expelled Yanagawa from their ranks because he attempted to stop their 1932 coup. After his marginalization and demotion to the reserves, Yanagawa served as a commanding officer in China and performed “great military achievements… including the surrounding of Nanking,” but the military withheld his name and photograph from publication at the time. Thus Yanagawa was known to many in Japan as “the masked shogun.”
Little was spared on the path to Nanking. Japanese veterans remember raiding tiny farm communities, where they clubbed or bayoneted everyone in sight. But small villages were not the only casualties; entire cities were razed to the ground. Consider the example of Suchow (now called Suzhou), a city on the east bank of Tai Hu Lake. One of the oldest cities of China, it was prized for its delicate silk embroidery, palaces, and temples. Its canals and ancient bridges had earned the city its Western nickname as “the Venice of China.” On November 19, on a morning of pouring rain, a Japanese advance guard marched through the gates of Suchow, wearing hoods that prevented Chinese sentries from recognizing them. Once inside, the Japanese murdered and plundered the city for days, burning down ancient landmarks and abducting thousands of Chinese women for sexual slavery. The invasion, according to the
A British correspondent had the opportunity to record what was left of Pine River, (Sungchiang, a suburban city of Shanghai), nine weeks after the Japanese had passed through it. “There is hardly a building standing which has not been gutted by fire,” he wrote. “Smoldering ruins and deserted streets present an eerie spectacle, the only living creatures being dogs unnaturally fattened by feasting on corpses. In the whole of Sungchiang, which should contain a densely packed population of approximately 100,000, I saw only five Chinese, who were old men, hiding in a French mission compound in tears.”
ASAKA TAKES COMMAND
But the worst was still to come.
On December 7, as the Japanese troops zeroed in on Nanking, General Matsui grew feverishly ill in his field headquarters at Suchow—another flare-up of his chronic tuberculosis. The illness struck Matsui right when power shifted from his command to that of a member of the imperial family. Only five days earlier Emperor Hirohito had promoted Matsui out of the action while dispatching his own uncle, Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, to the front to replace him. Under the new order, Matsui would be in charge of the entire central China theater, while Asaka, a lieutenant general with a thirty-year tenure in the military, would take responsibility as the new commander-in-chief of the army around Nanking. As a member of the royal family, Asaka possessed power that would override all other authority on the Nanking front. He was also closer to Lieutenant General Nakajima and General Yanagawa than to Matsui because he had spent three years in Paris with them as a military intelligence officer.
Little is known as to why Hirohito chose at this critical moment to give Asaka this position, though Bergamini believes it was done to test Asaka, who had sided with the emperor’s brother Chichibu against Hirohito on a political issue during the February 1936 army mutiny. On the palace rolls, Hirohito had singled out Asaka as the one member of the royal family who possessed an attitude that was “not good” and apparently gave his uncle the appointment at Nanking as an opportunity to redeem himself.
At the time it seemed like a trivial change, but later, for the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese, it would prove to be a critical one.
It is hard to describe what really happened behind the scenes in the Japanese army because many of the details were given by Matsui and his colleagues years later at their war crimes trial, or by sources who may be unreliable, and they are therefore cited with caution. But if their testimony can be believed, this is what we learn. Wary of the imperial newcomer and the potential for abuse of power, Matsui issued a set of moral commandments for the invasion of Nanking. He ordered his armies to regroup a few kilometers outside the city walls, to enter the Chinese capital with only a few well-disciplined battalions, and to complete the occupation so that the army would “sparkle before the eyes of the Chinese and make them place confidence in Japan.” He also called a meeting of staff officers before his sickbed and proclaimed:
The entry of the Imperial Army into a foreign capital is a great event in our history… attracting the attention of the world. Therefore let no unit enter the city in a disorderly fashion…. Let them know beforehand the matters to be remembered and the position of foreign rights and interests in the walled city. Let them be absolutely free from plunder. Dispose sentries as needed. Plundering and causing fires, even carelessly, shall be punished severely. Together with the troops let many military police and auxiliary military police enter the walled city and thereby prevent unlawful conduct.
But events were brewing elsewhere over which Matsui had no control. On December 5, the story goes, Prince Asaka left Tokyo by plane and arrived on the front three days later. In an abandoned country villa near field headquarters some ten miles southeast of Nanking, Prince Asaka met with General Nakajima, his colleague from his Paris days, who was now recovering from a flesh wound in his left buttock. Nakajima told Asaka that the Japanese were about to surround three hundred thousand Chinese troops in the vicinity of Nanking and that preliminary negotiations revealed that they were ready to surrender.
After Asaka heard this report, it was said that his headquarters sent out a set of orders, under his personal seal, marked “Secret, to be destroyed.” We now know that the clear message of these orders was: “KILL ALL CAPTIVES.” What is not clear is whether Asaka himself issued the orders.[2]
By the time Japanese troops entered Nanking, an order to eliminate all Chinese captives had been not only committed to paper but distributed to lower-echelon officers. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese 66th Battalion received the following command:
BATTALION BATTLE REPORTER, AT 2:00 RECEIVED ORDER FROM THE REGIMENT COMMANDER: TO COMPLY WITH ORDERS FROM BRIGADE COMMANDING HEADQUARTERS, ALL PRISONERS OF WAR ARE TO BE EXECUTED. METHOD OF EXECUTION: DIVIDE THE PRISONERS INTO GROUPS OF A DOZEN. SHOOT TO KILL SEPARATELY.
3:30 P.M. A MEETING IS CALLED TO GATHER COMPANY COMMANDERS TO EXCHANGE OPINIONS ON HOW TO DISPOSE OF POWS. FROM THE DISCUSSION IT IS DECIDED THAT THE PRISONERS ARE TO BE DIVIDED EVENLY AMONG EACH COMPANY (1ST, 2ND AND 4TH COMPANY) AND TO BE BROUGHT OUT FROM THEIR IMPRISONMENT IN GROUPS OF 50 TO BE EXECUTED. 1ST COMPANY IS TO TAKE ACTION IN THE GRAIN FIELD SOUTH OF THE GARRISON; 2ND COMPANY TAKES ACTION IN THE DEPRESSION SOUTHWEST OF THE GARRISON; AND 4TH COMPANY TAKES ACTION IN THE GRAIN FIELD SOUTHEAST OF THE GARRISON.
THE VICINITY OF THE IMPRISONMENT MUST BE HEAVILY GUARDED. OUR INTENTIONS ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT TO BE DETECTED BY THE PRISONERS.
EVERY COMPANY IS TO COMPLETE PREPARATION BEFORE 5:00. EXECUTIONS ARE TO START BY 5:00 AND ACTION IS TO BE FINISHED BY 7:30.
There was a ruthless logic to the order. The captives could not be fed, so they had to be destroyed. Killing them would not only eliminate the food problem but diminish the possibility of retaliation. Moreover, dead enemies could not form up into guerrilla forces.
But executing the order was another matter. When the Japanese troops smashed through the walls in the early predawn hours of December 13, they entered a city in which they were vastly outnumbered. Historians later estimated that more than half a million civilians and ninety thousand Chinese troops were trapped in Nanking, compared to the fifty thousand Japanese soldiers who assaulted the city. General Nakajima knew that killing tens of thousands of Chinese captives was a formidable task: “To deal with crowds of a thousand, five thousand, or ten thousand, it is tremendously difficult even just to disarm them…. It would be disastrous if they were to make any trouble.”
