The Nanjing Massacre - Revisited

cestmoi

I got this article from Quora. During WW2, unmitigated evil and hatred led to the wholesale slaughter of Chinese.

The rest of S.E. Asia was not spared the slaughtering by the Imperial Japanese troops, after China, Vietnam took the brunt of it. Unfortunately, the Vietnamese were slaughtered again by the USAnians after the French were thrown out. USA is trying hard to cover up for Japan and whihtewash that ugly part of history, along with their war crimes in Vietnam.

Worth reading.

Why did Japan kill so many Chinese people in the Nanking massacre, and not other nations like Vietnam or Indonesia?
I mean that Japan occupied or controlled a lot of asian nations, why Japan did not make a massacre in other nations like Vietnam, Indonesia,… in the WW2 but China. Japan despised China?

Tom Martin

Iris Chang’s important book, The Rape of Nanking (1997) covers this subject in depth but quora is about providing answers rather than mere references so I’ll speculate.

The Japanese held an odd view of China, let’s do the difficult and step into their possible view. It is harsh.

They respected the fact that the ‘Chinese civilization’ held thousands of years of superior culture, art, and developments, but they held the Chinese of more recent times in utter contempt as the ‘lap dog’, the coolies, victims of the European Forces that Japan more successfully limited in their incursions into Japan. China was colonized. Many influential Japanese felt they controlled the influx of Western influences, [and there is validity in this as their techniques of breaking down advanced foreign (western) technology, reverse engineering it, controlling the influences, and converting Western technology into familiar guises to promote acceptance without destroying, but rather shifting power bases is the model we will supposedly hope to use if an advance alien civilization is encountered.]

The Japanese leadership held the current Chinese in contempt. A loose, rough parallel is how the British viewed the Romans as opposed to the Italians, without the contempt reaching the level of brutal hatred.

The contempt mixed with fear. The surrendering Chinese troops greatly OUTNUMBERED the entire Japanese force and they didn’t even put up a great fight, and disgracefully, surrendered. Now the Japanese had, cowed, a huge population with hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers who should have realized their numbers. Getting rid of them quickly came as a quick solution when one holds them in contempt.

Now if the Chinese soldiers didn’t view their own civilians as worth protecting, what value were they to the Japanese?

So, contempt, rage, fear and blood lust might have explained an initial slaughter of prisoners, like those grim moments in Agincourt, when the the foot soldiers, under orders, began killing captive French knights when their baggage train was hit, but it’d not fully explain the day after day, after day often organized, often competitive inexcusable slaughter of Chinese soldiers and civilians.

Perhaps there’s another element.

Japan experienced incredible social, cultural, and tech gains, lost many freedoms, suffered incredibly to advance and perhaps those strains emerged, like prisoners in horrific Gulags, turning on the weaker ones, when given leave to do so by the authorities.

They vented their rage.

They possessed incredible rage.

yasawakic

1. Japan did not make a massacre in other nations like Vietnam, Indonesia

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What a piece of crap...Quora is funny, but sometimes peoples asking there ridiculous questions osometimes because they are truely ignorant to the zero degree, but also sometimes because they have learned in North Korean books....