China WWII – Description II by Pearl Buck

Gang Rape

Dragon Seed by Pearl Buck, 1942, Excerpts

She went on a little further, never knowing that she was being watched by the enemy and had been since she left the gate. Now orders had come down from above that no open evil was to be done in the streets any more, but what went on behind walls none knew, and as she passed a public water-closet for men, such as was to be found near any main street, she was suddenly fallen upon by five enemy soldiers who had been watching for a lonely woman to come by that they might draw her in. Such women were very rare now, for what woman would go out alone these days? When they saw Orchid they thought she must be a courtesan, because she looked so gay, and indeed she had a soft round face, and her body was plump and soft, and her full mouth was red, and they held her fast, and gloated on her for a moment and quarreled for who should have her first.

Orchid was one of those women who live long when they are loved and cared for, but in trouble they die soon. Now as she looked into the black faces of these lust-filled men, she was weak already. When one after another of those men took their will on her, and no passer-by dared to come into that public place to save her when once they had stared in and seen five soldiers with their guns against the wall, then she was like a rabbit fallen upon by wolfish dogs, and she was helpless. She screamed and then they beat her, and one held his hand over her nose and mouth, and she struggled only a little and then her life went out as easily as a little rabbit’s does, and the last man had to use her dead. When they were through with her, they left her there and went away.

Katharine Hepburn

China WWII – Description I by Pearl Buck

Gang Rape

Dragon Seed by Pearl Buck, 1942, Excerpts

Then the enemy began to come from the city and to spread among the villages, and one day Ling Tan looked up and there at his door stood four enemy soldiers. “There are no women in my house.” But they in turn could not understand what he said and so they leaped in and pushed him aside and searched for themselves in every room and place and when they found no sign of women, except some women’s garments left behind, they grew fierce and bellowed at him, and still he could not understand what they said. But their anger he did understand.

When those furious soldiers saw that indeed there was no woman, their lust knew no bounds. It burst from them like wicked flames, and Ting Lan saw what he had never dreamed of seeing. He saw them lay hold upon his youngest son, that lad who had always been too beautiful for his own good, and now his beauty was his grief, for they took this boy and used him as a woman. Then, laughing, those soldiers went their way. The lad was not dead, nor even wounded near death, but he was like one dead, as though his heart had been stabbed, and his father was afraid he was out of his wits.

Japanese Degradation of Families - WWII

Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, 1997, Excerpts

Some of the most sordid instances of sexual torture involved the degradation of entire families. The Japanese drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest – fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers as other family members watched. A fifteen year old Chinese girl’s family was murdered before her eyes. The Japanese first killed her brother, whom they wrongly accused of being a Chinese soldier, then her brother’s wife and her older sister because they both resisted rape, and finally her mother and father, who knelt on the floor begging the Japanese to spare the lives of their children. Before they died under the threats of Japanese bayonets, their last words urged the young girl to do whatever the enemy soldiers wanted from her.

The girl fainted. She revived to find herself naked on the floor in a strange locked room. Someone had raped her while she had been unconscious. Her clothes had been taken from her, as they had been taken from other girls in the building. For a month and a half the fifteen-year-old was raped two to three times a day. Eventually she became so diseased the Japanese left her alone. That girl was considered fortunate. Many other girls, tied naked to chairs, beds, or poles as permanent fixtures for rape, did not survive such treatment. An eleven-year-old girl died after she was raped continuously for two days.

Scene from City of Life and Death

Japanese Rape Nanking - WWII

Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, 1997, Excerpts

An estimated 20,000 – 80,000 Chinese women were raped. The Japanese raped Nanking women from all classes: farm wives, students, teachers, white-collar and blue-collar workers, wives of YMCA employees, university professors, even Buddhist nuns, some of whom were gang-raped to death. Japanese soldiers searched for them constantly as they looted homes and dragged men off for execution. They conducted door-to-door searches, demanding money and young girls.

Old age was no concern to the Japanese. Matrons, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers endured repeated sexual assaults. If the Japanese of the old women was terrible, their treatment of young children was unthinkable. Little girls were raped so brutally that some could not walk for weeks afterwards. Many required surgery; others died. Chinese witnesses saw Japanese rape girls under ten years of age in the streets and then slash them in half by sword. In some cases, the Japanese sliced open the vaginas of preteen girls in order to ravish them more effectively.

“Women suffered the most,” a former soldier recalled. “No matter how young or old, they all could not escape the fate of being raped. We sent out coal trucks to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 to 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse.” “After raping, we would kill them,” he recalled. “Those women would start to flee once we let them go. Then we would shoot them in the back to finish them up.” “Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.”

 “They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil.” Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breast, and nail them alive to walls.

One of the worst scenes witnessed in Nanking was a massive gang rape of teenager girls in the street. A group of young women between the ages of fifteen and eighteen were lined up by the Japanese and then raped in the dirt, one after another, by an entire regiment. Some hemorrhaged and died, while others killed themselves shortly afterwards.

Scene from City of Life and Death

Japanese Enter Nanking - WWII

Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, 1997, Excerpts

After the Chinese soldiers surrendered in masses, there was virtually no one left to protect the citizens of the city. The Japanese poured into Nanking on December 13, 1937, occupying government buildings, banks, and warehouses, shooting people randomly in the streets, many of them in the back as they ran away.

By the time the Japanese passed through the gates of the city, all those residents who possessed any degree of money, power, or foresight had already left for parts unknown. Approximately half the original population departed: before the war, the native population of the city exceeded 1 million people, and by December it had fallen to about half a million. Without protection, without personal resources, without a plan, al these people had was hope that the Japanese would treat them well. But the welcome was short lived.

The Japanese systematically killed the city dwellers as they conducted house-to-house searches for Chinese soldiers n Nanking. They also massacred the Chinese in the nearby suburbs and countryside. Corpses piled up outside the city walls, along the river, by ponds and lakes, and on hills and mountains. The Japanese shot down any young man who passed, under the presumption that he was likely to be a former Chinese soldier. But they also murdered people who could not possibly be Chinese soldiers – elderly men and women, for instance.

Tens of thousands of young men were rounded up and herded to the outer area of the city; where they were mowed down by machine guns, used for bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline and burned alive. For months the streets of the city were heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting human flesh.

The Japanese disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice.

Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds. Witnesses saw Japanese soldiers strip a victim naked and direct German shepherds to bite the sensitive areas of his body. The dogs not only ripped open his belly but jerked out his intestines along the ground for a distance.

Japanese Military Training II - WWII

Rape of Nanking

The Tent of Orange Mist by Paul West, 1995, Excerpts

When questioned in class, a Staff College student at once sat to attention and shouted “Sir!” firmly grasping each arm of his chair, and fixing his eyes on the back of the person in front of him. He then bawled out what seemed a carefully rehearsed answer predicted on the taught doctrine that the Japanese were a race morally superior to all others and that the soldiers of this race, their leaders above all, were a thing apart.

After seven and a half years of the most strenuous, the most exacting and the most spartan of all military training, infantry officer-cadets at last reach the rank of second lieutenant. During these impressionable years, they have been walled off from all outside pleasures, interests or influences. The atmosphere of the narrow groove along which they moved has been saturated with a special national and a special military propaganda. Already from a race psychologically far removed from us, they have been removed still further and scarcely still belong to the humanity they came from.

Young officers were schooled for death, not stagnation in a peacetime army; but most of the Japanese Imperial Army had fought little in the past thirty years. Their officers despised socialism, which they thought effeminate, and burned to reinstate the sword as the heroic insigne. Only a military dictatorship headed by the Emperor would suit them, and this they proposed to achieve through a coup d’état mounted by junior officers. Hence the Blood Pledge Corps of 1932. Sword-making once again became a cherished art while communism became a favorite target. Japan began to buy aluminum, lead, nickel, and zinc, tin and chrome, spikes for barbed wire, tank engines, ball bearings, and, from the activated-charcoal industries of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, filters for gas masks.

Japanese Military Training I - WWII

Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, 1997, Excerpts

To establish this sublimation of individuality to the common good, superior officers or older soldiers slapped recruits for almost no reason at all or beat them severely with heavy wooden rods. Officers often justified unauthorized punishment by saying, “I do not beat you because I hate you. I beat you because I care for you.”

Vicious hazing and a relentless pecking order usually squelched any residual spirit of individualism in him. Obedience was touted as a supreme virtue, and a sense of individual self-worth was replaced by a sense of value as a small cog in the larger scheme of things. Some youths died under such brutal physical conditions; others committed suicide; the majority became tempered vessels into which the military could pour a new set of life goals.

The Japanese soldier was not simply hardened for battle in China; he was hardened for the task of murdering Chinese combatants and noncombatants alike. Indeed, various games and exercise were set up by the Japanese military to numb its men to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking.

New officers required desensitization and underwent intensive training to stiffen their endurance for war. Instructors taught them how to cut off heads and bayonet living prisoners. They learned to kill and grew more adept at it. Atrocities became routine, almost banal. One soldier wrote, “We made them like this. Good sons, good daddies, good elder brothers at home were brought to the front to kill each other. Human beings turned into murdering demons. Everyone became a demon within three months.”