Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 205 - Nanking Part 1

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

Content warning: Everything. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources for all related episodes: Iris Chang. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII Timothy Brook. Documents on the Rape of Nanjing David Askew. The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone: An introduction. Sino-Japanese Studies Vol. 14 Joseph Chapel. Denying Genocide: The Evolution of the Denial of the Holocaust and the Nanking Massacre. Robert P Gray (translation into english. Originally by the Nanjing University Department of History Professors Gao Xingzu, Wu Shimin, Hu Yungong, and Cha Ruizhen) Japanese Imperialism and the Massacre in Nanjing http://museums.cnd.org/njmassacre/njm-tran/ Herbert Bix. Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan

Hello, and welcome to yet another lovely episode of the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe, and with me is Liam. Hello, Liam. You're too excited for what we're about to go through i'm gonna need you to be a little bit more enthusiastic liam i know what's coming and the listeners don't and you know what fine they do i mean they know they know what the title says hello hi joe how's it going buddy is? Is it going good? It's going great. It's like way too cold. I have my nice warm cup of I think this is a British brand of instant coffee.

I'm good to go, man. I have no good way to start this episode. Normally there's a segue. There's something we talk about before we started talking about the episode. I don't be honest with you, Liam. I got nothing this time around. Let's just fucking do it. right i like your enthusiasm i'm taking those enthusiasm yeah that's what we're calling it all right so in december of 1937 one of the most horrific war crimes in recorded history took place one that is largely not talked about very often depending what kind

of insane corner of the internet or world or japan mostly you find yourself in it's one that some people refuse to even accept that happened and that is of course the rape of nan king yeah let's please can't wait to hear from the Japanese ultra-nationalists on this. Yeah, it's going to be great, right? Actually, that is something that's weirdly enough already happened to me. Once upon a time, I think a couple months ago, it may have been in 2021, there was a guy with the Twitter handle Nankingisfake. Oh, yeah.

Nanking is a lie or something. I think it was N is a lie i think nan king is a lie he was crawling into my dms and mentions of the podcast account to be mad at me about the mishima episode we did sure uh which was i think like three years ago it was so long ago and all he was doing was posting shirtless photos of like ripped mishima and talking about like manliness it was legitimately one of the most unhinged conversations i think i've ever had on the internet so manly you won the wall wait a second my favorite part when he was so manly that he he failed doing what he was doing so he killed himself remember kids at first you don't succeed kill yourself so it doesn't happen again the mishima way that's right uh probably don't

actually do that but yeah don't do that although if you are a japanese ultra nationalist barging into our dms telling us nan king was a lie you know i'm not gonna say no you're not redacted now if you're looking at this title the episode that you clicked out you probably realize it just says nan king um that is because i'm not entirely sure how an algorithm or whatever is going to handle me using the word rape in a title of an episode so good i had that same thought yeah i thought of that at first and i feel like it was probably bad so let me just frame this for i'll do another content warning before we get to the worst episode, but this is just an overarching one. Everything, everything.

If any topic we've ever talked about bothers you, this episode will bother you more. I honestly think this might be the worst series we've ever done. Of course, the normal animal facts rule applies at any point Liam or I need to tap out. I have a list of buzz feeds 24 animal facts which i'll read from i think it's a new one because it came out like this year i actually wanted to say for myself this is the first episode where you know and i didn't make i don't think any jokes on the namibian genocide episode i'm not going to make jokes on this episode uh i don't feel like that's worthy of doing uh besides to if if i have opportunities to make fun of genocidal maniacs i'll take my shots but like

this just feels like it sucks oh yeah we'll have chances yeah it's not gonna be great i'm trying here to be respectful for once in my life and not besmirch the memory of the dead. See, that's what we call personal growth, Liam. Sucks, I hate it. You're doing great, buddy. Unlike virtually any other series I've ever written, I'm also going to preempt this with another content warning of sorts. I will not be using this space to debunk or debate any denialist garbage, with one exemption which I'll get to in a second i don't

think their arguments are a good faith and much like holocaust deniers or armenian genocide deniers they're simply fascists trying to wash away the sin that will never leave their shitty fetid disgusting dead empire and ideology get fucked all right glad we get that out of the way yeah cosign cosign yeah i'm not here to debate anybody. If you're crawling into my into my shit to debate me, suck my dick. I don't care. Now. Also cosigned.

You get, I think, most of the because our boy is a star. But I get occasional like, I just delete it. Like, in case you're ever wondering if I read your your shitty Imperial Japan apology, I fucking don't. I just block you. Those are my, like, the weirdest people online, quite honestly. Just absolutely nuts out. Before we get to the source, and Jesus Christ, you know, I'm heading off some dumb shit when I start off a series by defending a source. This kind of does go back a little bit on what I just said, because, ooh boy, is this source not popular with those

people. I don't think I've ever had to do this before, but I'll get to it. The main source of this series is a book called The Rape of Nanking, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang. My annoying complaints about its title aside, it's a very good book. However, as you can imagine with other points I've made, it has come under some serious fire from one specific guy, a Japanese historian. No, I should say one specific guy that's taken seriously. So, I mean, because he's an actual historian named Ikuhiko Hata. His complaints have been widely cited in Western newspapers, things like the San Francisco Chronicle, which is why I'm zeroing in on him. His criticisms are taken seriously.

I'm going to explain why they shouldn't be. Hara is not a specific denier, but a revisionist who attempted to deflate the numbers of Chinese victims over the years. He's also a comfort women denier. So he's a double bastard. Now, for people unaware, the concept of comfort women, the Japanese empire had a system like an institution that was put into kidnap women into sexual slavery. Many of these are Korean women, though there were also Chinese women. And there is a unfortunately large subsection of Japanese academic who believes that it simply never happened or that they were willing.

Yeah, it's gross. This guy has had multiple contributions to very far right Japanese publications like the Bungai Shinju, which has published Holocaust denial theories in the past. Man, fuck off. Yeah. Their particular story being that the entire

Holocaust was, weirdly enough, invented by the Soviet Union. Yeah, the Soviets, famous friends to the Jews. That's right. Okay, guy. And I have to say, of all of the weird Holocaust denial that I've heard of and studied, I haven't heard this one. I'm going to have to look into it for the future. In other articles, this magazine is called the MacArthur Foundation and Rupert Murdoch, agents of the Chinese Communist Party.

Probably not. Yeah. They're bastards, but they can stand on their own two legs to do it. What's incredible is that's like some John Bircher shit. So these people are insane. That's just confusing. Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's safe to say that anybody who writes for this particular outlet is more than a little sus and his argument should be disregarded and his entire research history should be questioned.

Now about the author, Iris Chang. To say that she has a weird history is a little bit of an understatement. She was born in the US, but her grandparents both survived the rape of Nanking, which is why she became so dedicated and spent several years of her life writing this book. However, those years were not kind to her. After the publication of the book, she was emotionally and mentally wrecked, not sleeping, spiraling downwards, and probably had some pretty serious and very untreated depression, which eventually led to her being placed in some seriously heavy medication that gave her side effects of becoming insanely paranoid and claiming that she was being recruited by the CIA, being followed, stuff like that, before she eventually killed herself. Now, unfortunately, I have to tell you that depressing story shouldn't really matter in a large scope of things, as tragic as it is. But people use that as a way to discredit her. Okay. Well, that's illogical.

But I imagine we're dealing with a lot of illogical shit here. Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Now to our story. Now, I say we here in the U.S. as if I'm sitting in the U.S. right now, which I'm not. I am. But generally, Americans, we think of World War II starting with the attack on Pearl Harbor. In Europe, you probably start in 1939 when Hitler and Stalin teamed up to fuck over Poland. If you're somebody else, that never happened.

If you're African, you might see it starting in 1935 when Muslim's broke-ass army invaded Ethiopia. If you're Chinese, you probably did it in 1931 when the Japanese Empire began their domination of East Asia with the occupation of Manchuria. Right. Much like Hitler, Emperor Hirohito, but mostly the Japanese government. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit later on, would use things like superior military force a bit temporarily, as well as master race ideology to cement the framework to greenlight the rule over its neighbors. Much like Germany, where Austria, the Sudetenland, and even Poland were all just the beginning, China was the same thing. Japan took Manchuria, forming the Manchukuo puppet government, even sitting a deposed chinese emperor emperor puyi upon a fake throne and man puyi's life is fucking hilarious

i would be honest with you uh he's like the shitty fail son emperor of china went into exile put on the throne by japan as a fake emperor got really angry that he was a fake emperor and then of course like japan lost so he was dep fake emperor and then of course like japan lost so he was deposed again and he lived his like entire life pretending he was an emperor afterwards and like uh treating everybody like shit when he was like living in an embassy i think yeah he was a piece of shit don't feel sorry for him yeah redacted or withdrawn not retracted there we go that's the correction to my previous comments you do not in fact have to impand it to emperor puyi apparently not what

do you know every emperor we're going to talk about in the series is bad weird that's one of how that works it's because the only good emperor is napoleon that is a take yeah steaming hot all right man who famously did nothing wrong. Also, Bokasa, because he had fucking drip. He did have drip. We will give him that. There's nothing else you can give him. You have to give him the drip. Consolation drip. Yeah. In reality,

this entire place is ran by the Japanese military. Not even the government. The military. Within a few years, this occupation would spread to Chahar, Hopta, and in 1937, Peking, Shanghai, and eventually Nanking. But this is hardly the first time Japan drew designs on their neighbor. The seed of this was planted in the Meiji Restoration in the mid-1800s, as previously, feudal society was thrust together into one frothingly mad nationalist one. Uh-oh.

Yeah, which is always a good sight, right? The Sun Cult of Shinto, where the emperor being a very important part, became the state religion. Bushido, which we've talked about before at length, being largely fake and not an ancient warrior code, became a moral code. And the government itself set some speed runs

in creating the most powerful nationalized army in the region, despite being a disjointed mess of warlords not that many years before. They forced gunboat diplomacy over Korea, eventually leading to the first war with China, and then leading to China's humiliating defeat, as well as Japan's foothold in China and places like Liaodong in Taiwan. Also, as we've talked about before, within a few years, Japan would also crush Russia. We have a whole series about that if you are interested. Japan took part in World War I and mostly just made a killing as their steel and iron was suddenly needed at a level that the world has never seen before. This made the Japanese empire insanely wealthy seemingly overnight and for the first time in its entire history and before even during the beginning of the meiji restoration despite their

their rapid modernization it was still not they didn't have a lot of money now jesus christ they were hood rich they had no idea to do with all this money i don't know if we should be saying imperial japan is hood rich imperial japan is hood rich i feel comfortable saying that oh god oh no they went out and bought a polaris slingshot you could go out and say it oh god i hate no they would have to get divorced and lose half their hair first yeah oh god i hate those things like we have a tail just buy a bike yes thank you i've been saying that or you know what even if you're like you physically you can't stand up a motorcycle get it get a try get a trike at least it's still kind of a motorcycle slingshots are what if you made like an el camino but dumber

el caminos aren't dumb so get that strongly disagree uh yeah because you have no taste el caminos are fucking sick i'm not going to debate that i i know yeah because you have no taste alchemy is a fucking sick i'm not going to debate that i i know i don't have taste now most of the production from the steel and iron that eventually sold into the war took place in factories owned by the japanese military as the military wasn't too keen on a middle class developing and challenging their largely uncontested and pretty much total power across the country this is not a place where like liberalism was taking hold this lack of any kind of economic diversification meant that when the war was over as wars generally do uh shit got kind of hard again uh when the

world's economy prolapsed in 1929 it got even worse thank you yeah picture that i did that for you baby whatever man i've i've seen shit i've i've puked at some pretty weird places it's fine dude i was just talking about this the other day with a friend of mine when i was like imagine back when you're like 14 or 15 right uh like the internet is it's still kind of new at least when it was when i was 14 or 15 uh like dial up was a thing like you like you couldn't really watch movies uh it was all pictures um but imagine the things that you saw that would shock you and compare them to like your your brain is just nothing but scar tissue now from the internet and nothing affects you anymore also real life i've seen man-made horrors beyond my comprehension i don't really care right Now, Japan thought itself equals to its fellow World War I allied powers,

but they eventually saw themselves being treated as anything but an equal. They wanted to start up colonies with their war-spoiled territories, just like everybody else was doing. But the Western powers balked the concept of an Asian empire. When Japan tried to press its claims over China, Western powers invested in China over Japan. And also, China has vastly more natural resources. It isn't on an island. Yeah, it's on a small island. Well, I guess Japan isn't that small of an island, but it's still, in comparison to China, it's small. When Japan got to keep control of Germany's former colony in China called Shantung, the Chinese boycotted Japanese goods.

All of this repeatedly kicked Japan directly in the nuts. And it became like a conspiracy within the government circles that, you know, we didn't do anything wrong. Why are these people protesting us we must be the victim of an international plot to keep us down is it the jews doing it yeah um not this time surprisingly maybe the chinese jews there you go you think you nailed it and like geopolitically it wasn't a conspiracy that kept japan down like nobody was doing this behind their back doing it right to their face, frankly. Yeah, yeah. Say what you will about Western powers. They did not hide their racism at this

point. Unfortunately, this bullshit, this conspiracy-minded insanity within the government didn't do much for actual people in need or people who became unemployed, bankrupt, and the Japanese economy just shit the bed. Within a couple of years, not even an entire decade of this incredible boom period, people were literally selling their kids into prostitution. Oh, Jesus Christ. Yeah. It was one hell of a downturn.

This also highlighted another problem that Japan was facing. Between the restoration years, like Meiji Restoration in the 1800s and 1930, the population had exploded from 30 million to 65 million. More than double. Yeah. Holy shit. Making them officially unsustainable via their own agricultural output and relying on imports. Yeah. You know what really sucks when you're relying on imports?

When your economy dies and you can't afford them anymore. That's bad. I have a degree in economics. Yeah. You know what really sucks in your lane? Imports. When your economy dies and you can't afford them anymore. That's bad. I have a degree in economics. Yeah. It's like the meme of the guy with the weird NPC face crossing his arms for like the stonks meme, but it's just like wheat going down. It's just a Japanese economic ministry. Now, as you can imagine, with their economy tanking, food imports got incredibly expensive.

So by 1920, there's a very vocal and incredibly insane bunch of Japanese military officers that were advocating for military expansion as the only way that they could feed the Japanese population. This feels like a might end poor like. It certainly doesn't. And great. I think it ends in a bright flash in like 10 years. Oh, yeah. I was wondering when we were going to get our atomic bomb joke. That wasn't even a joke.

It's factual. That is true. This idea was picked up by like away from the military minds and into civil society where long think pieces were written to newspapers complaining about the size and space of other countries pointing out that you know this wasn't just a fact of geography or whatever it was an injustice like it was celestially unfair that china was bigger than j. I don't want to be cruel here, but the word suck it come to mind. Yeah, like blame your God or whatever, man.

Like don't blame the Chinese. Blame your rotten luck for not being born there. Other people pointed out that the people in these lands were ungrateful because they were not making the most of their land. Only the superior Japanese people could farm it to its full extent so you got land racism now oh okay yeah sort of georgism in reverse i don't know a good way to put this as if like the american concept of manifest destiny right was you know the western expansion was their god-given right then the japanese version of that was their expansion into china that was their god-given right then the japanese version of that was their expansion into china that was their their west for them sure this just so happened to be while all of

this is happening the japanese military led by a hardcore right-wing nationalist tightened more and more and more of its grip around the politics of actual japan like this went from being fringe ideas to these people in fucking government now the mainstream sure well good thing we never see that again right and thankfully this has only happened in one country ever uh and i need is like these guys were insanely right-wing like the normal japanese government was largely a military dictatorship that was very very far right these guys made those guys go jesus christ y'all oh don't like that yeah now eventually the more moderate of the japanese

ruling class began to give way hoping and this might sound familiar to you if we compromise with these insane people on their fringes maybe they'll shut up no they won't don't worry yeah it only emboldens them so they gave more and more and more, but it was never enough. Tokyo was rocked by more than one coup attempt that ended in a prime minister and several statesmen dead. Now, these fringe groups didn't fully succeed in taking power, but their seat at the table of power was secure. And people were constantly afraid of them like uh because they knew that they largely controlled the military like the their the ranks of these fringe groups were weren't just like soldiers or whatever they were officers admirals generals and shit so people like

yeah we should probably listen to them or they're gonna start stabbing people again and you know the emperor was largely okay with it. Remember what happened to the last prime minister as a negotiating tactic. Yeah. It's like the Praetorian Guard. Eventually, you just accept the fact you have to please them or you're going to die. Right. These ultra-nationalists and even moderates in the government all saw China as ripe for the taking, not only as the right, but because China was not exactly the best run country on earth, it didn't exactly look like a hard thing to defeat. Having been subjugated and fighting with themselves with various loose kinds of government for decades, China wasn't exactly a military powerhouse. However, things were slowly, very slowly starting to change. In 1911, rebels had toppled the decrepit Qing dynasty, and under Chiang Kai-shek, noted fascist and piece of shit,

he eventually unified the country into a national republic. Now, I'm not going to go super deep into Chiang Kai-shek's government here, but it's telling that this guy who was kind of a big dumbass was a step up he was attempting centralization into something that could be controlled to secure china's borders now the problems that would eventually come out of shek are um too many to count uh at the beginning yeah like i said i'm not gonna get into it worst of all is that we have to deal with twitter malice yeah yeah we're not gonna be talking about them at all like i said people are aware of I'm not going to get into it. Worst of all is that we have to deal with Twitter malice. Yeah. Yeah.

We're not going to be talking about them at all. Like I said, people are aware of Chiang Kai-shek is, but you need to look at this where Japan is sitting right now is like, hmm, if this guy actually succeeds, we're not going to be able to take over China anymore. Right. No matter what ideological drum that we slam on about being racially superior, we're outnumbered like a million to one. If he gets his shit together, we're not going to be able to win.

If he modernizes the military and the essentialization, the government and taxes and infrastructure, all those things, we're fucked. In fact, they might come calling and wanting to equalize the score for a bit. Not that that was going to happen. I don't think I ever saw any evidence that that was ever proposed. But these are the things that are being said in the Japanese government circles. Now, one of the most important things that came out of Sheck taking office forcefully, it's not like he was elected, was one of the things that he felt very, very strongly about and not unwarrantly. unwarrantly it was uh he was going to eliminate all unfair treaties and agreements that have been forced on china by foreign powers which immediately made japan go huh that's us

shit we've been doing that for generations this is fucking play about us yeah i'm sitting right here man japan was worried that if shet got his shit together china would have the power to force japan to fuck off and like you they would not be able to exploit them anymore which would even now when they don't you know control however much they would eventually control of china even now japan is exploiting them so it's like you know our situation is already very very bad if if this happens it'll be significantly worse um so uh japan can eventually launch an undeclared war against them in 1931 with an obvious false flag attack against the Manchuria railways that the Japanese government claimed on Chinese nationalists. Cool. The seizure of Manchuria sparked even more anti-Japanese sentiment in China, surprise, as civilians rallied around the nationalist government, who then spurned the monothrone propaganda.

This was not something that japan saw happening they thought they would be able to march into manchuria and take it over make the government look very very weak and people lose faith in it but unfortunately people are very stupid and i'm not saying the chinese people are stupid i'm saying the japan japanese government stupid because it turns out when you invade someone even if their government is largely unpopular they rally around the flag uh for comfort yeah they'll do that yeah humans will pack bond with anything yep the the taking over manchuria is very funny uh it happened without the approval of the japanese government and the army just did it on its own oh no yeah it's called the kuangtung army we're not going to talk about it very much. The Kwantung Army ended up being pretty much the seed of all future Japanese government ministers in power, like Tojo's involved, various other generals that have become very important are involved.

It's effectively like... Bucs squadron, yes. Yes, yeah. Eventual wind chimes, leaders of the Kwantung Army. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Eventual wind chimes, leaders of the Kwantung Army.

But they were almost like a lateral piece of the state that was uncontrollable by the state itself. Cool. Love parabilitarios, man. Yeah. Always happy when we get some parabilitarios of the story. swept across the not taken over part of China and, you know, powered by propaganda where they said, you know, uh, the Japanese have agents everywhere to include their Shinto priests, which honestly was actually true.

Most of the priests were government agents. The whole bunch of priests were cornered on the streets of Shanghai and, uh, they get the shit beat out of them. One of them was beaten to death. Uh, yeah, it's bad.

Now the Japanese responded to this, uh, by carpet bombing the bombing the entire city uh while their troops raided it oh okay yeah seems like a uh what's the word proportional response yeah tens of thousands of people died i love doing it man it was bad uh now this is when uh like famously japan withdrew from the league of nations uh because uh the famed powerful uh international agency the the League of Nations because the famed, powerful international agency, the League of Nations, well-known for being able to stand on its own two feet and not on quivering floors

like a baby deer. Yeah, they blamed Japan for this rise in tensions, which like, yeah, you carpet bombed a city. That will happen. Japan withdrew from the League. I think I've said before that like the League of Nations and the UN is not functionally different from a model UN.

No, actually it's worse or better, I mean. The only difference is that some people believe that one of them has power despite all contrary to otherwise. Now with that, we have to dive into japanese society in the road to war and this is where things get real racist sorry everybody i have done my best to edit this so i can say without it sounding bad don't worry we're gonna the whole thing's a genocide we'll talk about that i fucking hate this show man now the education of Japanese youth during this time was not unlike that of German kids during the Nazi era. But remember, the Nazi era was quite limited.

Well, the Japanese imperial government was not. The concepts of Bushido were weaponized in schools, and the Minister of Education declared that schools were not for the benefit of the student, but the nation. that schools were not for the benefit of the student, but the nation. The 1890 imperial rescript on education, which was like the law of school, was mostly centered on obedience to authority above all else, even learning. A copy of this rescript was read in school every single morning by the teachers to the students and to other staff. The rescript was so important that teachers are expected to know it by heart. And there was even rumors that when a teacher fucked it up on their turn reading it, they killed themselves in shame. Oh, Jesus. Okay.

It's a popular rumor. It may not be true, but it was considered very serious. Just to show how serious it was that when newspapers wrote that a teacher killed themselves because they fucked up the rescript, people were like, yeah, that'll happen. It wasn't so far beyond the pale that people didn't believe it. Now, kids were taught from a young age on how important it was to be in the military, fighting and dying for the emperor and the Japanese nation.

And this includes girls, despite the fact girls can actually be in the military. Happy International Women's Day, everybody. In fact, a ton of normal school teachers were just military officers. Like, they were just in the military. Kids wore military uniforms. They were taught how to handle guns.

And they were taught about the racial superiority of the Japanese people. Terrific. Yeah. And the lessons on racial superiority came lessons of the racial inferiority of the Chinese and Korean people. This is like institutionalized. When a boy was crying, when he was about to dissect the frog, like the concept of having to kill this animal made him cry, which is like something I did in school. I didn't want to kill this frog, even though I did not dissect the frog, even though the frog was dead. Like, I know I wasn't killing it.

My teachers is like, go on the hallway, pussy. Welcome to Detroitroit bitch this japanese teacher screamed at this kid why are you crying about one lousy frog when you grow up you'll have to kill 100 or 200 bleep they didn't say bleep it was a slur it was uh the c word uh which blew. But yeah, like they were saying that shit in schools. School teachers underwent military style training. And while in like teachers, university, teachers college or whatever. Normal school. They would have to live in barracks type housing that were subject to incredibly harsh military discipline. They were then expected to pass on to their students.

Like physical punishment was commonplace in order to instill this. And not like smacking like, you know, the US used to have corporal punishment with like the paddle or whatever. Still does. Really? Yeah. Georgia just reinstated it a couple years ago. You've got to be shitting me. You can look it up right now, my friend. I mean, I

believe you at this point, but it's just like, come on, man. But they'll have like the school cops do it or something we don't need georgia anymore we've moved past the need for georgia um yeah but like you know how they had like the paddle or whatever this was like being hidden with sticks and like getting punched like this wasn't like a paddle russian conscript this included things like punches slaps and getting beaten conscript. This included things like punches, slaps, and getting beaten with sticks. It also included things like forcing kids to stand outside in the snow barefoot or

run sprints around the school until they vomited and collapsed from exhaustion. An easier way to describe all this is child abuse. This is just child abuse. Institutionalized child abuse is a great way to build a society. Now, all this happens before young men found themselves in the military, which, of course, most would. The method of control within the Imperial Japanese military was savage, unrelenting violence towards itself. Unlike anything I think I've ever seen before,ruits were slapped and beaten for no reason. And the excuse for this is very weird.

Food was taken from them and recruits were forced to fight and beat up one another to instill a ruthless pecking order so that it would control these men even when officers were away. Like physical violence was the name of it. It was like the name of everything.

Officers would bludgeon recruits nearly to death with heavy wooden clubs for no reason. Like this wasn't even for punishment. It was just like time to beat the soldiers. According to author Iritani Toshio, this kind of violence is often followed up by recruits being told by their officers that they were being beaten because they cared about them. Oh,

okay. Yeah. How noble. Yeah. Officers were conditioned in much the same way. Until the expansion of World War II, where all military departments would have to undergo rapid expansion to make up for all the men they're bringing in, all officers would pass through training in a place called Ichigaya, an academy that was more like a prison than

a school. Rooms were unheated, cadets survived on a starvation diet, and brutal physical punishment was meant to break what little individualism they had left after they graduated school. And that is even accounting for their workload, which was massive. So, for instance, an average British officer of the day would be commissioned after 13 hours of classwork and a 245 hours of private study. Their Japanese counterparts had 3,300 hours of classwork and 2,700 hours of private study. That's too much. That's too much. In order to create this environment, officer's school moved at a relentless pace,

leaving little time for sleep. Exams were so stressful that the results were kept secret and told to people one by one because before that cadets would kill themselves in large groups if they failed and everybody knew it. Okay, if your school has a prevention plan for mass suicide, redo the school. Yeah, I feel like you fucked up somewhere along the way here, homie. And also it's weirdly, for japan at the time

it's actually kind of progressive where it's like you'd think that they wouldn't care that failures would kill themselves but they're like actually so many of you are killing yourselves this is unsustainable for us and later uh those guys became one on the board of provosts at william and mary oh god edit that out nate i of you. The curriculum was standard military fare for the most part, but the classroom was mostly propaganda reinforcing Bushido and the concept of Japanese racial superiority. No outside reading material was allowed into the academy, nor were cadets allowed to leave until school was over,

creating something of a corps of officers that was psychopathically violent as well as completely brainwashed because they were not allowed to leave or take in any other kind of media for years. Seems like a bad idea, Joe. To be fair, it served their purpose, which was all bad. So they nailed that part. You don't have to congratulate them for it. Now, with that in mind, by 1937, Japan had finally managed to spark a full

scale war with China. After a firefight at the Marco Polo Bridge that caused a Japanese soldier to go missing, the Japanese used it as an excuse to march to the Chinese fort at Wanping to demand they be allowed inside to search for him. When the Chinese refused, the Japanese shelled the fort.

Within a few months, they had invaded Shanghai, and the Second Sino-Japanese War was fully on, like the little border raids were a thing of the past. This was full of war. Undeclared, but yeah. However, Japan ran into some problems. Invading such a massive country that has such a manpower advantage means you're going to be outnumbered as a default, which is exactly what happened. Chiang Kai-shek just so happened to have a lot of bodies at his disposal and used them to outnumber the Japanese 10 to 1 in defense of

Shanghai. And the Battle of Shanghai I'm not going to go into a lot here. It's a topic for probably another series. It's nicknamed like the Stalingrad of China. It's fucking insane. Yeah. Volshek did have a massive military boasting nearly 2 million men in uniform. It wasn't really that big. The Japanese thought them to be largely untrained and unarmed, badly lacking heavy weapons, and mostly

that was true. Of his nearly 2 million men, only around 300,000 were anything that could resemble professional soldiers. And he used those to form 20 divisions and committed them to battle in defense of Shanghai, deciding to turn Shanghai into a fucking meat grinder. And one of the reasons why he decided to turn the city into a bloodbath was that Chek hoped by prolonging the battle, he might be able to get some international attention and help in resisting the Japanese invasion. be able to get some international attention and help in resisting the japanese invasion and shanghai was thought to be the most important city in china to the eyes of westerners which it was and this was a decent plan but whoops this didn't work anyway whoops yeah we hear the west are super good at ignoring suffering yeah terrific at it yeah unfortunately the japanese government and military and even its soldiers down to the rank and file didn't care.

They knew themselves to be Japanese supermen and no subhuman Chinese were going to stop them from conquering the entirety of China in three months time, which is exactly what the government thought that they were going to be able to do, which is even with your mind high on like race science nationalism. That's nationalism. Super nationalism. That's a bold fucking prediction. You're going to take over all of China in three months. It's big, as it turns out. Yeah. Instead, like I said, Shanghai turned into a bloodbath, with nationalist soldiers forcing Japan to take street by street, house by house.

Because before then, Japan had kind of just walked through China. The nationalist army had kind of just kind of failed completely. So they're like laughing and joking until this battle began. Like Japan thought they're just going to walk right into Shanghai and it wasn't going to be a problem. Be greeted as liberators, if you will. Oh, I don't know about that part. But at least not be greeted with firearms. Right. Rather than taking over Shanghai in just a couple days, the struggle over the city would continue until winter.

For nearly three months, it killed tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers, which was the most they had lost so far in the war. By the time the city fell in November, all the lighthearted ideas within the Japanese military that this would be an easy war were all gone. And those feelings were replaced by thoughts of revenge as they marched towards the nationalist wartime capital of Nanking. For Japan, the strategy for Nanking was pretty simple. The city was penned in by water on two sides, laying south of the band of the Yangtze River, and then went northward before turning east. By attacking the city in a semi-circular front from the southeast, the Japanese could simply use the natural barrier to act as a total encirclement. The Japanese Air Force made short work of any bridges that

might throw any kink into this plan, and then they could just besiege them. By November 3rd, different forces of Japanese soldiers marched into the city under the operational command of General Kasigo Nakajima. Though Nakajima was under the command of Imperial Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who will become a main character to the story, unfortunately. Asaka was so incredibly right-wing, being a major supporter of the Imperial Way faction of the Japanese government, that the emperor had to actually distance himself from politics for a time. He had to get rid of him to make some space. He was the

emperor's uncle. He's like, my uncle is fucking up. I have to send him to China. He literally was so worried about his uncle, who was a prince, making the emperor, the throne look bad. He sent him to China. Look bad? Fuck. He was in turn under the command of general awane

matsui a man who had been pulled out of retirement for this war and he was like barely alive uh he he had gotten sick with malaria when he went to china and he had already been afflicted with tuberculosis so like this man is this man does not look good and we'll talk more about those guys at length later on. Now, inside the city, the defense was not going so great. Like I said, the Air Force was bombing them relentlessly. Food began to run low as the siege settled in and disease became rampant. Chiang Kai-shek decided not to command the defense of Nanking, but instead giving the defense over to Warlord Tang Shen-C Qi, a man who is not exactly in the best health.

All right, lead for the front. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Let's send it to the vigorous General Qi, the guy who is coughing and shaking constantly. Half dead already. Yeah. People aren't sure if he was sick, if he had some kind of diphtheria, tuberculosis, or if he was sick, like if he had some kind of diphtheria tuberculosis, or

if he was high, because reportedly he loved taking drugs and he was constantly just sweating his balls off and shaking which, like, nobody's sure what the fuck is wrong with him. Jesus. Now, many government officials were ordered to flee the city and move to nearby

areas, mostly so, because remember, this is the wartime capital, like, we need to evacuate government administration so move to nearby areas mostly. So because remember, this is the wartime capital. Like we need to evacuate government administration so the government can continue working. Sure. Now, unfortunately, when you like order government workers to evacuate a city, it makes people afraid. Like, wait, what do you mean the government's leaving? What are you going to do with us?

Like, are you abandoning us, right? Yeah. Good luck to you. Here's your rifle. So this government evacuation turned into something of a panic flight. Yeah, I bet it did. Yeah. And then this had a bit of a trickle-down effect. Like I said, trickle-down only works in the worst ways.

The government administrators began leaving, which caused people to panic and start fleeing, which caused people in the military, many of them officers, to jump in cars and take off for the hills. And for some reason, also, the vehicles that the army officers used to run also had their communications equipment on it. So at the end of the day, the people who actually didn't run away and wanted to defend the city like they were supposed to had no radios because someone had stolen them. Come on, man.

Yeah. Now, not that that would matter. Remember how I said that Sheck used his 20 best divisions to defend Shanghai? All of them pretty much died. So these guys were more on the barely trained part and the reluctantly conscripted part of the Chinese military from all over China. If you're at all familiar with China, you know that China has tons of different dialects of spoken language, many of whom are not intelligible to the other. So a lot of different soldiers within the ranks simply couldn't talk to people to include their own officers. So it's a recipe for success. It sounds like it.

And another problem was that so many government workers and officers took cars to run rather than just like walking or whatever that they left nothing behind for the military to move equipment and food around the city for like people and like the mid soldiers then shek left the city chinkai shek's like all right she shits all yours i'm gonna go all right peace you got my number uh if anything happens with the kids uh give me up. All right. See you. Your people talk to my people. Good luck with this shit. And then because the nationalist military is largely warlord ran, there's really no continuation or centralization of command when Chiang Kai-shek isn't in the room with them.

People like he's gone. I can do the fuck I want. The local contingent of the Chinese Air Force then fucked off when they saw Chiang Kai-shek left. Yeah. Now, defenders decided the best way to defend the city would be to give themselves a clear fire zone. Like, well, the Japanese are going to attack from this direction.

This is the only direction they can attack. We need to make that as open to us as possible to shoot into. Which, now, if you're in, like, the woods or, like, underbrushed, that is true. They're in like the woods uh or like underbrush that is true they're in a large city yeah yeah so they force civilians out of their homes in that general direction forcing them back into the city proper which is badly overcrowded and then burn the outskirts of the city to the ground to open up their fields of fire fuck my ass dude that's terrible now meanwhile the japanese

let's talk about nakajima he was not exactly a military mind but god damn was he a real fucking bastard uh he had made a career in the intelligence field within the japanese military mostly just means torturing guys strike one yeah yeah He has been described as quote, a small Himmler of a man. Oh boy. Okay. Start strong. Strike tail. He was a noted specialist in torture and was a noted sadist.

People said that he wasn't like a professional when it came to his torture. Like he wasn't like a Flintstones tortures. Like, well, it's the job that somebody's got to do it. Right. I just made the worst Flintstones cartoon. cartoon earth like a pelican waterboarding someone it's a tough job but

someone's gotta do it like dinosaurs working at gitmo he took pleasure in in doing this so a real piece of shit yeah like for instance kimura kinonori who was nakajima's own biographer and was obviously stilted in his opinion of him, has described him as both a beast and a terrible, violent man. This is his biographer. Fuck. Okay. This might be why the brutality began before they even got the Nanking. Little to nothing was spared on the road to the city.

Every tiny farm the soldiers came across was raided. Civilians were beaten and stabbed to death, following orders not to waste ammunition on them. When Japanese soldiers took the city of Suchao, they began a streak of murder and plunder that would go on for days. They set fire to buildings and ancient landmarks and kidnapped thousands of Chinese women, impressing them into sexual slavery. By the time they moved on from the city, the population had dropped from 350,000 to 500. What the fuck, dude?

Yep. When a British journalist made it to the town of Shenzhen, uh, once home to a hundred thousand people, he found only five living adults during this time. It's probably, uh, one of the most famous and well-known public acts of

Japanese violence, a killing contest between two lieutenants to see who could murder 100 people the fastest with a sword. The score of this contest is run enthusiastically in the December 7th issue of the Japan Advertiser, a very well-known and widely read newspaper within the country of Japan. Eventually, this goal was raised to 150 dead people, and one of the men in the contest remarked that it was, quote, fun. It's it. This ended up being one of the pieces of evidence

that was used because it was literally in the newspapers. Now, Nanking would only hold for four days of battle, as the Japanese closed the encirclement and bombed them to hell with their air force. The Chinese army inside the city was set into a panic when Shek ordered

Tang to personally retreat and leave his men behind if he had to, but Tang attempted to withdraw as many people as he could, leading to a stampede and then a crush. Soldiers and civilians raided stores for anything they could on their way out as soldiers stripped naked so they could be free of their military uniform and try to pass the civilians as they ran into the Japanese.

So many people swarmed the last few boats across the river that the crews had to fight off desperate men with axes as they tried to climb aboard. On the only road out of the city, the one that wouldn't lead them directly into Japanese lines and towards the river, something called on fire. Nobody's entirely sure what, but it spread to discarded ammo and sweeping through columns of refugees. When they tried to retreat from the flames, they were thrown underfoot and trampled to death or drowned in the river. By the time

that the Japanese marched into the city, anyone with any amount of money or power, even the physical ability to do so, had run for their lives. Those left behind were the poor, the young, the old, and the physically weak. As this was happening, General Matsui became wracked with a bout of malaria. Another one, I guess. This guy is constantly sick.

He's the Mr. Burns of Japanese generals. Some people also say this is tuberculosis. Nobody's actually entirely sure what. The man was like half dead already. Emperor Hirohito promoted the old man out of his positions. Like one of those fuck you move up like thing. Like you're like fired it up kind of. And he passed command over to Prince Asaka,

who would be given the position of commander in chief of the Nanking operational zone. Asaka, as both a general and a member of the imperial family, uncle to the emperor, meant that absolutely nobody would be able to question his authority. And normally if you were the Japanese commander of an operational zone, you wouldn't exactly be dealing with a lot of people questioning you. Remember, obedience

is pretty important here. But you would have people like, sir, maybe we should do this. Sir, maybe we should do that. But that would not happen here. Yeah, not gonna have that here we're just gonna have whatever the fuck this is he could only be told what to do by the emperor himself who was you know famous for not really getting involved in military matters kind of like you guys do your thing i'm just here to reap the rewards now this is kind of where history smashes up against the wall, as what happened with the Imperial Army Command Group can only

be known from these men's testimony post-war, which as we know, can be moved around in order to defend themselves or even the Emperor after the fact. We'll talk more about that in part three. But Matsui, if he is to be believed, ordered only the best troops in the best order and the best formation should enter Nanking. Of course, this is sometimes read in Matsui's defense that he was worried about the people of the city and the conduct of his soldiers. Never mind the plethora of evidence of situations where he didn't seem to care at all what his soldiers did. Remember, we just talked about those. Right. The way I read this is,

Nanking was the capital of China, and this is going to be an international event. He did not want to look bad as he marched through the enemy capital. And I think that's pretty accurate. However, Matsui was no longer in command. Asaka was. With Asaka in command,

those orders for only the best soldiers, et cetera, et cetera, no matter which way they're meant to be taken, wouldn't be given. Asaka met with Nakajima and heard reports that Nanking was about to officially surrender. What happened next is still up for debate. Asaka's headquarters sent out a set of orders. Under his personal seal marked, quote, secret to be destroyed. When you opened it, it read, read quote kill all captives okay what is lost to history of course is probably on purpose you know given the fact that he's a prince

is if he gave those orders himself or if someone within his inner circle did maybe nakajima which i don't believe that i don't think um Nakajima would have forged Imperial Seal to pass that order. Right. Looking at the rest of the things that Osaka would do, it seems very likely he passed them himself. But we literally have no idea. But we do know the order was passed down from his headquarters. down from his headquarters. And I highly doubt there'd be like a large scale conspiracy within a group of people in the literal princes, like one of the Imperial princes camps of like, no, we're all fine forging this. He seems like a rational person who will murder us if we do this.

Sure. Yeah. That's, that's what I'm reading of the situation. Certainly rational. Got it. Terrific. Yeah. What we do know is by the time the Nanking government surrendered, the military command surrendered after only four days of battle, that order had unquestionably been passed down. And we know the exact details of it. The Japanese 66th Battalion received the following orders. Quote, Battalion battle reporter at two o'clock recovered order from the regiment commander to comply with orders from brigade from brigade command. All prisoners of war to be executed. Method of execution. Divide prisoners into groups of a dozen.

Shoot to kill separately. A further order is passed down to company level commanders. 3.30 p.m. A meeting is called together company to commanders on how to dispose POWs. It is decided that the prisoners are to be divided evenly amongst each company and be brought out from their imprisonment in groups of 50 to be executed. Another order reads, quote, our intentions are absolutely not to be detected by the prisoners. Every company is to complete preparation by five o'clock. The executions are to start by five and is to be completed by

730. When the Japanese had taken the city on December 13th, it was home to half a million Chinese civilians and around 90,000 troops. Only about 50,000 Japanese soldiers took the city. This meant the Japanese would have to kind of trick the Chinese into surrendering once they figured out what they were doing with or without orders, because once they figured out that they were being executed, they could kind of overpower them. The Japanese soldiers promised the Chinese fair treatment in exchange to not put up resistance. Once this happened, they could kind of overpower them. The Japanese soldiers promised the Chinese fair treatment in exchange to not put up resistance. Once this happened, they were divided into groups of one or 200 men, led out into different areas of the city, shot. Nakajima hoped that faced with this, the rest of the Chinese garrison would simply give up. Somehow all of this worked.

There is resistance, but mostly sporadic and unorganized. After being shattered with their best leadership killed in Shanghai, most of these soldiers fell into the one step above farmer category of conscript. Many of them had even been kidnapped and forced to serve against their will. So they weren't exactly the most motivated soldiers on earth. And when the Japanese are like, no, if you just throw on your weapon, you'll be fine. They're like, okay, can I just go back to my farm? When threatened with the Japanese advance, many have thrown away their guns only to find that the city in all approaches had been surrounded and they had no way out. After being promised to be fed, which their own military was not even doing for days at a time, many turned themselves in without much of a question or without

any resistance. This led to something of a feedback loop of violent racism. Most, if not all, of the Japanese soldiers who took part in the battle had been raised and supported by a system that did not see Chinese people as human beings. This is then reinforced in their opinion by the surrender of the garrison. The Japanese considered them cowards, which only reinforced their previous beliefs on racist ideas. We can see this dehumanization process happen in real time in the diary of Japanese soldier Azuma Shiro. Shiro writes, people with ignorant expressions on their face. A herd of ignorant sheep with no rules or order marched on into the darkness whispering to one another. They hardly looked like the

enemy who only yesterday was troubling us. It's impossible to believe that they were the enemy soldiers. It felt quite foolish to believe that we were fighting to the death against these ignorant slaves. Some of them were even 12 or 13 year old boys. Shiro and his soldiers then all murdered these men.

Fucking Jesus. However, the murder of the POWs and the civilians in the city of Nanking was just getting started. I don't like that. I don't, it's not a joke. I don't like that.

You told me this was going to be the least bad version of, I already want to throw up in a bucket. Did you know that seahorses get married and perform daily bonding rituals with their other half? Aw, okay. I know, it's adorable. But the Japanese in the city of Nanking were just getting started.

And that is where we will pick up next time. Terrific. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, part two is probably the worst script i've ever written in my life great i'm gonna be very honest with you yeah hell yeah buddy i'm gonna be drinking for that like i said i'm not uh liam why do you drink i host a podcast podcast for which i constantly get threatened to be kicked off of traded excuse me i don't

threaten to kick you off i merely say i might trade you for draft picks i don't know what other podcasts i have an agreement with i don't know um major league podcasts this is a sports league now i don't know i'm not sure how podcast draft pick works we don't exactly uh pull from college i went to college you went to college yeah but like there's no like podcasting combine oh we should do a podcasting company that would be funny i'd watch that like instead of doing a bench or like the the 40 or whatever you have to it's like how long can you sit down uh hours and hours and hours unfortunately yes anding until you can't say anything anymore oh he only could yes and for two minutes

well liam thank you for joining me on nan king part one get fucked bud it's only gonna get worse from here guys uh liam plug your show i i feel dirty doing it but all right well there's your problem it's a it's a podcast about yeah it's a podcast about engineering disasters in which lives are lost we make jokes about it. People get mad about us. And then I have another podcast called 10,000 Losses, which is a Philly sports podcast with my friend Tom that Joe has been on. I have. And I'm on an upcoming movie podcast series called See It or Screw It. That could be the name of a porn.

It could be both. Anyway, everybody, thank you for supporting the show. Keep listening. I promise it's not all like this. Just most of it. Maybe consider supporting us via Patreon. Your support keeps us rolling. You get bonus stuff. Buy my books. Maybe the Hooligans of Kandahar, the Liberty of Death

series all available through Amazon or wherever the fuck else you buy books. Up to you. I don't care. And until next time, I'm so sorry. Yeah.