The River at the Centre of the World

by Simon Winchester

  On the evening of Monday 13 December 1937 General Matsui entered through the great eastern gates of Nanjing's wall and proceeded to unleash one of the most horrifying episodes of soldierly excess in modern times. It has since become known as the Rape of Nanking – but rape was only a part of it. This was cruelty on an epic scale, the settling of unspoken scores and the uncollaring of decades of blind hatred, one race for the other.

  Thousands tried first to flee across the river, to swim to safety. But the river in December is cold and swirling with residual autumn currents, and the pace of the swimmers was slow: machine-gunners raked them with bullets, and hundreds, maybe thousands, drowned. One Japanese, Masuda Rokusuke, reckoned later he had shot five hundred, at least. But after this, as terrible an atrocity as it would have been alone, the Japanese turned their attention to the hundreds of thousands who remained behind.

  They performed a formal gate-opening ceremony and then commenced their butchery. Katazukeru was one word for it: tidying up. Shori – treatment – was another. Missionaries and doctors and foreign businessmen and women stood in horror as the terror unfolded and then went on and on and on, for six terrible weeks. Japanese soldiers treated the soldiers and civilians they had pinioned in Nanjing as animals, available for every act of barbarism and butchery it is possible to imagine. The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal said later that 200,000 men were slaughtered, and 20,000 women raped.

  Children were used for bayonet practice. Women were raped repeatedly by dozens of soldiers standing in line, one after another. Old people were buried alive. Contests were held to see how many heads could be cut off with a single sword blade – the winner claimed 106, and his victory made headlines in the Tokyo press. Women had sharpened bamboo poles thrust deep into their vaginas. Men were lashed between the poles of bullock carts and made to pull away booty looted from the stores, then shot or burned to death. The Japanese hacked and sliced and filleted and butchered and battered and burned their way through an unprotected civilian people. They lined them up and machine-gunned them to death. They herded them into ruined buildings and doused them with paraffin and torched them. They humiliated them in every way imaginable, and most unimaginable ways as well.

  Soldiers staked their victims out on the wrecked ground and knifed them and raped them and then took snapshots of one another doing so, and sent the films off to shops in Shanghai to be developed and sent back home to Japan to demonstrate how they had ‘taught the Chinese a thing or two’. They did what they did with swagger and brute pride: they had caught the Chinese, from whose loins they had once sprung, and taken them down a peg or two, or more. They had brought the mighty Celestials low, had showed them who were the masters now.

  Lily and I spent a stunned afternoon wandering around the museum to this horror show. Its compound is in a distant suburb, and its buildings are ugly, though better maintained than most state-funded operations. There is a rock garden, with names of victims, and a large concrete building with an inscription over the main entrance: Victims, 300,000. There are sandboxes filled with skulls and bones, said to be those of murdered and tortured Chinese.

  The Massacre Museum was built not to demonstrate a horror that must never be permitted to happen again, but, according to a notice on the wall, ‘to commemorate the victory of the Chinese people in the anti-Japanese war… to educate the people… to promote friendship between the Japanese and Chinese people…’ Lily and I were as dazed and quiet as all the others who came, even though the tour buses from which they spilled made us think they would be noisy and would behave like tourists, gawking and insensitive. Instead, everyone came here well prepared to be shocked, and they saw it all, and they duly were. Rooms after rooms of black-and-white pictures (not grainy or out of focus or the hasty work of surreptitious spies, but well-posed, well-composed studies) – snaps, for the wife and children back in Sapporo and Kagoshima and Tokyo – of man behaving with the utmost incivility and depravity towards his fellow man… and woman.

  One of the display cabinets held a roll call of the International Relief Committee, a body set up in a hurry in response to the terrible happenings. There was John Rabe of Siemens, J. M. Hanson from the Texas Oil Company, J. V. Pickering of Standard Vacuum, Ivor Mackay from Swires, the Rev. W. P. Mills of the Presbyterian Mission, E. Sperling of the Shanghai Insurance Company – such comfortable, suburban names, having to deal with such horrors. They set up a number of encampments that they called ‘safety zones’,* where terrified civilians could take sanctuary from the marauders. But time and again the Japanese stormed into the zones anyway and took young men away, adding them to the steadily rising toll of victims. Afterwards the committee members wrote a report; nine years later they gave evidence to the War Crimes Tribunal. They did their best: but against the awful power of the Japanese army, it was little enough.

  And against the awful power of Japanese disbelief, their story still has not been properly told in Japan itself. For years there was no mention of it; history books spoke not a word of the atrocities, and merely praised Japan's action in ultimately liberating Asian countries from foreign – or rather, Western – domination. School history books spoke of the Japanese Army's ‘advances' into China, rather than its ‘invasion’. The terrible happenings in Nanjing were summarized with surgical succinctness: ‘In December Japanese troops occupied Nanjing. At this time [explains a footnote] Japanese troops were reported to have killed many Chinese, including civilians, and Japan was the target of international criticism.’

  As late as 1991, senior Japanese officials were insisting that the story of the Rape of Nanking was all invention, that spiteful and humiliated Chinese were telling lies to besmirch the reputation of their innocent neighbour. Only in 1995 did a Japanese prime minister make a first formal apology: but there was still plenty of opposition to his doing so, and scepticism continues among many Japanese that they might be capable of such a thing.

  The museum – which has captions in Japanese, and a book of condolence and a room where Japanese visitors could leave their gifts and their apologies – was in the process of expanding. There were cranes and backhoes all around, piles of gravel, bags of cement. More sculptures are being added in the garden, more rooms being built above and below ground, the further to remind the world of what happens when a people goes mad for blood.

  There was a small cinema in the complex, and every few minutes a film was shown. One might think that a film of a massacre would merely appeal to a voyeuristic streak in all our natures; but watching the Chinese – and a few Japanese, amazingly – who sat on those hard metal chairs and watched in rapt and sad attention the images of life being squeezed and burned and choked and stabbed out of so. many victims, I felt that it was something else, something very different from mere voyeurism, that had brought them all there. There was a sense of shame, a sense of awful incredulity, that man might be capable of such things.

  There was a sense, too, undeniable, that in their attitude to the Chinese, the Japanese were somehow different. True, they were cruel beyond belief to the alien others with whom they dealt in the Pacific War – to the Burmese, the Filipinos, the Malays, the Americans and the British. But to the Chinese it was always much, much worse. They were terrible to the Koreans: they were pathologically inhuman to the Chinese, and the Chinese never have forgotten, and never will forget.

  Yet it was not as if the Rape was the end of the atrocities in Nanjing. The Japanese did something far more terrible for the next six years, in a compound only half a mile from our hotel.

  For some years it has been known that the Japanese occupation troops in China had set up a huge biological experimentation camp at a place called Pingshan, near Harbin in Manchuria. I had been there once: it had been called Unit 731, and what was left of it, in the squalid outskirts of a cold and windy industrial town, was a most unutterably depressing place. There was a small museum among the coal heaps, showing photographs of some of the victims who had been experimented upon, who had been given ghastly dise
ases while they were still alive, and observed in the throes of their agonizing deaths. The fields where women had been crucified naked and left soaked in winter to freeze and have their frostbitten limbs plunged later into boiling water were still there. The stakes to which men were tied while bombs containing typhus bacilli were exploded near them, they remained as well. Tables where men had been injected with gasoline, or horse urine, or prussic acid, and where children had been dissected alive… The Japanese, commanded by a man named Ishii, had not regarded their prisoners as humans at all – they called them maruta, logs of wood. And on a wooden log you may perform any indignity you like.

  Shortly before I left for the Yangtze a new book was published, telling in great detail the story of another camp, but this time in Nanjing. Called Unit Ei 1644, it was commanded by a general named Masuda Tomosada. It was just as terrible a place as Pingshan, set down next to an old hospital on Zhong Shan Road East, close to the old Ming Palace, which was then and still is now a museum. Of the Japanese compound – the ten-foot walls, electrified fences, a four-storey research annexe – there remains no evidence. Lily and I went to the exact address, but all we found was a shopping arcade and a car showroom. There was a black Rolls-Royce car on display, a 1993 Silver Spur. The salesman was asking for three million yuan – but warned that taxes would amount to another million, at the very least. ‘I have been trying to sell it for a year. Business is a little slow. I can't say why.’

  The Rolls-Royce in China was known as a Lao-si Lai-si, its closest phonetic equivalent. There were two others in the city, the salesman said, one owned by the head of Nanjing Petrochemical Corporation, the other parked in the basement of our hotel. But perhaps if I wasn't interested in the Rolls-Royce, I might care for a Ferrari? I asked if he knew that he was selling his cars on the site of an old Japanese death camp, and all he said was that in Japan ‘they have many of these cars. Very rich people, the Japanese.’

  Next door Lily ran into a man she knew from the time she lived in Nanjing. He ran a hairdressing salon, his own business, and he was doing very well. He had no idea that he was blow-drying and coiffing where once Japanese technicians had murdered scores of people, all in the so-called interests of biological science. He shuddered theatrically. ‘Their hair is very different from ours. You can always tell a Japanese girl by her haircut. Much neater. Much tidier.’

  The Japanese had also been tidy in the way they organized their camp. They had called the captured citizens of the Chinese capital zaimoku – lumber – and no indignity was too great for them either. The ‘lumber storage unit' was on the top floor of the research building. Prisoners, brought to what they had thought was a prison hospital, were fed copiously and nutritiously in a refectory on the floor below as they were prepared for the coming experiments. Then they were taken upstairs to what the guards called ‘the rooms that did not open’. White-coated technicians were brought in to the room – interpreters told the prisoners that they were doctors, would give them injections to cure their ailments. But the injections were of bizarrely horrific substances, with names as sinister-sounding as their effects: nitrile prussiate, cyanide hydric, arsen-ite, acetone, crystallized blowfish poison, and the distilled venoms of cobras, habu snakes and a vile reptile called an amagasu. The scientists watched unemotionally as the victims choked and screamed towards paralysis and spasm, and in most cases, death. If not dead by chemicals, then – since they were now hopelessly contaminated and useless for further work – by a bullet in the head, and quick incineration in the camp furnace.

  The Japanese bred fleas in Nanjing, too, which they infected with a variety of bacilli and had released in distant parts of China, experimenting once again on the possible effectiveness of biological warfare. They manufactured phials of anthrax and plague and paratyphoid, all designed to be used in poisoning wells and rivers. Plague was proudly referred to as a Nanjing speciality.

  The experiments continued for six years. The Zhong Shan East Road camp had been set up on 18 April 1939 as the Central China Anti-Epidemic Water Supply Unit. It was closed, in a frantic hurry, in the early days of August 1945. The remaining ‘lumber' was murdered and burned. The files were destroyed, the buildings were levelled. General Masuda fled home to Japan. He was detained by the Americans and, it has subsequently been revealed, he exchanged the information he had on this grotesque biology for immunity from prosecution. None of those involved in this terrible trade were tried: the world may have loathed what they had done, but eagerly accepted the data from all their terrible tests. It was one of the uglier examples of the end retroactively justifying the means – particularly since the means were carried out by Orientals, and not by those living in the supposedly civilized West.

  General Masuda died when his motorcycle hit a truck east of Tokyo, in 1952. He is remembered a little among the old people of Nanjing; but it goes without saying that neither he, nor any other Japanese, is missed.

  But as to why all these things happened – no one then or since has come up with any kind of acceptable answer.

  As Lily came away from the film at the Massacre Museum she said she had found it difficult to breathe, she was so horrified. Her chest had tightened in a way she had never experienced before.

  ‘Why did they kill all those civilians, those innocent people? Why couldn't they just kill the Chinese soldiers? There seems to have been no point in it! I really cannot bring myself to like the Japanese, you know.’ The gifts in a glass cabinet – plastic flowers, a child's painting, bottles of sake – seemed to her tawdry, puny, and not sincere enough. Only one thing cheered her: the surrender table, which had a room to itself, and around which Chiang Kai-shek had made the Japanese sit on child-sized chairs, so that their stature appeared as diminished as they deserved.

  I asked her about the grudging, half-hearted apologies that had been occasionally wrested from the Japanese, now that the war has faded somewhat by time. She thought for a moment.

  ‘I cannot believe we will not meet them again one day. I think one day they will have to answer for what they did. They were powerful then. But we are becoming more so now. We will get our own back for all this, I think. I hope.’ have heard Chinese say many times that they believe that if they ever do go to war, serious war, it will one day be against the Japanese, against the detested ‘little people’. From the strength of feeling in Nanjing, a feeling that is so strong and palpable it infects the very air, I can well believe it. One day, the city seems to be constantly murmuring, we will teach those little people a lesson.

  Outside what remains of the city's western wall is a small stream, polluted now, but still overhung with the sycamores shipped in from France. It leads into the Yangtze itself, disgorging beside an island where the port has been built, and from which the Yangtze steamers leave. I had bought tickets on an evening boat upriver: we made our way along the little stream, which is called the Chin-huai, and tried hard to conjure up memories of this as one of China's epicentres of erotic delight.

  For the Chin-huai was where the famous flower boats were moored. They had lovely names – Lady Sincerity, Laughing Peach Blossom, Singing Fragrance, Iris Pavilion. Some were large – ten yards long, and with room for parties. Most were tiny, with room for only one singsong girl, and for her customer.

  On a summer's evening you might stroll northward under the trees as we were doing now, the city walls looming to the right, the sentries patrolling silently up above, the ships' sirens echoing mournfully from the great river nearby. Moored in the stream would be the little boats, a paper lantern lit in the stern of each and, underneath and dressed in bright silks, the singsong girl herself. She would have a fan on which were written the names of the songs she could perform: you would pay one hundred copper cash for her to perform three of these, in her high-pitched voice, while two old men would provide strings and timps. There would be a low bed, a kang, and if you liked each other you could hire her entire boat for the evening, on payment of just four Mexican silver dollars, the currency of
the time. The old men would be dismissed; standing forlorn on the riverbanks they would cast you off, after which you would drift downriver while the girl sang more songs for you, and then gently extinguished the paper lantern with a brief puff from between her delicate lips…

  I was awakened from this pleasant reverie by a Chinese soldier. He had a submachine-gun slung over his shoulder and was demanding to see my passport. We had reached the end of the Chin-huai stream, and the area ahead, on the far side of a crudely built brick wall, was controlled by the military. But only very informally: after I had shown my documents, I was waved through, and within minutes a group of sailors who were working stacking sandbags – for everyone was expecting the Yangtze to flood, as the radio had warned of excessively rapid snowmelt up near the headwaters, in Tibet – stopped and offered me tea. Their official task, they explained, was to guard a boat that was used by Party leaders whenever they came to Nanjing. Chairman Mao had used it many times on the river: perhaps I might like to see it?

  I had to walk along a dangerous arrangement of planks balanced on breeze blocks, because all the normal entranceways to the dock were flooded: the river was rising very fast now, and ports upstream were reporting damage, warning that some dykes were in danger of breaking. Mao's pleasure palace is called the Jiang Han 56 – the Han River No. 56 – though in Mao's time it had been called The East Is Red Number One. For nearly twenty years it had been his private yacht. He first used it when he swam in the Yangtze in 1956. He would do so again ten years later in an act that – as a sign of his rebellion against the wishes of the Party elders – essentially signalled the start of the Cultural Revolution.