On the night of July 7, 1937, a small Japanese force on maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing demanded entry into the walled town of Wanping to search for a missing soldier. The Chinese garrison refused. A shot rang out, and both sides opened fire. That single confrontation, born from a dispute that neither government was willing to compromise on, ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War, a conflict that would not end until Japan’s unconditional surrender on September 2, 1945, and would set the stage for the Pacific theater of World War II.
The path to that moment had been paved years earlier. Japan, an industrial power with scarce natural resources, looked to Chinese Manchuria as a source of oil, coal, rubber, lumber, and other raw materials. It also saw the region as a buffer against Soviet encroachment from Siberia. On September 18, 1931, Japanese troops planted a small explosive device beside the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden.
The damage was minimal, but it provided the excuse Japan needed. Without approval from the civilian government and without a declaration of war, the Japanese army seized Mukden and then all the cities along the railway. By February 27, 1932, the last Chinese forces in Manchuria had surrendered, and on March 1, Japan established the puppet state of Manchukuo. The League of Nations, whose rules Japan had breached, could do nothing to stop it.
In the years that followed, Japan and China clashed in a series of limited incidents, but full-scale war remained out of reach until the Marco Polo Bridge. After the fighting began there, the Chinese government, under intense anti-Japanese pressure at home, refused to make concessions. Japan held its ground as well, and the conflict expanded rapidly across China. Japan scored major victories in quick succession.
Beijing and Shanghai fell. The Battle of Shanghai, fought from August 13 to November 26, 1937, was among the largest and bloodiest battles of the entire war, later described as Stalingrad on the Yangtze. Nearly one million troops were eventually involved. In the first stage, the Chinese National Revolutionary Army tried to wipe out the Japanese presence in downtown Shanghai.
In the second, the Japanese launched amphibious landings on the coast, and the two armies fought a brutal house-to-house battle for control of the city. In the final stage, the Chinese army retreated in the face of Japanese flanking maneuvers, and the fighting shifted to the road leading to China’s capital, Nanjing. Among the Japanese officers taking part in these campaigns was Captain Gensui Tanaka, a company commander in the 45th Regiment of the 6th Division. Tanaka had been born in Tokyo on March 19, 1905, and had followed a conventional path through the Imperial Japanese Army Academy, where cadets studied general education, martial arts, and horsemanship before completing regimental probation and being commissioned as second lieutenants.
By December 1937, he was part of the force driving toward Nanjing, some 300 kilometers west of Shanghai. The Japanese commander, General Iwane Matsui, had made clear to his superiors that the war with China would not end until Nanjing was under Japanese control. He believed the fall of the capital would bring down Chiang Kai-shek’s government entirely. Most of Nanjing’s civilian population had already fled.
Wealthy families left first, followed by the middle class and then the poor. Only the destitute remained. Three-quarters of the city’s population had gone before the Japanese arrived. Foreigners still in the city established the Nanjing Safety Zone, managed by the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone, led by German businessman and Nazi Party member John Rabe.
The zone sheltered some 250,000 Chinese civilians from the violence to come. On December 9, Japanese aircraft dropped leaflets over the city demanding surrender within 24 hours, promising no mercy if the offer was refused. No response came. On December 10, Matsui waited an extra hour and then ordered the city to be taken by force.
Under heavy artillery and aerial bombardment, General Tang Shengzhi, commander of the Nanjing garrison, had earlier declared the city would fight to the death. But on December 12, he ordered his men to retreat. Chaos followed. Some Chinese soldiers stripped civilians of their clothing in desperate attempts to blend in.
Others were shot by their own supervisory units as they tried to flee. On December 13, the 6th and 16th divisions of the Japanese army entered the city, meeting little military resistance. What followed was a campaign of random murder, rape, looting, arson, and systematic brutality that would last for weeks. Japanese soldiers hunted down and killed suspected Chinese soldiers, and arbitrarily arrested thousands of young Chinese men, many of them innocent.
Thousands were taken to the Yangtze River and machine-gunned. Others were blown up with landmines, doused with petrol, and set alight. Those who survived were killed with bayonets. Prisoners of war were beheaded.
Tanaka used his sword, named Sukuhero, to kill more than 300 prisoners of war and civilians, many by beheading. He was portrayed in Yoshinori Minami’s propaganda book Imperial Soldiers as a heroic fighter. One photograph showed Tanaka in Nanjing cutting off the head of a civilian with his sword. The massacres extended far beyond the ranks of soldiers.
Families living outside the safety zone were slaughtered. Tens of thousands of women were raped, including children and the elderly. Estimates of the number of rape victims range from 20,000 to 80,000 or more. Much of the raping was done systematically, as soldiers went door to door searching for girls, gang-raping them, and often killing them afterward through mutilation.
One former Japanese soldier later spoke candidly about the practice: it was always safer to stab and kill the victims, he explained, because dead bodies do not talk. There were also accounts of Japanese troops forcing families into incestuous acts, sons forced to rape their mothers, fathers their daughters, brothers their sisters. Instead of punishing those responsible, the Japanese expeditionary force in central China ordered the establishment of comfort houses for its troops. The army also looted the city and burned down a third of it.
The violence continued for three to six weeks, depending on the crime. As many as 300,000 civilians and numerous unarmed Chinese soldiers were killed over the course of two months. The chaos, fires, and mass graves made a precise count impossible. The violence subsided only in February 1938, after the establishment of a Chinese-led, Japanese-influenced government.
After the war, Tanaka was not initially on the list of war criminals connected to the Nanjing Massacre. But in April 1947, the Chinese delegation in Japan requested his extradition. The request was approved on May 14, 1947. Four days later, Tanaka was extradited to Shanghai and held in a war criminal detention center before being moved to Nanjing on May 22.
On December 12, 1947, the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal began his public trial. Five days later, his case was combined with that of Toshiaki Mukai and Soshi NoDa, the two officers who had become infamous for their contest over who could behead 100 people first with a sword, a rivalry that had been covered in Japanese newspapers like a sporting event. At trial, Tanaka refused to confess to any of the charges. He claimed the photograph of him beheading a civilian could not have been taken during the Nanjing Massacre because the people in it wore short sleeves, and the massacre happened in winter.
The prosecutor countered that it was entirely possible to remove one’s jacket while committing brutal acts. Tanaka admitted he had served in General Tani’s division but insisted he had nothing to do with the crimes. The killings described in Imperial Soldiers, he said, were only propaganda to make him look like a heroic fighter, imagined by the author. He swore by all the gods of Heaven and Earth that he had no part in the Rape of Nanjing.
His denials did not save him. Tanaka, Mukai, and NoDa were found guilty of having massacred prisoners and non-combatants during the Battle of Nanjing and the subsequent massacre. On January 28, 1948, they were sentenced to death. All three were executed by shooting in the mountains of the Yuhuatai district.
Mukai and NoDa were both 35 years old. Tanaka was 42.