The Japanese can use similar names but often prefer to call it the "Nankin Jiken", which just means "The Thing that Happened in Nanjing". It is written in Japanese writing.
The Nanjing Massacre lasted over six weeks. During this time, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army:
During the six weeks of the Nanjing massacre, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) massacred between 40,000 and 300,000 people. It is difficult to know exactly how many people were killed in this mass murder, because the IJA burnt many bodies, buried others in mass graves, and dumped others in the Yangtze River. Because of this, scholars and historians do not agree on exactly how many civilians were killed.
However, historians agree that the Imperial Japanese Army began massacring Chinese civilians the day they entered Nanjing. On that day, John Rabe, a German businessman, wrote in his diary: "We come across corpses every 100 to 200 yards. The bodies of civilians that I examined had bullet holes in their backs. These people had ... been [running away] and were shot from behind."
In another massacre, Japanese soldiers shot thousands of Chinese people with machine guns. They left their bodies in a trench they named the "Ten-Thousand-Corpse Ditch." Most historians think that more than 12,000 people were killed in this massacre. The IJA also massacred about 100 Hui people (a minority group in China who are mostly Muslim).
For the entire six weeks of the Massacre, the Imperial Japanese Army kept killing Chinese civilians. They killed in cruel, brutal ways and often tortured their victims before killing them.
For example, in 1984, ex-IJA soldier Kozo Tadokoro admitted:
Another ex-soldier named Nagatoni admitted that Japanese soldiers tortured people to death by doing things like:
In 2010, a Japanese woman named Tamaki Matsuoka made a documentary film about the Nanjing Massacre. In the film, former IJA soldiers admit that they often raped Chinese women and massacred Chinese civilians. However, out of the 250 former soldiers that Matsuoka interviewed, only three felt bad about what they had done. One former solder, Sho Mitani, said:
During the Massacre, the Japanese soldiers raped about 20,000 women including children and the elderly. Soldiers would go from door to door, searching for girls. When they found one, they would take her and rape her as a group. If anyone tried to stop the soldiers, the soldiers would shoot them.
Right after they raped the women, the Japanese soldiers would often kill them, sometimes by mutilating their sex organs.
One survivor of the massacre said that sons were forced to rape their mothers, and fathers were forced to rape their daughters. One group of soldiers gang-raped a pregnant woman, who gave birth only a few hours later (the baby did not seem to be hurt). Japanese soldiers also raped Buddhist nuns and forced monks to rape women.
On 19 December 1937, the Reverend James M. McCallum wrote in his diary:
Another witness to the rapes in Nanjing was Robert O. Wilson. He was a surgeon at an American hospital in Nanjing. On December 15 and 18, 1937, he wrote to his family:
Starting in 1931, an international law called the Third Geneva Convention said it was illegal to treat prisoners of war in certain ways. It said these prisoners had rights for example, the right to have a trial before being executed. However, in August 1937, Hirohito, the Emperor of Japan, had decided that neither he nor the army would not follow any international laws about how Chinese prisoners of war had to be treated.
Right after the IJA took over Nanjing, they started searching for ex-Chinese soldiers. They took thousands of young men as prisoners. Some of these men were never soldiers; the IJA just assumed they were. Without any trials, the IJA took many of these young men to the Yangtze River and killed them with machine guns.
According to confessions made by former IJA soldiers, on December 13 and 14, 1937, a unit of IJA soldiers had taken 14,777 Chinese prisoners of war. In the next few days, they took another 2,0003,000 prisoners. In two days, the IJA massacred every one of these prisoners of warover 15,000 people. In their confessions, the former IJA soldiers said their military leaders had ordered them to do this.
Over the six weeks of the massacre, the IJA killed a total of about 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war.
The Japanese Army left most of the buildings in Nanjing destroyed by looting and arson. They destroyed newly built government buildings as well as many civilians' homes. Soldiers also stole whatever they wanted. Because the Imperial Japanese Army was so much stronger than the Chinese soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, the Chinese could not fight back. This meant the Japanese could take all of the city's valuable things for themselves.
In January 1938, the Imperial Japanese Army announced that Nanjing was in "order" again. In the first week of February, it created a government that would obey all of Japan's needs. After that, the IJA left. The massacre was over.
On September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allied Powers. This ended World War II.
Soon after this, the Allied Powers began creating international military courts. To try Japan's leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity, they created the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE).
Three of the Japanese Imperial Army's leaders in Nanjing were put on trial at the IMTFE:
All three of these men were found guilty of "Class A" war crimes. This meant they had been found guilty of planning and being in charge of the war. All three were sentenced to death and were executed.
In 1946, the Chinese government created the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. This court tried General Matsui's lieutenant, Tani Hisao, for his part in the Nanjing Massacre. It found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
The Nanjing Massacre is still very controversial in Japan. Only a small number of Japanese writers say the Massacre never happened at all. Most of the argument over the massacre has to do with how many Chinese people died. Some scholars say that many fewer Chinese people died than most historians say. For example, Japanese writer Tanaka Masaaki says that only a few hundred civilians died in Nanjing.
As of 2014, Japan still honored fourteen "Class A" war criminalsincluding the three who were in charge of the Nanjing Massacreat a national shrine.
There is a lot of proof that the Nanjing Massacre happened the way most historians and survivors say it did. This proof includes:
Neoliberalism
Neoliberalism is a term for different social and economic ideas. Originally the term was used by a group of liberals who helped shape social market economy in the mid 20th century. Classic liberalism characterized by free market trade, deregulation of financial markets, mercantilism and the shift away from state welfare provision.
Alexander Rustow was the first economist to develop this concept, looking after a Social Democracy system rather than a Laissez Faire Capitalist Society.
In the application of neoliberal ideals, the state might also intervene and regulate, for example, to prevent exploitation, or to ensure social fairness and equality.
Neoliberalism is antithetical to the protection of group - rather than individual - interests, for example, that might be achieved through lobbying of groups, or state interventions that protect national interests via tariffs or subsidies.
Neoliberalism has moved away from a centrally governed economy.
Since the 1990s the term has been consistently used in academia to imply the move from welfare state to laissez faire economic management, particularly associated with the promotion of free market ideals in the late 1980s by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US.
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