Aim: How Could the Rape of Nanking and Bataan Death March Happen?

I The Rape of Nanking (1937) In 1931, the Japanese occupied Manchuria and established the puppet state of Manchukuo. July 1937 Japan took Peking. August 1937 Japan attacked Shanghai. Dec 13, Japan took Nanking. Japanese General Matsui Iwane ordered Nanking be destroyed. The "Rape of Nanking”: The Japanese butchered 150,000 – 200,000 men, and raped at least 20,000 women and girls of all ages. General Matsui Iwane

Mounted Japanese troops pass under the Chungshan Gate while entering Nanjing, China, Jan. 4, 1938.

A Japanese headsman tells a Chinese prisoner how to hold his head for a smooth decapitation 1938.

Chinese prisoners are buried alive by their Japanese captors outside the city of Nanjing.

The Rape of Nanking Continued… C) Approximately 200,000 women from Korea, the Philippines, China, Burma, and Indonesia were forced by the Japanese military to work in brothels. The Japanese soldiers referred to them as “comfort women”. “I had a big room with a double bed. I got two simple meals a day … I was forced to have sex with ten to twenty men a day. Sex was excruciating. Oh, you have no idea how painful it was. If I didn’t perform well, I would get beaten. Some of the men would be drunk and beat me anyway.” [Anonymous, quoted in George Hicks, The Comfort Women, New York, W. W. Norton & Co, 1995, 13.] 4 Japanese “Comfort Women”

The Rape of Nanking Continued… D) General Matsui was found guilty of war crimes by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and executed. E) Today, Japanese nationalists claim that the death tolls are inflated.

II The Bataan Death March 1942 70,000 U.S. and Filipino prisoners were marched 60+ miles with little food or water. Those who fell behind were executed. 5,000 - 11,000 died.

U.S. Army National Guard and Filipino soldiers shown at the outset of the Bataan Death March. Allied forces were forced to surrender to the Japanese on April 9, 1942, the largest surrender in U.S. history.

III Other Japanese Atrocities Under the leadership of Ishii Shiro, Unit 731 performed tests on living humans. They injected victims with germs to test vaccinations. They performed operations on living humans without anesthetic. The victims were then killed.

Col. Vicente Alhambra, 100, is one of the only remaining Filipino survivors of the notorious Bataan Death March.

Summary Questions and Key Vocabulary What was the Rape of Nanking? Who were the “Comfort Women”? What was the Bataan Death March? Why do you think these events are not as well known as the Holocaust? Key Vocabulary: Bataan Death March Comfort Women General Matsui Iwane Manchuria Rape of Nanking