Japanese soldiers using dead Chinese as targets for bayonet practice

Japanese soldiers using dead Chinese as targets for bayonet practice.

During the second Sino-Japanese war, the Imperial Japanese Army would often use chinese corpses for bayonet practice.

Durng the Sino-Japanese War, 1937-1945, one of the many ways the Japanese military would murder their Chinese prisoners was by bayonet. But this was not a simple execution. Often the purpose was to give their new soldiers real life bayonet practice, and especially to remove their normal inhibitions against killing other human beings.

This practice is what may be going on in this photo. For documentation on Japan's murder of near 4,000,000 Chinese during the Sino-Japanese War (which in 1941 merged into World War II), see China's Bloody Century Source: "Nanjing Massacre:" 300,000 Chinese People Killed, 20,000 Women Raped.

The Japanese Army had pushed quickly through China after capturing Shanghai in November 1937. By early December, it was on the outskirts of Nanjing. The speed of the army's advance was likely due to commanders allowing looting and rape along the way. As the Japanese approached, the Chinese army withdrew the bulk of its forces since Nanjing was not a defensible position. The civilian government of Nanjing fled, leaving the city under the de facto control of German citizen John Rabe, who had founded the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. On December 5, Prince Yasuhiko Asaka was installed as Japanese commander in the campaign. Whether Asaka ordered the Rape, or simply stood by as it happened, is disputed, but he took no action to stop the carnage.

The first Japanese troops reached the city on December 13, and faced little resistance. The massacre began the same day, with Japanese troops running entirely unchecked. Chinese soldiers were summarily executed in violation of the laws of war. Women and girls were raped en masse and looting was widespread. Due to multiple factors, death toll estimates vary from 40,000 to over 300,000, with rape cases ranging from 20,000 to over 80,000 cases. However, most credible scholars in Japan, which include a large number of authoritative academics, support the validity of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and its findings, which estimate at least 200,000 murders and at least 20,000 cases of rape.

The massacre finally wound down in early 1938. John Rabe's Safety Zone was mostly a success, and is credited with saving at least 200,000 lives. After the war, multiple Japanese military officers and Kōki Hirota, former Prime Minister of Japan and foreign minister during the atrocities, were found guilty of war crimes and executed. Some other Japanese military leaders in charge at the time of the Nanjing Massacre were not tried only because by the time of the tribunals they had either already been killed or committed seppuku (ritual suicide). Prince Asaka, as part of the Imperial Family, was granted immunity and never tried. The massacre has remained a wedge issue between modern China and Japan. Historical revisionists and nationalists in Japan have been accused of minimizing or denying the massacre.