Historias Innecesarias: La masacre de Nankin

Warning: The following story presents descriptions and time files that may be strong for some viewers. Discretion is recommended. In 1937, for only 42 days and in a single city, more people were killed than in Hiroshima at the time of the impact of the atomic bomb. That city was Nankin, the capital of China. There, the Japanese imperial army used all the methods available at the time.

bayonets, rifles, swords and fire. The women were raped in the homes where they hid, without age distinction, and the prisoners were tied with their hands on their backs and thrown into the river. Meanwhile, two Japanese officers competed in the

of the most read newspaper in Tokyo, for seeing who first beheaded 100 Chinese with a sword. When they tied at 100, they raised the bet to 150. And although this was covered by the international press, it was of no use, since the powers of the moment were looking at Berlin, where there was an Austrian with a mustache who was about to start his own war.

This story actually begins in 1853, when a fleet of American warships entered the Tokyo Bay and broke into a siege that Japan had been holding for more than two centuries. Until then, Japan was a feudal and closed society. It had an emperor, but the royal power was exercised by some warriors, the Samurai, who had decided centuries ago that the rest of the world

was a problem. When the American ships forced them to open, the Japanese came to a brutal conclusion: either they modernized quickly or they ended up like China, divided and humiliated by the European powers. They chose the first option. What came next was a unprecedented transformation.

In less than 40 years, Japan became a country of peasants with swords, to an industrial power with armoured vehicles and a modern army. They did it deliberately, with a state program and a motto that sums up the mentality of the time very well: "A rich country, a strong army." What no one expected was the speed with which that strong army was going to come out to prove itself. In 1894, Japan declared war on China.

He won it in less than a year and stayed with Taiwan as a boot. Ten years later, in 1905, he does something even more spectacular. He defeats Russia in a naval war. It was the first time in modern history that an Asian country won a European power militarily. In 1910, Japan annexed Korea without firing a single shot.

The empire was getting stronger and each generation had a winning war. Along with the military victories, an idea appeared that would justify everything that would come after. In Japanese it's called "Hako Ichiyu" and it translates more or less like "The Eight Corners of the World Under One Roof". The idea is simple: Asia has to be united and the roof that unites it has to be Japan. The phrase was presented as ancient, almost religious or taken from the classical texts. But the truth is that it was an invention of the 20th century.

to give a spiritual aura to a purely expansionist project. And this is where history begins to twist. Because by the end of the 20's, Japan had a problem. The army no longer obeyed the civil government. Young officers had begun to believe that politicians were corrupt, weak and that they were betraying the imperial destiny of the country. The economic crisis of 1929, which hit Japan very hard, ended up convincing them.

The solution, they said, was to expand to the continent and get territory, resources and markets. In September 1931, and without asking permission from the government of Tokyo, a group of Japanese army officers, which was in Manchuria, in the north of China, flew a section of the railway, blamed some imaginary Chinese guerrillas, and used the alleged attack as an excuse to invade the entire region.

In a matter of months, Manchuria stopped being China and became a puppet state called Manchukuo. The Society of Nations, which was the international organization of the time, sent a commission to investigate and published a report condemning the invasion. The response from Japan was, directly, to leave society. Five years later, the army took over the country. In February 1936, young officers attempted a coup in Tokyo.

1,400 soldiers, three assassinated ministers, and the first minister who saved himself by hiding in a poster. The coup failed, but after the coup, the balance was broken. No Japanese civil government was going to dare to contradict the army ever again.

So, the military doctrine became a state policy. And while all this was happening in Japan, in China something else was happening. And this is important because without understanding how China was in the 1930s, we don't understand why the Japanese invasion was so

China was officially a republic. It had a central government in Nanking headed by a general named Chiang Kai-shek, who led the nationalist party. But the word "central" was an exaggeration. Chiang controlled less than 10% of the territory. The rest was in the hands of regional warlords, military captives with their own private armies, who charged taxes, swindled money, and obeyed Chiang only when it was convenient for them.

In addition, in a mountainous area in the center of the country, there was a communist party growing rapidly, commanded by a peasant, who became an intellectual, called Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-shek was more concerned about the communists than the Japanese.

For years, Mao pursued them militarily until in 1934 he forced them to make an epic retreat of 6,000 km on foot through the interior of China, the famous "Larga Marcha", which, although it killed 80% of those who started it, ended up turning Mao into an undisputed leader of Chinese communism.

In December 1936, one of the generals kidnapped Chiang for two weeks to force him to sign an alliance with the communists and face Japan together. Chiang signed, but it was too late to prepare the country. By 1937, the two countries were in opposite positions.

Japan was an industrial and military power ruled by the army with a continental expansion ideology, a decade of easy military victories, and the conviction that Asia had to be under its roof. China, on the other hand, was a huge, divided country, just coming out of its own civil war and led by a weak government that had just accepted, almost by force, that the main enemy was outside and not within its territory.

The only thing that was missing to make everything explode was a spark. And that spark was going to be a missing soldier. On the night of July 7th, 1937, a Japanese army company that was doing night maneuvers to the outskirts of Beijing, passed the list at the end of the exercise and discovered that a soldier was missing.

Automatically, the Japanese officers decided that the soldier had been kidnapped by Chinese troops who were stationed near a historic bridge that in the West is known as the Marco Polo Bridge. And they demanded to register the Chinese barracks to find him. The Chinese refused and the shooting began. When the sun came out, the Japanese soldier had already appeared. He had been all that time on a latrine without knowing everything that had occurred.

China decided not to let go of what had happened, and soon after, Chiang Kai-shek's government mobilized its best troops. Japan, which had planned a quick operation to punish Beijing, suddenly found itself in a total war. A war that, in addition,

never formally declared. Until the end, the official Japanese documents referred to Nanking, Shanghai and the rest of China as an incident. The first major crash occurred in Shanghai. It was China's economic jewel. It had skyscrapers, tramways, casinos, large ports, a French concession, a British one, factories, banks and 3 million inhabitants.

Chiang Kai-shek decided that in a city full of foreign witnesses, was where the decisive battle against the Japanese would take place. The idea was simple: if the world saw China resist, someone would have to help it. The battle started on August 13th,

and lasted three and a half months. Three and a half months of street-by-street urban combat, with Japanese artillery bombing entire neighborhoods and bodies piled up on the roads. The final figure: about 200,000 dead Chinese soldiers and between 40,000 and 50,000 Japanese. Shanghai fell in November, but at a cost that Japan did not have planned.

And Japan had planned to break China in six weeks.

Three months later, he was still in a single city. His generals were furious, and his soldiers, many of them poor-natured and unpaid reservists, who had seen half of his unit die under the Chinese bombing, were exhausted and resentful.

The rage that accumulated during these three months did not evaporate when Shanghai fell. It was about to fall in the next city. That next city was the capital. The Japanese army officers, without asking the Tokyo civil government for permission, which preferred to negotiate, decided on their own

march on Nanking. And the road between that city and Shanghai became, throughout November, a preview of what would come next: whole villages set on fire, looted villages, and the bodies of peasants abandoned in the rice fields.

For the first days of December, the imperial army was at the gates of the Chinese capital. And the capital, meanwhile, was emptying. Nanjing, at that time, was a walled city with almost one million inhabitants. It was the capital of the country, the place where the ministries, embassies, the great universities, the main hospitals, and the imperial archives that China had accumulated for centuries.

And everyone in that city knew what was coming. What happened during those previous weeks was almost a biblical exodus. Those who had money or contacts fled to the west, river by river, to the new provisional capital that the government had announced in a city called Wuhan. Those who had nothing stayed, because leaving involved money that they simply did not have.

Thus, the population was reduced in a month from 1 million to 1,250,000 inhabitants. The ones who stayed were, above all, the poorest. On December 7, before dawn, Chiang Kai-shek himself boarded a private plane with his wife and left. Before leaving, he passed the city's defense to a general named Tang Sheng-chi. He commissioned 100,000 men,

Most of them were green reservists, without real training, and recruited by the force days ago. And he asked them to defend the capital until the last man. Tang promised that he would do so, in a public speech broadcast by radio. But among the inhabitants who stayed, there was a handful of foreigners.

Businessmen, doctors, university professors and missionaries who had lived in Nankin for years. They spoke Chinese, had Chinese families, and when the other foreigners ran away, they decided to stay. This group created an international committee and declared a security zone on paper.

It was 4 square kilometers in the west of the city where embassies, a university, a couple of hospitals and most of the houses of foreigners were concentrated. The idea was to turn it into a neutral, civil and out-of-combat refuge. And the person who stood in front of the committee was a 55-year-old German,

Siemens electrical equipment seller and a member of the Nazi Party. His name was John Rabe, but we'll be talking about Rabe a bit later. For now, it's enough to know that between November 22 and December 12, this committee set up shelters for 250,000 people.

On the night of December 12, while the Japanese were bombing the gates of the wall with heavy artillery, General Tang Sheng-Chi received a call from Chiang Kai-Shek from Wuhan, ordering him to withdraw. Tang accepted the order immediately,

and left the city that same night through a north gate that was not yet blocked by the Japanese. He did it without informing any of his soldiers. When they found out that their officers had fled, they tried to follow them through the same north gate.

But when thousands of people gathered in a narrow exit, the escape became a slaughter by crushing. Hundreds died lying on their feet before crossing, while others threw themselves into the Yangtze River without knowing how to swim. Those who did not arrive on time, surrendered to the Japanese army that entered through the remaining four doors. It was the night of December 13, 1937, and the six darkest weeks of Chinese history of the 20th century began.

The first thing the Japanese soldiers did when they entered the city was to execute the prisoners. First, they separated the young men, whether they were surrendered soldiers or civilians who looked like soldiers, they tied them up with a cord and they marched them to the banks of the Yangtze River. Once there, they shot them from behind and let the bodies fall into the water. The banks of the river, during the following weeks, were covered with corpses. The massive executions were not spontaneous.

They were systematic. Entire army platoons had received the order to clean up the prisoners and turned to do so. In total, more than 50,000 men were killed at the banks of the river. Most of them were not soldiers, but workers, students, merchants or refugee peasants. The rule during those days was that any young man was automatically suspicious. Many were buried alive or even cut to pieces by dogs.

Then, the Japanese army deployed house by house and the violations started. The figures established by the Tokyo Military Court later talk about 20,000 violations documented in 6 weeks. The most extensive academic estimates go up to 80,000. To take dimension, 80,000 violations in 6 weeks are almost 2,000 violations per day in one city.

without age distinction. The documented victims were from 11-year-old girls to grandmothers of 70. The soldiers entered the houses, separated the women from the rest of the family, raped them in groups and many times killed them later. There are testimonies of pregnant women being opened to the middle with a bayonet and the men who tried to defend them, fathers, husbands or children, killed them at the moment.

After destroying and looting entire neighborhoods, the Japanese army set them on fire to avoid leaving any traces. By the end of December, it is estimated that a third of the city was destroyed by the fire. But there is a detail of those weeks that still seems to be taken from a movie.

The most well-read newspaper in Tokyo, called "Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun", sent a team of correspondents with the Japanese army to cover the march towards Nankin. Among the officers who covered it, they found two subordinates: Toshiaki Mukai and Tsuyoshi Noda. The competition consisted in seeing who first decapitated 100 people using only one sword.

The newspaper started covering it as if it were a sports news. When the two officials had tied at 100, they decided to raise the bet to 150. There is an academic debate today about whether the competition was real or if it was a sensationalist invention of the newspaper itself to sell more copies.

What is not so doubtful is that those two officers killed tons of people with a sword in those days. On December 17th, four days after the fall, the army organized an official victory ceremony to show the world that the city had been taken with honor.

Japanese journalists showed the soldiers in a row and the general in chief, a sick tuberculosis sycophant called Iwane Matsui, who had been in bed during the whole capture, greeting in front of the flag. Three blocks away from the ceremony, the violations and executions were still in full development. Matsui would find out a week later when it was already too late.

The following weeks, until the end of February, were of more dispersed violence, but not less. The total numbers established by the Tokyo Military Tribunal were more than 200,000 deaths. The official Chinese figure, which is now recorded on a wall of the Nanking Memorial, is 300,000. Western academic estimates range between 100,000 and 300,000. The discrepancy, as with all massacres, depends on what is counted.

Only civilians or also military prisoners. Only inside the wall or also in the nearby towns. As always, it is to try to reduce an atrocious event to a numerical discussion. At the end of January, when the Japanese army finally restored order and forced the refugees to return to their homes, opened in the outskirts of Nankin a first "station of consolation". It was a building of a floor where the army had locked about 20 young women, Chinese and Korean, for Japanese soldiers.

The idea, according to the officers, was to reduce street violence and improve discipline. What they were actually doing was to institutionalize crime. In the following years, that model of a "station of consolation" would be replicated throughout Asia. By the end of January 1938, the worst had ended. The city was standing, but a third of it was in ruins.

There were about 100,000 survivors there, still sheltered in the security zone or trying to rebuild what they had. And the heroes who left the Nanjing massacre are three people that no scriptwriter would have put together in the same place: a Nazi German, an American missionary, and a Protestant pastor.

The three foreigners, the three civilians, and the three during those six weeks, did more for the Chinese in Nanking than any army. One is the aforementioned John Rabe, a German who had lived 30 years in China and who worked as a commercial representative for Siemens.

In 1934, and like many Germans who lived abroad at the time, he joined the Nazi Party. He did it for professional convenience. The Party gave him labor benefits and, above all, it gave him weight in the German community.

When the Japanese arrived in Nankin, Rabe realized that the bracelet with a swastika on the left arm was paradoxically a shield. Japan and Germany were allies. For the Japanese soldiers, seeing a swastika was like seeing a friend flag.

And Rabe used that symbolism to stop Japanese soldiers who were going to rape women, to get families out of houses that were about to be set on fire, and to hide Chinese soldiers in their own garden. It should be noted that Rabe even wrote a personal letter to Adolf Hitler asking him to use his influence with the Japanese government to stop the massacre.

But that letter never reached its destination. Meanwhile, a 51-year-old woman was doing something similar in a university campus. Her name was Minnie Botrin. She was from Illinois and had arrived in China 20 years earlier as a missionary and she was directing Gingling,

the first university for women in the country. When the Japanese entered, Botrin opened the doors of the campus and let all the women and girls who could fit in. By the end of December, he had 10,000 refugees sleeping in the classrooms. Botrin spent the next six weeks doing the only thing he could do:

to be at the door. Every time a group of Japanese soldiers approached the campus to look for women, Botrin went out to welcome them. He would argue with them and show them his US passport. Sometimes he would convince them, and sometimes he wouldn't. And if they took any girl, they would write it down in a diary with the exact time and with the description as detailed as possible of the officers who had taken them out.

The third protagonist of this story was called John Magee. He was an American Episcopal pastor, he lived in Nanquín decades ago, and he had a hobby that, during those six weeks, became the most important file of the crime. He was an amateur filmmaker. He had a 16mm camera that he had bought years before to film his family's holidays, and during the whole massacre he took it hidden inside his church bag to film absolutely everything.

In total, he filmed 105 minutes. When the massacre ended, he gave the material to another member of the international committee who took out the cans of china hidden inside the lining of his overall. That man, George Fitch, traveled to the United States with the films stuck to his body during the entire Pacific Crusade. Once on the go, he organized private projections for members of Congress, for the Red Cross, and for the army.

Today, that material, restored by Yale University in the 90's, is the only contemporary film of the Nankin massacre that exists on the planet. And it should be noted that the world found out what was happening while it was still happening. On December 18th, 1937, five days after the fall of the city, the New York Times cover published a report where it described in detail what the Japanese army was doing.

The next day, the Chicago Daily News published another similar report that coincided in practically everything. The information then was not secret. It was on the covers of the main newspapers of the Western world. And even so, the international political response was essentially none.

The US government formally protested when a North American war ship was bombed by Japanese planes in the middle of the massacre. But because of that massacre, almost nobody officially showed up. The democratic powers were concentrated in Berlin, where a regime was being consolidated that was going to put in motion its own extermination machinery in a matter of years. And that international indifference had a concrete consequence.

He gave the Japanese imperial army the confirmation that the logic of collective punishment, of systematic crime, of the dissolution of all difference between fighter and civilian was not going to have an international cost. And what came in the next seven years was a multiple of the same.

In December 1938, a year after the massacre, the Emperor Hirohito himself personally signed the approval of a military operation in the north of China known as "Sanko Sakusen", a three-word directive that translated as "Kill everything, burn everything and loot everything".

The operation was applied for years against Chinese villages suspected of sympathizing with the communist guerrilla. Academic estimates speak of up to two and a half million civilians killed just for that operation. In parallel, in a secret military base near a Chinese city, the so-called unit 731 was installed.

a biological experimentation program with human beings. Chinese, Korean, Soviet and then also American prisoners were used as test subjects to study diseases, freezes, vivisections or the effect of chemical weapons. The numbers of victims range between 3,000 and 12,000 people. When the war ended, the American army gave immunity to the officers who led that unit in exchange for keeping their data and none of them were processed.

Some time later, when Japan lost the Second World War in August 1945, the Allies organized a military court in Tokyo to judge the perpetrators of war crimes. 28 high-ranking Japanese officers were accused. Seven were sentenced to death. Among them was General Iwanema Tsui, the sick tuberculosis xenophile who had arrived late to the Nanking Victory Ceremony and had reported to his own officers when he found out what they had done.

Despite that, the court declared him guilty. Not because he ordered the massacre, but because he wasn't able to stop it. They hanged him on December 23, 1948, together with former Prime Minister Hideki Toho.

In parallel, in Nankin itself, another court, this time Chinese, judged the officers who had been on the ground. General Isao Tani, the two subtenants of the competition of 100, Mukai Noda, and all were shot. The man that many historians consider the true operative responsible of Nankin, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, uncle of the Emperor Hirohito and temporary commander of the operation during the hardest days of the massacre, was never prosecuted.

General Douglas MacArthur, head of the Allied Command in the Pacific, had decided that the entire Japanese imperial family should be out of the process to not destabilize the country during the occupation. Asaka lived freely, playing golf in Tokyo's exclusive clubs until his death in 1981, at 94 years old. Emperor Hirohito, for the same reason, was not prosecuted either.

He died in 1989 as a symbolic head of state, and he never formally responded to what happened under his command. And that selective impunity, where the subordinate officers are hanged and the imperial officials are left alone, is one of the elements that will complicate, during all the following decades, the possibility that Japan will make a clear duel with its own history. And it is that, after the trials, 30 years of silence came.

It's one of the rarest events of the Asian post-war period. During the 50s, 60s and a good part of the 70s, neither Japan nor China made any noise about what had happened. Each one for their own reasons. Japan, occupied by the United States until 1952, was economically rebuilt as a key ally of Washington in the Cold War.

no US government wanted to bother its new ally by removing too heavy blames. Even the Japanese textbooks of that time mentioned the war in China in vague, without details, and many times without even the word "massacre". China, on the other hand, went through an internal earthquake in the same years.

the great leap forward, the cultural revolution and the complete closure of the educational system for a decade. There was no institutional space to make memory of Nanquín. Silence began to break at the end of the 70s in a rather unexpected place.

A temple. And it's because in Tokyo there's a Shinto shrine called Yasukuni, where Japanese soldiers who died in the war are honored. The idea is that no one is buried there, but their souls are consecrated. They are spiritually left inside the shrine, and the Japanese state honors them as national heroes. In 1978, the priests did something that they kept a secret for months. They consecrated the souls of 14 high-class war criminals.

Among them, General Iwane Matsui and former Prime Minister Hidehi Toho. In this way, the top officials of the war and the massacre were officially among the heroes. When it was known, the international scandal was immediate. And since then, every time a Japanese Prime Minister visits the sanctuary in an official ceremony, China and Korea protest.

In fact, in parallel to these protests, during the 80s, another battle began. The same symbolic, but much longer. The battle of textbooks. In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Education rejected the word "aggression" in a school manual to describe what the Japanese army had done, and suggested to change it for "advance". There was a scandal, Chinese and Korean governments protesting, and everything reached the United Nations.

The word was restored after months of pressure. But the battle for how the crimes of Nankin are taught in Japan did not end that day. It came back cyclically all the time, especially in the 90s and 2000s, and it still is in dispute today. There are current Japanese manuals that mention the massacre with their documented figures, and others that barely mention it in one sentence and without context.

Furthermore, a minority but visible group of Japanese intellectuals, academics, former military and conservative politicians, have been supporting for decades that the massacre simply didn't exist, or that it existed on a much smaller scale. They say that the numbers are inflated, that the photos are manipulated, and that the witnesses simply lie.

And her arguments crossed in 2006 with a survivor in particular. A Chinese woman called Xia Xuchin, who was 80 years old at that time. She had been beaten three times at the age of 8 by Japanese soldiers who had killed seven members of her family that same afternoon.

She managed to survive hidden under the bodies and decades later, in the 90's, she had given public testimonies of the crime. And a Japanese historian, a negationist, had accused her in a book of having invented everything. After that, she was sued by the Japanese court for defamation.

After three years of trial, on February 5th, 2009, the Supreme Court of Japan failed in favor of her and ordered the historian to pay her 4 million yen in compensation and to admit that her testimony was true. It was one of the few times in 80 years of dispute that a Japanese court formally gave the reason to a victim about a negationist. And what ended up reopening the subject in the West came from a book.

In 1995, a 27-year-old Chinese-American journalist named Iris Chang started investigating what had happened in Nanking. Her grandparents had fled the city in 1937, days before the assault, and had told her absolutely everything.

Chang got into university archives, traveled to Nanking, interviewed survivors, and recovered the forgotten diaries of John Rabe, who were in the hands of Nazi Germany's granddaughter. In 1997, he published "The Rape of Nanking". It was a world bestseller. And for many people who had never heard of this event, especially Western audiences, that book was the first contact with history. Chang was opened to the Chinese political response,

But the Japanese was very different. She received death threats, deniers chased her in universities, they went to disprove her on television, and blocked her from doing shows in Japan. Some time later, in 1985, China opened a memorial in the city of Nanking to the victims of the massacre. It was expanded in 2007 until it became one of the most visited memorials in Asia.

Die!

John Rabe returned to Germany in 1938. The first thing he did when he arrived was to give public conferences about what he had seen in Nankin. He carried out some and then the Gestapo arrested him. They confiscated his documents, they forbade him to talk about the subject and they questioned him for days. And this is what happened.

that the German government didn't want its Japanese ally to be exposed. Rabe signed a document, promising not to speak publicly about the issue again, and he kept the newspapers and photos in a box in the basement of his house. When the war ended in 1945, he lost his job in Siemens for his affiliation to the Nazi party. After that, he was removed from his pension and expelled from the professional association he belonged to.

Thus, he and his family fell into extreme poverty in a Berlin bombarded by post-war. In 1948, he wrote a letter to a colleague in China asking if anyone remembered him. The letter was delivered to the mayor of Nanjing, and the city that he had helped save ten years ago organized a spontaneous collection.

They gathered 2,000 US dollars, which was a fortune in post-war Germany, and from that moment, every month until his death, they sent him a package with food and money from the other side of the planet. He died of a heart attack on January 5, 1950, in Berlin. His grave, which was in a cemetery in that place, was symbolically moved to Nanquín in 1997, when his diaries were rediscovered.

Minnie Botrin stayed in Nankin until May 1940. After the massacre, she tried to return to her academic routine, but she was emotionally destroyed. The journal she kept during those years, kept at Yale University, records that deterioration. Insomnia, nightmares, uncontrollable crying episodes, and guilt for the girls she couldn't save, and for the impossible decisions she had to make, like giving some to save others.

In May 1940, she suffered a complete nervous breakdown and was sent to the United States for treatment. There, she was diagnosed with what we would call severe depression with post-traumatic stress disorder. On May 14, 1941, she closed the windows of her apartment, opened the gas key and lay down on the bed so as not to wake up again, never again. She was 54 years old. Her grave says in Chinese: "Merciful Goddess of Gingling,

the name that the refugees that she had protected gave her. Iris Chang, the journalist who published the book, continued to investigate war crimes. She received constant threats, she started to have insomnia, paranoid episodes and depression. In 2004, during a trip she made to investigate for a book that would never end, she suffered a psychotic collapse, she was hospitalized and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Soon after, he drove to a route from Santa Clara County to California, parked the car on the side of the road, and shot himself with an old revolver that had been bought three days ago. General Tang Sheng-Chi, the Chinese who escaped on December 12th, survived the war, survived the Chinese Civil War, and reconciled with Mao's communist regime. He lived in Beijing in relative tranquility until 1970, when he died of natural causes at 81 years old.

Chia-Shu-Kin, the survivor who had been bashed three times at the age of eight, the one who sued the historian and won, lived until 2024. She died at 95 years old in Nankin, in her bed, surrounded by her family. She always said exactly the same thing in every interview.

I don't want forgiveness. I want it not to be forgotten. There's a photo that appears in any book that talks about the war between Japan and China. It was taken by a Chinese photographer named H.S. Wong on August 28th, 1937. Four months before Nanking. It's taken in the rails of the main station of Shanghai after a Japanese bombing.

In the center of the photo, there is a baby sitting on the floor, with his clothes burned, crying. His parents have just died, presumably in that bombing. The photo was published in the magazine Life and in hundreds of newspapers around the world. At the time, it was one of the most viewed images of the 20th century. It generated outrage, letters to the director and humanitarian campaigns

but none of that worked. Four months later, the Japanese army, which had bombed the baby who survived, entered Nankin and did what it did. And the world, again, looked, was outraged, and again, did nothing. And that's the question that resonates.

Why some atrocities become the central story of an era, and others, like these, remain in almost permanent dispute. Why Hiroshima has a world memorial, and Nankin, documented in real time by foreign witnesses, and filmed by a pastor with a hidden camera, took 60 years to return to the history books.

Nankin didn't end in February 1938 when the Japanese army restored order. Nor in 1948 when Matsui was hanged. Nor in 1985 with the memorial, nor in 2009 with the trial of Shia Shukin. It's something that is still open. And while this story is still open, it's worth telling it. Because the ones that stop being told are the ones that happen again.

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