The Rape of Nanking

             

            The Nanking Massacre, known as the Rape of Nanking, was a mass murder occurred during the six-week period after Nanking surrendered to Japan in December 1937. The Flowers of War, a historical drama film, directed by Yimou Zhang, has its setting in this time period. In order to protect girls in the convent, 12 legendary prostitutes decided to garb themselves as the innocent girls and meet the cruel Japanese Soldiers on their behalf. Besides the unique storyline, the heroic, tragic romance between a Chinese prostitute and an American mortician and the artistic filming techniques definitely catch the audiences’ eyes.

The Rape of Nanking is the largest short-term mass extermination in history, during which 250,000 civilians are killed. The Chinese soldiers’ bodies were cremated or dumped into the Yangtze River. Children were killed in front of their parents. This required knowledge of what would be most painful for a human to witness. Family attachment and parental protectiveness were used to maximize psychological as well as physical pain. What’s worse, every woman available was raped regardless of age. The post-rape killing included mutilation, insertion of foreign objects into the vagina, disemboweling, and vivisection. Men were sodomized or forced to perform sexual acts with members of their own family.

The logic behind the sadistic behaviors exhibited by Japanese Soldiers is controversial.  The most popular explanation is the dehumanizing military training of the soldiers. Desensitization was part of Japanese military training. The training included exercises to numb men, and relinquish the human instinct against killing innocent people. Soldiers were taught how to cut off heads and bayonet living prisoners in training. Initially, recruits had revulsion to these practices.  Eventually, desensitization occurred and the soldiers became inured and atrocities became banal.

The intent of the prosecutor was genocidal.  Ethnocentrism, fuelled by the vision that Japan was the leader of the Great East Asia, was extreme in that era. Chinese were viewed as resisting that social order and hence are derogated as subhuman. In addition, during the massacre there were International Non-killing Zones where Americans and Europeans lived. Although the Rape of Nanking is often referred to as a massacre, the ideology of Chinese as an inferior race that needs to be exterminated and the selective killing during the massacre reveals the genocidal motives behind the bloody massacre.