understand China.
To repeat, no such massacres have ever taken place in Japanese history. The Chinese havevehemently insisted that the "Nanking Massacre" was the work of the Japanese in spite of49

An English translation of this book is available on the website of the Society for the Dissemination ofHistorical Fact. (http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/71_S4.pdf)
50
See A History of Massacres in China: What Makes the Chinese Such Lovers of Murder?, page 107.

32

the fact that the Japanese have no history of engaging in this sort of atrocity. In fact, the taleof the Nanking Massacre was created on the basis of the massacres which the Chinese
themselves have repeatedly perpetrated throughout their own history. This is precisely thereason why the stories of the Nanking Massacre, which were fabricated to indict theJapanese Army, are identical to the accounts of both the mass killings that have occurred
time and again in Chinese history and the more recent massacre which the Chineseperpetrated in Tongzhou.
Japanese outrage and the rise of the "Punish China" slogan
The Japanese people were enraged at the news of the Tongzhou Massacre. Newspapers
throughout Japan carried the headline "Punish China".51 And yet, though public opinion
seethed against the unforgivable atrocity and voices demanding resolute government action
grew louder, no attacks on Chinese residents in Japan, like those during the Wanpaoshan
Incident in Korea, ever occurred. As I described earlier, in 1931 Korean rioters attacked
Chinatowns in Seoul, Pyongyang, and Sinŭiju, killing 109 people. It's important toremember that in Japan in 1937, no harm ever came to the Chinese quarters of either
Yokohama or Kobe.
One might be led to believe that this upsurge in popular outrage against China compelled
the Japanese government to go to war with China. However, that is not what happened.
In fact, the government held firm to its non-expansionist policy in spite of the atrocities in
China and the incensed public opinion in Japan. In accordance with the Emperor's
suggestions, a landmark peace plan52 was drawn up on August 1. On August 5, the Foreign
Minister and the Army and Navy Ministers approved the proposal that would be submitted
to China. Japan's peace plan was a momentous, conciliatory document wherein most of thepending issues between China and Japan to that point, and in particular vested rights inNorth China, were renounced.
Japan's peace plan was called the Funatsu Peace Initiative, after Funatsu Tatsuichiro who
was selected to be in charge of the negotiations. Funatsu was formerly Japan's consul
general in Shanghai and at the time he was the chairman of the board of the Spinners' Trade
Association in China.
August 9, the day of the first meeting between Kawagoe Shigeru, Japan's ambassador to
China, and Gao Zongwu, head of the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Asia Office, was also the
day that Sublieutenant Oyama was killed. As I mentioned already, this was an act carried
51

This slogan, boshi yocho in Japanese, literally means "punish the violent Chinese".
Draft of ceasefire negotiations: (1.) The Tanggu Truce, the He–Umezu Agreement, the Qin–Doihara
Agreement, and any other extant military agreements in North China are cancelled. (2.) Special areas will beestablished as demilitarized zones. (3.) The administrations in East Hebei and Hebei–Chahar are to beabolished. (4.) The strength of the Japanese forces stationed shall return to their status quo ante bellum.
Draft of diplomatic relations: (1.) China must recognize or acquiesce to the state of Manchukuo. (2.) China
and Japan will enter into an anti-communist pact. (3.) Repeal of the free flight of Japanese aircraft, etc...
52

33

out by the crypto-communist Zhang Zhizhong, the defensive commander of Nanking andShanghai, in order to get Chiang Kai-shek to fight the Japanese. It was also meant to be an
obstruction to the peace process. The Comintern order had read, "1.) You must staunchly
avoid localized resolutions and instead lead the way to a full-scale confrontation between
China and Japan. 2.) You must use every possible measure to accomplish the above goal,and eliminate leading figures who are betraying the liberation of China through localized
resolutions and compromises with the Japanese." Through various means, this order was
successfully implemented. As intended, the peace negotiations collapsed.
The Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact and secret military agreement
Chiang Kai-shek had moved forward with preparations for war with Japan. His
preparations consisted of the formation of a central army, including fifty divisions withmodern equipment and training under the direction of a corps of German military advisors
led by General Alexander von Falkenhausen, as well as the construction of a solid
defensive network of 20,000 bunkers in the suburbs of Shanghai. This came to be called the"Seeckt Line" after General Hans von Seeckt, the fourth leader of the German advisors.
Still, Chiang Kai-shek was cautious about starting a real war. Falkenhausen had suggested apreemptive strike, but Chiang distanced himself from that idea, as well as from thecontinued warmongering of General Zhang Zhizong and others.
Despite this, Chiang had to confront facts outside his control, including the rise ofanti-Japanese sentiment and the murder of Sublieutenant Oyama. Finally, he did make thedecision to go to war. Many theories exist about when Chiang came to this decision, though
it seems that none of them have been definitively proven. Professor Lloyd E. Eastman of
the University of Illinois, a leading researcher of modern Chinese history, has argued that
Chiang made the decision on August 7 at a meeting with his top military commanders.
According to Eastman, "Chiang then made one of the greatest - and most debatable gambles of his career."53
I suspect that the main reason why Chiang was willing to make this gamble was themilitary agreement54 he signed with the Soviet Union as part of the Sino-Soviet
Non-Aggression Pact of August 21. Under the terms of this agreement, the Soviet Union
was bound to provide the following military aid before the end of the year: 360 planes, 200
tanks, 1,500 trucks, 150,000 rifles, 120,000 artillery shells, and 60 million rounds ofammunition, plus technical experts in a variety of fields.
Negotiations for this treaty began much earlier, and it is assumed that the secret items were
set in early August at the latest. This promise of such a great quantity of military supplies
from the Soviet Union had to have been reassuring to China, which, despite having a large
53

See Lloyd E. Eastman's book The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), page 119.
54
See The Lowdown, issue of January 1939, page 18. The secret agreement seems to have been leaked out at
an early stage, because its contents also appear in several other publications.

34

army of 2.1 million soldiers, lacked the ability to manufacture its own aircraft and tanks.
Setting aside the beginning of the hostilities, if the fighting were to be drawn out even alittle longer, such supplies would become absolutely essential to the prosecution of the war.
Thus, we can surmise that, without them, Chiang Kai-shek would probably not have beenable to make the decision to go to war.
Indeed, it would seem that the Soviet Union was pushing China toward war. As we can see
from the Comintern orders, that was exactly in accordance with the goals of Soviet strategy.
The actual situation of the Second Sino-Japanese War was that China relied entirely on
Soviet military aid for the first half of the war, and for the second half on British andAmerican military aid, to continue fighting.55 It was not because mainland China was sohuge that the conflict went on and on and became a quagmire, but rather because of the vast
military assistance and intervention from the great powers. Still less was it because ofJapanese “aggression”.
China's all-out attack: The struggle of the naval landing force and the dispatch of two
divisions
On August 13, 1937, the 30,000-strong elite Chinese force encircling the concessions ofShanghai began its attack on Japan's 4,200-man naval landing force stationed there. It is
often said that the fighting leapt like a flame from northern China to Shanghai, but thismanner of speaking is far removed from the truth. Japanese forces in northern China did not
move south of Baoding, which was 1,000 kilometers away from Shanghai, and therefore
were in no position to threaten Shanghai.
Just as The New York Times described, the Battle of Shanghai was provoked unilaterally by
the Chinese, or in other words, by Chiang Kai-shek. On the 15th, Chiang Kai-shek ordereda nationwide general mobilization, established a supreme command headquarters, andassumed the rank of commander-in-chief of all three branches of the military - the army,
the navy, and the air force - for waging all-out war against Japan.
Since 4,200 troops could not have been expected to protect the 30,000 Japanese residents ofShanghai, Japan decided on August 13 to dispatch two divisions to China. On the 15th, theShanghai Expeditionary Army under the command of General Matsui Iwane was formed.
However, it was to take nearly ten days at the minimum to mobilize, transport, and landthese two divisions, and until then, the naval landing force in Shanghai had to hold out
against attacks from an elite force nearly ten times their size. What might have happened ifthey had been beaten and allowed a Chinese force to penetrate the concession had alreadybeen demonstrated in Tongzhou. It would have been a second Tongzhou Massacre. There
was a strong possibility that thousands, or even tens of thousands, of civilians might havebeen slaughtered.

55

See Hata Ikuhiko's book, Rokokyo Jiken no Kenkyu [Research on the Marco Polo Bridge Incident] (Tokyo:
Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1996).

35

36

One Japanese army division finally landed in Wusong near Shanghai on the 23rd. In thoseten days, the men of Japan's tiny landing force defended their positions well.
Thanks to their remarkable bravery, a "Shanghai Massacre" was averted. Chiang reportedly
lamented that, "In the first week of the war, we proved incapable of wiping out the enemy
in Shanghai even with all our strength." Evidently, Chiang had been expecting a quick
victory in Shanghai.
China's deadly bombing of the foreign concessions
On August 14, a group of Chinese aircraft, which had embarked on a raid against Japanese
warships, wandered off course during a counterattack and instead dropped their bombs in
the French Concession and the Shanghai International Settlement. Some of the bombs
landed on the road in front of the Palace and Cathay Hotels, killing 729 civilians instantly
and leaving another 861 wounded, but an even greater tragedy occurred at the Great World
Amusement Center, which was serving as a women's refugee center. The bombs which fell
on Great World killed 1,012 people and wounded another 1,007. The majority of thevictims were Chinese, but many foreigners also perished, including the elder brother of
Edwin Reischauer.
As usual, the Nationalist Party publicly blamed the attack on the Japanese, but the bombing
had taken place in full view of Shanghai's international community, including a large
number of foreign journalists. As could be expected, this lie convinced no one, and theChinese government ultimately expressed its regret over the incident.
Though Japan's Shanghai Expeditionary Army had finally gone ashore, it quickly became
embroiled in a desperate campaign against nearly 200,000 Chinese soldiers firmly
ensconced in over 20,000 bunkers and defensive encampments. The main force of theChinese Army had received German military training and was supplied with the latest
equipment. One of the most formidable challenges for the Japanese Army was dealing with
China's high-quality light machine guns, which were called "Czech guns". On September 9,
the Japanese Army finally began making further progress thanks to an additional threedivisions and one brigade in reinforcements. On October 26, the Japanese captured thestrongpoint of Dachangzhen and brought most of the city of Shanghai under their control.
However, the victory in Shanghai had been achieved at great cost. Japan's casualties
ultimately totaled more than 41,000, including 10,076 dead and 31,866 wounded, whichwere the heaviest losses Japan sustained since the Siege of Port Arthur during the
Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905). On the other hand, the Chinese Army is believed to havesuffered about 400,000 dead and wounded. On November 5, the Japanese 10th Army,composed of three divisions, executed a surprise landing at Hangzhou Bay, sixty kilometers
south of Shanghai, in order to cut the Chinese Army off from behind. This manoeuvre
succeeded in causing the rapid collapse of the Chinese forces, who fled in disarray towards
Nanking. In the end, the Japanese military had committed a force of 250,000 to rout about
600,000 Chinese.

37

The order to capture Nanking
Because of the non-expansionist policy adopted by the Japanese government and military,
Japanese forces could not advance beyond an operation restriction line stretching from
Suzhou to Jiaxing. However, as long as this policy was maintained, there was the realpossibility that most of the Chinese Army fleeing chaotically from Shanghai would bepermitted to escape. Moreover, Chiang Kai-shek had not accepted peace terms Japan
offered by way of the German ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann,56 and wascontinuing to put up stiff resistance. In Japan, it seemed more and more likely that the war
would not be brought to a conclusion unless the Chinese command center of Nanking was
occupied. On November 28, the Japanese Army General Staff handed down its decision tocapture Nanking.
Matsui Iwane, the commander of the Central China Area Army, which was formed throughthe combination of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army and the 10th Army, ordered hisforces to advance on Nanking on December 1. The Chinese had constructed both outer andinner defense lines between Shanghai and Nanking, but the Japanese Army broke throughthem one by one in pursuit of the fleeing Chinese forces. On December 9, the JapaneseArmy completed its encirclement of Nanking and airdropped leaflets over the city callingupon the commander of the Nanking Garrison Force to surrender.
At the same time that the Japanese Army released this ultimatum, an attempt was madefrom within Nanking to save the city from the ravages of war. On December 9, members of
the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone57 presented a ceasefire proposal
to Chiang Kai-shek. Their proposal asked the Chinese Army to withdraw peacefully from
Nanking and permit the Japanese Army to enter the city without further bloodshed.
Unfortunately, Chiang Kai-shek vetoed the offer. Meanwhile, the deadline of the Japanese
ultimatum, set at noon on December 10, passed without a response from the Chinese side.
At 1:00 PM, the Japanese Army launched an all-out attack on the walls of Nanking.
Fierce fighting continued, but Nanking had already lost its outer defenses, and its fortresswalls, however strong they may have been, were no match for modern weapons. Tang
Shengzhi, the commander of the garrison in Nanking, deemed the situation hopeless andfled the city at 8:00 PM on the 12th, abandoning his subordinates to their fates. Nanking
fell on the 13th, but without their commander the Chinese soldiers in Nanking scrambled in
confusion to escape the city. Often they were shot dead in mid-flight by Chinese barrier
56

The Trautmann Mediation was a peace initiative between the governments of China and Japan that took
place between November 1937 and January 16, 1938, under the mediation of the German ambassador in
China.
57
The International Committee was established on November 29 by a group of Westerners, mostly
Americans, who had chosen to not evacuate from Nanking. Their objective was to create a noncombat zone
which would ensure the safety of Nanking's civilian population. The Committee was composed of a total of
fifteen people, including seven from the USA, four from Great Britain, three from Germany, and one from
Denmark. The head of the International Committee was a German, John Rabe.

38

troops. Those who were unable to escape instead cast off their uniforms and went into
hiding in the Nanking Safety Zone, an act which was a violation of the international laws of
war. In many cases, they were later discovered and executed by the Japanese. Still, very
little fighting occurred within the city itself. In fact, at the time the Japanese Army entered
Nanking, the city was virtually deserted except for the Safety Zone. Outside the city walls,
several pitched battles did occur between the Japanese Army and Chinese units attempting
to withdraw, but inside the city it was mostly quiet.
Why do people say that a massacre happened in Nanking?
The Japanese soldiers did not all enter Nanking at once. Instead, only specially selected
portions of each unit were permitted to invade the city. For example, the 6th Division from
Kumamoto selected two of its battalions to enter the city, and the 20th Regiment selected
one of its companies. It has been estimated that the first Japanese soldiers to go into
Nanking numbered fewer than 10,000. Within Nanking, there was very little disorder, a fact
noted by the nearly 150 Japanese reporters and cameramen who were present in the city at
the time it fell.
The soldiers of the units entering Nanking were much more unnerved by the deadly quiet of
the wholly abandoned city, a situation described in the diaries and other accounts they left
behind. The reason for this was that almost all of the 200,000 inhabitants of Nanking had
congregated within the "Safety Zone", which was administered by the International
Committee. No citizens were found anywhere outside the Safety Zone. This should not be
surprising, as a directive had been issued by Tang Shengzhi on December 8 ordering all
citizens of Nanking except those with special permits to remain in the Safety Zone.
Considering that there were 150 reporters and cameramen in Nanking, all energeticallyreporting on events in the city and sending their stories back to Japan, there is no possibility
that they could have failed to witness a massacre in the Safety Zone, which covered an area
only about the same size as New York's Central Park. And yet, none of them wrote a single
article describing a massacre, nor did they admit after the war to having seen one. One
typical news report was the series of photographs appearing in the newspaper Asahi
Shimbun. The first photo in the series was "Peace returns to Nanking", taken by special
correspondent Kawamura on December 17 and reprinted in this book. The next
photographs in the series were captioned with "Benevolence to yesterday's enemies - A
scene of amity in Nanking", "Nanking smiles - A sketch of life within the city walls", and"Holding hands on New Years' - Sino-Japanese friendship deepens each day". These photos
certainly seem to reveal the way things really were in Nanking at that time. Controls on thepress in Japan were not rigorously enforced, and only two articles were censured on the
grounds that they might compromise military operations.
How did the Nanking Massacre take place under such circumstances? How could it havetaken place? Common sense alone should allow the reader to answer this question.
Nationalist China's silence on the "Nanking Massacre"

39

The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone left records of its activities inEnglish. An extra-governmental organ of the Nationalist Party edited these documents in
1939 and published them with Kelly & Walsh Co. in Shanghai under the title Documents of
the Nanking Safety Zone. American missionaries held key positions on the International
Committee, and their observations are tainted with a heavy anti-Japanese bias, but even so,
the following two facts recorded in these documents are extremely important.
1.) The population of Nanking was 200,000 at the time of the city's fall, and remained atthat level for the rest of the month of December. However on January 14, a month later, thepopulation of Nanking was recorded as being 250,000. This is definitive proof, from acontemporary primary source, that no large-scale massacre could possibly have taken place.
2.) Twenty-six cases of murder were recorded on a list of the complaints brought forward
by citizens of Nanking. However, only one of those cases had an eyewitness, and it had anote appended to it explicitly stating that it had been a lawful killing. The Safety Zone,
which held 200,000 people, was about the same size as New York's Central Park, and if amassacre had happened there, it could not have gone unnoticed. Nevertheless, there wereno eyewitnesses to any massacre.
Those two points alone should make the extent of the massacre hoax clear enough, but for
those who need even more proof, there is also the top-secret document "Outline ofInternational Propaganda Operations, International Propaganda Section: from 1938 to April
1941", which was discovered by Professor Higashinakano Shudo at the Museum of Chinese
Nationalist Party History in Taipei.58 This was an internal document of the Nationalist
Party, so any hints of propaganda within it are slim. According to the document, during aneleven-month period which included the month when Nanking fell, China's International
Propaganda Section invited foreign correspondents three hundred times to press
conferences in Hankou, where the Nationalist Government had retreated after the Battle of
Nanking. Even though these press conferences were convened for the purpose of criticizing
the conduct of the Japanese Army, not one single time was there any talk of a massacre ofcivilians or the unlawful execution of prisoners in Nanking. If there had been a massacre,
would they really have said nothing about it? That is, of course, impossible.
Though there are many people who seem to be under the mistaken impression that the
Nationalist Government condemned the Nanking Massacre in the aftermath of the fall of
Nanking, the reality is quite different. It is true that there were covert operations,particularly for overseas audiences, which employed foreigners to disseminate atrocity
propaganda that actually came from the Chinese government. However, if the Chinese hadcarelessly brought up the massacre at any of the aforementioned three hundred press
conferences in Hankou, then the foreign correspondents would have gone to Nanking toinvestigate it themselves. At the time Japan was not at war with other foreign countries like58

See Higashinakano Shudo's book The Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction (Tokyo: Sekai Shuppan,
2005), page 298.

40the United States and Great Britain, so as soon as public order in Nanking had been
restored, there was nothing to stop them from going there. If they had done that, theNationalist Government's lies would have been quickly exposed. In order to maintain its
credibility, China would not have been foolish enough to repeat such false claims publicly.
The anti-Japanese group, American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese
Aggression, which was organized principally by the YMCA, released a booklet entitled"America Supports Japanese Aggression" roughly half a year after the fall of Nanking. In
1938, 60,000 copies of it were printed and then distributed to the media, Congress,
academic societies, and other groups. The booklet includes an extensive denunciation ofJapan's alleged aggressive acts towards China. Among them is the bombing of Canton,
which took place half a year after the fall of Nanking and left a few hundred dead, butthough the bombing received thorough coverage, not one word was devoted to the Nanking
Massacre. This is yet another powerful piece of evidence that no massacre ever occurred in
Nanking.
In short, the Nanking Massacre is simply a trumped-up lie, fabricated by the victors andfoisted upon Japan after the war when Japan was occupied by the US Army and unable toeffectively object to or rebut the accusation.
Open questions for President Hu Jintao
Research on the "Nanking Massacre" has progressed rapidly in recent years. It has now
been proven in a virtually irrefutable manner that the "massacre" was a creation of the
Nationalist Party's wartime propaganda machine. A pamphlet which summarizes all thelatest research was published by the Campaign for the Truth of Nanking and is now
available in English.59
It is surely very foolish that people continue to harp on about this lie as if it actually
happened. To put a stop to this ridiculous situation, the Committee for the Examination of
the Facts about Nanking (Kase Hideaki, chair; Fujioka Nobukatsu, secretary general)presented an open letter of inquiry to President Hu Jintao of China when he came to Japan.
The five important points of their questions are summarized below, followed by its fulltext.
(1.) Mao Zedong did not mention the Nanking Massacre one time in his life, a significant
fact considering that it was alleged to be one of the largest massacres of the century and notjust a trivial incident. Jung Chang criticizes Mao for this in her book Mao: The Unknown
Story, but it is those like Chang who still deeply believe this lie who truly deserve thecriticism.

59

An English translation of this pamphlet is available on the website of the Society for the Dissemination ofHistorical Fact. (http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/112_S4.pdf)

41

(2.) The Nanking Massacre was never mentioned at any of the aforementioned threehundred press conferences.
(3.) According to Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, which consists of the records ofthe International Committee, the population of Nanking was 200,000 in December and roseto 250,000 in January.
(4.) Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone claims that twenty-six murders were committed
in Nanking. However, only one of those cases had an eyewitness, and this case had a note
appended to it explicitly stating that it had been a lawful killing in which a Chinese man
was shot dead for running away when asked to identify himself.
(5.) It has been demonstrated that none of the several hundred alleged pieces ofphotographic evidence for the Nanking Massacre prove the existence of any massacre.
This message has been disseminated to the world via press conferences and the Internet. It
appears on the website of the Society for the Dissemination of Historical Fact in Japanese,
Chinese, and English. (The English version is available at
http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_3/17_S1.pdf) It comes as no surprise that Hu Jintao has
yet to respond. This is because he cannot respond. With this, the issue of Nanking has, at its
essence, been settled.
OPEN QUESTIONS FOR HIS EXCELLENCY HU JINTAO,PRESIDENT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
May 5, 2008
As enthusiastic supporters of friendly relations between Japan and the PRC, we would liketo extend the warmest of welcomes to President Hu Jintao on the occasion of Your
Excellency's visit to Japan.
For some years, our organization has been engaged in an investigation into the events thattranspired in Nanking in connection with the Battle of Nanking, which took place inDecember 1937. We are profoundly concerned about the PRC's position on and approach tothese events. Additionally, we are exceedingly uncomfortable with the duplicity of the PRC
in its pursuit of friendship with Japan on the one hand, and actions that are most unfriendly
in nature — the expansion and renovation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in 2007
— on the other. Recent research has proven that there is absolutely no basis for the claimthat there was a massacre in that city. We respectfully request Your Excellency's responses
to five important questions, which follow.
1. Chinese Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong never referred to a massacre in
Nanking. He made exactly one mention of the Battle of Nanking during a lecturedelivered at Yan'an six months after the conflict, reproduced in On Protracted War.
Chairman Mao criticized the Japanese for failing to annihilate Chinese troops after

42

having surrounded them. If there had been slaughter in Nanking of a magnitude so great(300,000 civilian victims) as to prompt the description "holocaust of the century," there
is not the slightest chance that he would have been silent on the matter. What are Your
Excellency's thoughts on the facts presented here?
2. In November 1937, during the Second United Front and prior to the Battle of Nanking,the Nationalist Party established a new section at the Central Propaganda Bureau — theInternational Propaganda Section. We would like to direct Your Excellency's attention
to a top-secret document entitled "Outline of International Propaganda Operations,"
which states that the International Propaganda Section held 300 press conferences in
Hankou between December 1, 1937 and October 24, 1938 (a period that includes theBattle of Nanking); they were attended by 35 foreign journalists and diplomats, on the
average. How does Your Excellency explain the fact that not once during any of these300 conferences was a statement or announcement made to the effect that a massacre
had been perpetrated, or that prisoners of war had been unlawfully killed in Nanking?
Does Your Excellency, too, find these circumstances extraordinary?
3. The International Committee cared for the civilians remaining in Nanking, who weregathered in the Safety Zone. Records of the International Committee's activities were
published in 1939 as Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone by a British company inShanghai, under the auspices of the Nationalist Government's Council of International
Affairs. According to those records, the population of Nanking prior to its occupationby the Japanese was 200,000. That figure remained unchanged, at 200,000, throughout
the remainder of 1937. By the end of January, it had increased to 250,000. Thesestatistics completely and utterly destroy the credibility of any accusation of a massacrethat claimed 300,000 victims. What are Your Excellency's views on this matter?
4. Among the records in the aforementioned Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone aredetailed complaints about misconduct attributed to Japanese military personnel. They
include a total of 26 murders, only one of which was witnessed (to that account isappended a note describing the "murder" as a lawful execution). Can Your Excellency
reconcile these records with the PRC's claim of a massacre with 300,000 victims?
5. Photographs purported to be evidence of a massacre in Nanking are on display at the
Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, at other exhibitions, and in printed publications.
However, Analyzing Photographic "Evidence" of the Nanking Massacre byHigashinakano Shudo (Soshisha, 2005) and other recent scientific research reveal that
there are no photographs attesting to a massacre in Nanking. If Your Excellency isaware of photographic evidence of a massacre, please have it forwarded to us so that we
may examine it.
On the basis of the factual information contained in these five questions, we are completely
and totally convinced that there was no massacre in Nanking. We would greatly appreciateYour Excellency's responses to our questions. Please note that we have selected the43

open-question format precisely because the matter at hand is clearly one of the prime
concerns of many citizens of Japan and the PRC. Our hopes for friendly relations between
our two nations, for all generations to come, rest in Your Excellency's hands.
COMMITTEE FOR THE EXAMINATION OF THE FACTS ABOUT NANKING
Chairman: KASE Hideaki
Secretary-General: FUJIOKA Nobukatsu
Auditors : TOMIZAWA Shigenobu, MOTEKI Hiromichi
Members: ARA Kenichi, UESUGI Chitoshi, KOBAYASHI Taigan, SUGIHARA Seishiro
SUGIYAMA Kouichi, TAKAIKE Katsuhiko, TAKAYAMA Masayuki, HANAOKA
Nobuaki, HIGASHINAKANO Shudo, NISHIMURA Kohyu, MIZOGUCHI Ikuo,
MIYAZAKI Masahiro
Japan's peace terms after the fall of Nanking and the First Konoe Statement
On December 22, after Nanking was occupied, the Japanese government decided once
again to try to resolve differences peacefully, mediated through the good offices ofGermany's ambassador to China, Oskar Trautmann. The following four points were thebasic conditions.
1.) China will renounce pro-communist, anti-Japanese, and anti-Manchukuo policies, andwill cooperate with Japan and Manchukuo's anti-communist policies.
2.) Demilitarized zones will be put in place in required regions, and special organizations
will be established to administer them.
3.) China, Japan, and Manchukuo will enter into an agreement for economic integration.
4.) China will pay reparations to Japan.
Prior to the occupation of Nanking, the clause on reparations had not been included in thepeace talks, but it was inserted after taking into account the demands of the Japanese people.
Even so, one cannot say that these were particularly severe conditions. No demands weremade for a piece of territory or for certain special rights or interests. Instead, they mention
formalizing a relationship of economic cooperation. They also speak of collaborative
anti-communism, but since Chiang Kai-shek was anti-communist from the start, this item
can hardly be said to have been a harsh one.
Chiang Kai-shek did not accept the agreement probably for fear of how it might affect his
relationship with the Soviet Union and the CCP, as well as his relationship with America
and Great Britain. Even when the deadline for his reply, January 12, was reached, he did
not respond. In the face of Chiang's stalling, the leaders of Japan's government, including
Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro and Foreign Minister Hirota Koki, concluded that the
Chinese side was not negotiating in good faith. On the 16th, the Japanese government cut

44

off negotiations and issued the First Konoe Statement declaring that, "We will no longer
deal with the government of Chiang Kai-shek".
Japan's Army General Staff put up strong resistance to this decision, insisting thatnegotiations with Chiang Kai-shek's government be carried through to their conclusion. If
this view had prevailed and the negotiations had continued, is it possible that at very least
the complete breakdown of Sino-Japanese relations could have been averted, and thatperhaps some sort of compromise could have been reached? If that had happened, Japan's
conflict with China would not have devolved into the quagmire that it was to become.
It is possible that there was some influence here by one of Konoe's close associates, Ozaki
Hotsumi,60 who was a covert operative of the Comintern. However, I think that it is more
likely that Konoe made the decision out of a desire to curry favor with a Japanese public
who were fed up with China's brazen acts.
It has been commonly said that Japan went down the path to war because of therecklessness of the Japanese military, but if we turn to the facts, it seems that in many cases
it was the military which acted with great caution whereas it was the civilian government
which turned to war in order to appease popular opinion. This was more or less the same
reason why the Konoe government issued a tough statement toward China and hinted at
dispatching three divisions from Japan on the July 11 following the Marco Polo Bridge
Incident, even though a local ceasefire had been concluded that very night.
Regardless, the end result was that Japan was drawn into a protracted war against the
government of Chiang Kai-shek. Still, calling this a “war of aggression” is wholly
unwarranted.
Firstly, it was the CCP that orchestrated the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, and it was also the
CCP that expanded the conflict based on their Comintern instructions to "staunchly avoid
localized resolutions and instead lead the way to a full-scale confrontation between China
and Japan." Furthermore, it was Chiang Kai-shek's government that rebuffed Japan's
Funatsu Peace Initiative, amidst growing anti-Japanese sentiment, and set the course forfull-scale war in Shanghai.
Thus, the Second Sino-Japanese War was caused entirely by China. Even after the outbreakof the war, Japan again made peace overtures, but they were all flatly refused. The onus for60

Ozaki Hotsumi was a reporter for the newspaper Asahi Shimbun. As a member of Prime Minister Konoe's
brain trust and especially as a recognized expert on the China question, Ozaki exerted influence on Japan's
government from the time of the Second Sino-Japanese War until World War II via his contacts with some ofJapan's highest-ranking and most influential political figures. Just before the outbreak of war with the UnitedStates, Ozaki was exposed as being the mastermind behind Richard Sorge's Soviet spy ring. He was arrested,
put on trial, and executed. In his personal recollections, Ozaki states that, "I believe that World War II willlead inevitably to a world revolution." It was for this reason that Ozaki supported the idea that Japan should
advance into Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

45

the war lies primarily on the Chinese side, and the result was that the fighting dragged on.
No matter how one looks at it, describing Japan's actions as aggressive is undeserved.
Under international law, the aggressor is the one making lawless attacks or unprovoked war,and thus by this standard, it was China that was the aggressor even though the war took
place on Chinese soil.

46

Part 3 - Japan's Policies Toward China
Was the North China Buffer State Strategy an act of aggression?
Manchurian bandits, who had at one point numbered more than 200,000, were largely
wiped out within about a year of Manchukuo's founding. However, after Zhang Xueliang
was expelled from Manchuria, he formed a 40,000-man militia and occupied neighboring
Jehol Province to use as his base of operations against Japan and Manchukuo. To eliminate
this threat, the Kwantung Army launched an attack on Jehol and, in short order, pushed
Zhang Xueliang's forces south of the Great Wall. The policy of the Japanese military was to
not advance beyond the Great Wall, which made the situation very difficult for the
Kwantung Army when it was attacked by 50,000 soldiers from China's central army under
the command of He Yingqin, the Chairman of the Beiping Branch Military Council.
Strategically, the Kwantung Army had no option but to cross the Great Wall and expand thefighting into North China.
The conflict ended with the signing of the Tanggu Truce, which established a demilitarizedzone in the northeastern section of Hebei Province. Subsequently, the He-Umezu
Agreement of 1935 extended this demilitarized zone to the whole of Hebei Province. Thisagreement was to form a part of the Kwantung Army's operation to construct anautonomous buffer state in North China. This plan by the Japanese military to extend its
influence into Hebei has been called an act of aggression against China.
Nevertheless, the situation in China left the Kwantung Army with no other course of action.
The Kwantung Army was compelled to throw its weight behind pro-Japanese elements in
Hebei Province in response to repeated provocations by the Chinese Army and ongoinganti-Japanese agitation sponsored by Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Government.
The following table, taken from a primary source document, should give the reader an ideaof how frequently attacks on Japanese citizens occurred in China due to anti-Japanesepolicies of the Nationalist Government. The Kwantung Army confronted the reality that theJapanese government was unable to devise any effective countermeasures against thisproblem.

Attacks on Japanese Citizens in China, late-1935 to 1936
Date
Place
Description
1935, November 9
Shanghai
Seaman First Class
Nakayama Hideo of the
Shanghai Special Naval
Landing Party is shot dead.
1936, January 21
Shantou
Police officer Tsunoda isshot dead at the Japanese
consulate.

47

1936, July 10

ShanghaiKayo Kosaku is hit by asniper and dies soon after.
1936, August 20
Changsha
A bomb is thrown at aJapanese-owned inn in
Xiangnan. One Japanesecitizen receives minor
injuries.
1936, August 21
BeipingMorikawa Taro, an ethnic
Korean, is beaten andseriously injured by a soldierof China's 29th Route Army.
1936, August 24
ChengduWatanabe Kozaburo, areporter with the Osaka
Mainichi Shimbun, andFukagawa Keiji, an
employee at the Shanghai
office of the South
Manchuria Railway
Company, are murdered by amob. Two others arewounded.
1936, September 3
Beihai
General store owner Junzo
Nakano is murdered.
1936, September 17
Shantou
A bomb is thrown into
Kanshi Restaurant, owned bya Japanese citizen, but it does
not explode.
1936, September 19
HankouPolice officer Yoshioka isshot dead at the Japanese
consulate general.
1936, September 23
ShanghaiSeamen First Class Taminato
Tomomitsu, a crew memberof the warship Izumo, is shotdead and two others areseriously wounded.
1936, September 27
Changsha
Arsonists attack the office
and warehouse of the
Xiangtan Sino-Japanese
Steamship Company but
cause little damage.
1936, November 11
ShanghaiTakase Yasuji, a Kasagi
Maru crewman, is shot dead.
Source: Toakyoku, Gaimusho Shitsumu Hokoku [Foreign Ministry Work Reports] (Tokyo:

48

Kuresu Shuppan, 1993), Volume 1, pages 48, 63, 66-67, 543-555, 613-618.
If the Japanese military had viewed the North China Buffer State Strategy as the first stepin its conquest of mainland China, then how could the Funatsu Peace Initiative, proposed in
the aftermath of the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, have been put forward with the support ofboth the army and navy? The peace offer contained the following terms:(1.) The Tanggu Truce, the He-Umezu Agreement, the Qin-Doihara Agreement, and anyother extant military agreements in North China shall be cancelled.
(2.) Special areas were to be established as demilitarized zones.
(3.) The administrations in East Hebei and Hebei-Chahar were to be abolished. (These wereautonomous governments with a degree of independence from the Nationalist Government
which were seen as being under Japanese influence.)(4.) The strength of the Japanese forces stationed shall return to their status quo ante
bellum.
Under this proposal, Japan offered to renounce almost all of the vested interests it had
acquired in Hebei Province since the time of the Manchurian Incident. Moreover, Japanwas not offering these terms from a position of desperation. Just the opposite, Japan was ina position of strength at the time it submitted the proposal, having just secured control of
the cities of Beijing and Tianjin with three divisions. Therefore, the original intention of theNorth China Buffer State Strategy could not possibly have been aggressive.
Essentially, Japan merely stated that if Chiang Kai-shek ceased his anti-Japanese activities
and entered into a cooperative partnership with Japan, then there would no longer be anyneed for Japan to detach North China from the Nationalist Government. Given these facts,
it is absolutely unreasonable to insist that the North China Buffer State Strategy carried any
aggressive intent.
Peace talks after the Battle of Shanghai and the Trautmann Mediation
On August 30, after the Battle of Shanghai had escalated into a full-scale state of war,
China reported Japan to the League of Nations for violations of the League of Nations’Covenant, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, and the Nine Power Treaty. China appealed to theinternational community to take necessary measures against Japan.
Even though the Chinese had wished for war, because it was not going their way, they took
the rather brazen step of demanding legal action against Japan. I have already shown that,the very next day, The New York Times identified China as the sole aggressor in the Battleof Shanghai. Furthermore, though it has often been assumed that China was abiding by the49spirit and letter of the Nine Power Treaty,61 John Van Antwerp MacMurray,62 an
American diplomat who was deeply involved in the inauguration of the treaty, stated at thetime that it was actually China that was responsible for the most serious ongoing violations.
The League of Nations passed a resolution of moral support for China, though by thenJapan was no longer a member of the League. It was also decided that a Nine Power Treaty
Conference be convened in Brussels, Belgium. The conference began on November 3, but
was ultimately unable to agree on any sanctions against Japan.
Meanwhile, on October 27, the Japanese government notified Great Britain, the UnitedStates, France, Germany, and Italy that it was preparing to enter talks with the Chinese
government through a friendly, third-party mediator. Ultimately, Germany was asked toserve as the mediator. Japan's peace conditions were almost identical to those offered in the
Funatsu Peace Initiative, and Germany, judging them to be very reasonable, passed them on
to Chiang Kai-shek on November 5 via Oskar Trautmann, the German ambassador to China.
As previously shown, Japan's peace conditions included no demands for any territory or
special rights. In spite of this, Chiang was still holding out hope that the Nine Power Treaty
Conference would impose sanctions on Japan, and so he rejected this peace offer. On
November 15, the final day of the conference, the Japanese government asked Joseph Grew,
the US ambassador to Japan, to persuade Chiang to negotiate, but this too came to nothing.
When, as already noted, the Nine Power Treaty Conference ended without sanctions,
Chiang found himself stuck in an even more difficult situation.
Japan's China policy after the First Konoe Statement
After this, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s cabinet issued the First Konoe Statement,
cutting all ties with the Chiang Kai-shek regime, over the vehement opposition of the Army
General Staff Office. However, Japan renewed its offers for peace with China in the Second
Konoe Statement of November 1938 and the Third Konoe Statement of December 1938.
Although the cities of Canton and Wuhan fell to Japan in October 1938, the prospects ofending the war seemed as distant as ever. It was under these circumstances that theJapanese government released the Second Konoe Statement, advocating the establishmentof a New Order in East Asia. The statement asserted that the purpose of Japan's military
expedition in China was the founding of "a lasting New Order" under which Japan, China,
and Manchukuo would join forces to achieve international justice, joint defense against
communism, and economic integration throughout East Asia.

61

The Nine Power Treaty was signed at the 1922 Washington Naval Conference by nine nations: the USA,the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Japan, and China. The treaty
confirmed that each power was to respect China's sovereignty, the Open Door Policy, and equality ofinvestment opportunity in China.
62
MacMurray, an American diplomat, served in succession as Chief of Division for Far Eastern Affairs,
Assistant Secretary of State, and Minister to China. He was author of the book, How The Peace Was Lost
(Stanford, California: Hoover Press, 1992).

50

This statement was intended to revise the First Konoe Statement and open the door towards
improved relations between China and Japan.
In response to Japan's overture, a faction emerged in China around Wang Jingwei63,
seeking to secede from Chiang's government in Chongqing and forge a partnership between
China and Japan within the framework of the New Order. Representatives of Japan andWang Jingwei signed the Sino-Japanese Consultative Record, the preamble of which
committed Japan and China to the establishment of "a New Order in East Asia based on theprinciples of friendly relations with neighboring states, anti-communism, and economic
cooperation". The agreement upheld the following conditions as the means to achieve theiraims:(1.) The signing of a Sino-Japanese anti-communist security pact, including provisions forthe stationing of Japanese troops in China to defend against communism.
(2.) Recognition by China of Manchukuo's independence.
(3.) Recognition by China of the freedom of Japanese citizens to live and conduct businesswithin China in exchange for consideration by Japan to repeal the extraterritorial rights of
its citizens in China and to return its concessions to China.
(4.) An immediate commencement of Japanese troop withdrawals from China following therestoration of peace, with the exception of troops stationed to defend against the communist
threat, and complete troop withdrawal within two years as law and order returns to Chinese
territory.
The Japanese government responded to this accord on December 22 by issuing the Third
Konoe Statement, affirming Japan's commitment to the principles of "friendly relations
with neighbors, anti-communism, and economic cooperation".
Wang Jingwei, who had escaped from Chongqing, entered into a series of discussions with
the Japanese government in the wake of the Third Konoe Statement, and finally, in March
1940, he founded the Government of the Republic of China in Nanking through unificationof the Provisional Government of China, which occupied North China, and the Reformed
Government of China. With the signing of the Sino-Japanese Basic Treaty, Japan
recognized the new government and ceded its concessions to China.
The Japanese government continued to send peace offers to Chiang Kai-shek through avariety of channels. The most important among these was the negotiations that started in
63

Within the Nationalist Party, Wang ranked alongside Chiang Kai-shek as the successor to Sun Yat-sen's
legacy. In 1932, following the establishment of the Nationalist Government in Nanking, Wang served aspremier of China. After this, Wang parted ways with Chiang and became president of a pro-Japanese
government founded in Nanking.

51

Hong Kong in December, 1939. In July of the following year, it was agreed that Itagaki
Seishiro, the Chief of Staff of the China Expeditionary Force, would meet with ChiangKai-shek for peace talks next August in the city of Changsha. Wang Jingwei was also to
participate in these talks. Unfortunately, the plan fell through, most likely largely becauseof American pressure. It is no coincidence that the United States announced later in
December that it would provide Chiang's government with a loan of one hundred million
dollars.
Even after this, Japan made further attempts to broker a peace deal that would bring
together the rival governments of Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Jingwei. It is said that ChiangKai-shek's diary refers to more than ten such peace feelers. However, none of them came tofruition.
The Japanese Army's attitude towards China as seen in Orders for Officers and Menof the Expeditionary Force
Lastly, I would like to mention a document that will give readers an understanding of thegoals and policies of the Japanese Army in China and the mentality under which it fought.
On April 29, 1940, the pamphlet entitled Orders for Officers and Men of the Expeditionary
Force was issued in the name of China Expeditionary Force Chief of Staff Itagaki Seishiro.
The pamphlet's subtitle reads, "This concerns the true meaning of our crusade, and toprovide standards."
Its contents are divided into the following six chapters.
"(1.) Origins of the outbreak of the Incident""(2.) What are the objectives of the hostilities?""(3.) Infer His Majesty's will""(4.) How should the Incident be resolved?""(5.) How should officers and men of the Expeditionary Force comport themselves?""(6.) Orders for officers and men returning to Japan"
The text is written in a very refined style of writing. The complete document has beentranslated into English and can be read on the website of the Society for the Disseminationof Historical Fact at http://www.sdh-fact.com/CL02_1/70_S4.pdf.
The following text appears within the section, "Basic notions for the resolution of the
Incident".

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"The three general principles of neighborly friendship, cooperative anti-communist
measures, and economic cooperation (all of which are already national policies) arebeing advocated vis-à-vis the coupling of Japanese, Manchurian, and Chinese relations.
That is, the three countries will by morality be made into a base of cooperation, andthrough giving weight to cooperation in national defense and the economy, we will all
work together, giving mutual respect to the particular characteristics of the citizens ofeach nation. We will deepen the amity of cooperative friendship, with neighboring
countries defending each other materially against the influx of Sovietization, andlong-term mutual compensations with a level economic exchange. We must preserve andexpand the original Asian moral culture by achieving mutual cooperation. This
relationship is the basis for rehabilitating East Asia, and it must set the example."I have also selected one further excerpt from the section entitled "Value the traditions andcustoms of the Chinese people".
"In China, there are Chinese traditions, and Chinese people have their own particularcustoms. It is an absolutely indispensable requirement to respect them, to understandthem, and to honor them. Along with Japanese being true Japanese, one also must
respect the Chinese for being true Chinese. Friendship requires tolerance andcompassion."
This was the mindset with which Japan's soldiers fought the war. As Ko Bunyu explainedin his essay, "A Grateful China Should Also Pay Respect to Yasukuni Shrine", it was thesame spirit which led them to aid farmers, build schools, provide technical assistance, andsponsor cultural activities in occupied China. It is often said that Japan forced its way into
Chinese territory to terrorize the people of China, but I hope earnestly that this book will
help the reader understand that these claims are pure fantasy.

Afterword
The military parade of September 3
On September 3, 2015, the People's Republic of China conducted an ostentatious military
parade in Tiananmen Square "in commemoration of the seventieth anniversary of our
victory in the War of Resistance against Japan".
Though China proudly trotted out its latest weapons of war for the event, its government
curiously insisted that this threatening demonstration was somehow "a parade for peace".
What was unusual was not that China would lie so shamelessly to the rest of the world, butrather, that the rest of the world seemed to have so little interest in calling China out for it.

53

The first lie was presenting the event as if the victor of the Second Sino-Japanese War was
the People's Republic of China.
It is true, as I have explained, that the same members of the CCP who went on to found thePeople's Republic were responsible for provoking the incident at Marco Polo Bridge which
led to war. Although the communists did participate in the Second Sino-Japanese War for atime as part of small units attached to the Nationalist Government, the only real battles thatthey fought were the Battle of Pingxingguan64 and the Hundred Regiments Offensive.65
As I noted in Part 1 of this book, Mao Zedong himself ordered that seventy percent of theirwar effort was to go towards strengthening their own forces, and only ten percent was to go
towards fighting Japan. The CCP's pretensions to being the author of victory in the Second
Sino-Japanese War are obviously fraudulent, but the world says nothing.
China has claimed from the outset that it was the victor of the war, but the Japanese Army
was not defeated in China. Japan actually achieved an overwhelming military victory,
winning forty-nine and drawing one of the war's fifty battles. Thanks to the military
victories of the United States and the Soviet Union, China managed to take a seat among
the victor powers, but that was only the result of the United States and Great Britain giving
Chiang Kai-shek his due.
Perhaps China's most brazen lies of all are its evangelization on "peace". Even though
China continues to build military airfields and undertake land reclamation work on the
Spratly Islands, as well as threatening neighboring countries like the Philippines, it stillinsists that its state-of-the-art military hardware is "for peaceful purposes".
A man who has not only failed to call out these flagrant lies, but also has been actively
supporting them, is former Japanese prime minister Murayama Tomiichi, known for his"Murayama Statement," which apologized for Japan's actions during World War II. Mr.
Murayama showed little shame in making a special trip to Beijing to participate in theparade. I hope that I am not the only one wondering if it really was Mr. Murayama's desirefor "peace" that inspired him to make this trip. Probably any normal Japanese person wouldfind Mr. Murayama's actions dubious at best.
The shameful act of the world's leaders
64

In September of 1937, a logistics unit of Japan's 5th Division marching through Shanxi Province wassubject to a devastating attack from the CCP's 8th Route Army led by Lin Biao in the mountain pass of
Pingxingguan. Communist propaganda played up the event as being the total annihilation of 10,000 enemy
soldiers. In reality, the Japanese unit was a mostly unarmed supply column which sustained over 100
casualties during the battle.
65
The Hundred Regiments Offensive of 1940 was an all-out attack by the CCP targeting strategic targets
such as railway stations in Shanxi Province. The CCP even made unprecedented direct attacks on units of theJapanese Army, which sustained considerable casualties. Ultimately, the Japanese Army lost just under threehundred men, and railways and other facilities took damage, but the CCP's losses were more than ten times
those of the Japanese, and the Red Army never again undertook any major offensives.

54

Thankfully, there was one youth who was not afraid to say the obvious. After the Japan
Broadcasting Corporation had finished airing the military parade in its entirety, it sought
out the views of some of the citizens of Beijing.
One young man said, "The world leaders who came to Tiananmen Square to see thismilitary parade have committed a shameful act. What they have seen, and what they havepraised, is the most wicked army in the world."
Remarkably, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation did not cut the young man off half-way,
but instead recorded all that he had to say without obscuring his face. Mr. Murayama had
apparently fallen ill and mercifully avoided the "shameful act" of appearing on stage at theparade. Still, it doesn't change the highly grotesque fact that a "pacifist" was lending moral
support to China's "wicked" army.
I can only hope that that young man's voice rouses the people of the world from theirslumber, and the ones who should hear him first are the people of Japan.
The historical fabrications of the movie Cairo Declaration
On November 22, 1943, three Allied leaders, President Roosevelt of the United States,
Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain, and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of China,
met in Cairo, Egypt, in order to discuss what their policies toward Japan would be
following the conclusion of the war.
Shortly before, on November 5-6, the Greater East Asia Conference took place in Tokyo,
bringing together representatives of seven independent Asian nations and the Provisional
Government of Free India. Together they issued the Greater Asia Declaration, arevolutionary statement enshrining the principle of racial equality. Following theconference's conclusion, the representative of India, Subhas Chandra Bose, travelled to
Nanking where he made a direct appeal to Chiang Kai-shek in Chongqing for peace withJapan. Bose's act had a big impact in China. It is said that Roosevelt planned the Cairo
Conference and invited Chiang to it out of fear that Chiang might reach a separate peacewith Japan.
And yet, believe it or not, reports say that the new movie, Cairo Declaration, produced by
a company affiliated with the People's Liberation Army of China for the seventiethanniversary of Japan's surrender, portrays CCP leader Mao Zedong as playing a key role atthe conference.
The Chinese government can tell even the most outrageous lies with a straight face, and thisis precisely why China has had no scruples about manufacturing one lie after another,including the Nanking Massacre, the Three Alls Policy,66 the 10,000-corpse pits,67 and the66

According to the Chinese Communist Party, during the Second Sino-Japanese War the Japanese Army
implemented the "Three Alls Policy," primarily against the operational bases of the 8th Route Army. Japan's

55

200,000 comfort women,68 in order to denounce Japan. I would like sensible Japanesepeople to awaken to this problem soon, and to start confronting these lies directly instead of
meekly submitting to them. I urge readers to recall the words of the poet Yevgeny
Yevtushenko, who said, "When truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie." We should
no longer stand by silently and allow lies to prevail over truth.
My hope is that this book might play at least a small role in empowering readers to win thebattle for truth.
September 25, 2015
-Moteki Hiromichi

alleged strategy was to "kill all, burn all, and loot all". However, the Japanese Army never used any such
expression in the first place, nor did it ever engage in mass murder or similar crimes. Even Mao Zedong
criticized the Japanese Army for, "encircling many Chinese soldiers but annihilating few." Though thismisinformation was intended for propaganda purposes, even so, many Japanese historians continue to treat
the “Three Alls Policy” as historical fact.
67
It has been said that the many Chinese laborers working at coal mines in Fushan and other places inManchuria who were rendered unable to work due to malnutrition, injury, or sickness were buried alive by theJapanese. The mass graves where the victims were buried were called "10,000-corpse pits". A memorial hall
was constructed at the "10,000-corpse pit" of the South Manchuria Mine where heaps of human skeletons areon display for public viewing. However, it has already been proven by many researchers that these stories are
simply hoaxes.
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See Ka Mei's book Chugoku Kyogaku no Seidorei [China's Shocking Sexual Slavery] (Tokyo: Seirindo,2015), pages 31-32.

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