Japan’s Drive For An Empire: Nanking Massacre

What happened to Chinese civilians when Japan invaded China’s capital?

Invasion of Manchuria• Military leaders win control of Japan during the

depression – think war/expansion will fix economy

• Possible target is Manchuria, an area rich in coal & iron and where there was a lot of Japanese investments

• 1931: Japan invades Manchuria

• League of Nations condemns the invasion. Japan claims they are helping Manchuria and quits LON

• Japan creates a puppet government & Manchurians declare the independent country of Manchukuo

• 1937: Japan claims one of its soldiers is missing. Japan wants to enter China to search

Invasion of China

•Japan states they will only target Chinese soldiers

•Japanese army enters the city, they kill everyone

• KMT Refuses, Japan opens fire on China (Marco Polo Bridge Incident)• From Manchuko, Japan invades China (Second Sino-Japanese War)• Japan captures Shanghai, a major business/industrial city & port

• After conquering Shanghai, Japan goes after the Chinese capital of Nanking (Nanjing)

•As the Japanese Army drew closer to Nanking, civilians flee the city

• Civilians were bayoneted, decapitated, burned and shot

• Women were forcibly raped, some girls as young as eight years old

• Like they had done earlier to Korean women, Chinese women were forced into prostitution becoming “comfort women”

• One man who helped was a Nazi businessman named John Rabe

•Japan had joined Axis powers, so using his position as a Nazi, Rabe set up a “safety zone”

•Although Rabe saved countless people, nearly 300,000 were killed in the six-week massacre

•Preoccupied with Germany, many in the West ignored what happened in China – “the Forgotten Holocaust of WWII”

•After the war, many in Japan denied genocide & that the massacre ever occurred

•Saburo Ienega, a leading textbook writer has had his HS history textbooks censored by the Japanese government, he sued government

Map Time!

• Color Japan (1), Korea (2), Taiwan (3) red

• Stripe Manchuria (4), China (7) in red

• Color Japan’s Empire in key red, Japanese occupation striped red