Rotten Mango - #202: The Rape of Nanking & The Trafficking of Comfort Women

Episode Date: October 2, 2022

They were called “Comfort Women,” but their lives would not be in any sense comfortable. They were kidnapped, tortured, and held hostage to be assaulted by military officials. Soldiers had their own name for them; it was “public toilets.” Most of these women either died in captivity from murder, disease, or from the sheer violence of their assaults. But don’t be fooled by the name, sometimes comfort women were girls as young as 11 years old. Why? Well, wartime always brings out the superstitions in soldiers, and it was believed that assaulting a virgin brought soldiers strength and power. And they would need that strength to go out and kill over 200,000 citizens in the city of Nanking. This might be one of the darkest cases we have covered in a very long time. Full Source Notes: rottenmangopodcast.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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in all states or situations, prices vary based on how you buy. Betting betta boob. Welcome to this week's mini-sode of rotten mango. I'm your host Stephanie Sue. Chang was just 9 years old when he was walking through the street with his mom. She's holding onto her newborn baby, his newborn brother in his arms, and there's kind of a sense of urgency in the air. They are wreaked.

It wreaked of something metallic almost. So the three of them, they keep their heads down and they shuffle their feet through the alleyway. They're not trying to make eye contact with anyone. Nobody, that is the key to staying alive. They rush through the alleyway, briskly walking, and then head on, they bump into three men. And immediately, like you just knew,

it was gonna be bad. These three men, they had these sick, twisted smiles on their faces. They were looking at Chang's mom, like they had just hit the jackpot. Chang and his family looked at them, turned around and tried to you turn it back down the alleyway where they came.

But they grabbed for Chang's mom. He saw it, he ran behind a dumpster and you watched in slow motion as one of the men that grabbed his mom stabbed her. She fell to the ground screaming. He tried to scream out, too, please don't stab my mom, please don't stab my mom. please don't stab my mom. Chang's mom was holding her newborn baby when she fell to the ground.

And one of the men smiled, came up behind her and stabbed her a second time. She was in so much pain, she let go of her baby. The other man walks to the baby, the newborn baby that's on the ground, grabs his knife and stabs the newborn child through his anal cavity. It's described to be like a skewer. And they tossed the baby to the side, and all three of these men they laugh, and they walk off. Tang crawls out from his little hiding spot, and he had just seen this whole thing he had watched in horror. He crawled to his mom and he's choking on his own sobs and his mom is lying there dying, trying to talk to him.

Even at 9, I mean he knew what she was asking. She was asking him to try and save his little brother. Chang grabs his baby brother, he's bleeding profusely, and he brings the baby to his mom's arms. She sits up. Mind you, this woman has been stabbed twice. She's in a pool of her own blood. She unbuttons her blouse, and she breast feeds her baby

one last time. Chang kneels next to her, and his shoulders are shaking. He doesn't even know what to say. He feels helpless. He can't even do anything but watch. He's just watching his mom's last display of bravery, how she was still a mom until the last breath that she took. Both his mom and brother died in that alleyway that night.

As always, full show notes are available at rottenminglepodcast.com, but there's a really intense book on this case. It's called The Rape of Nanjing. Well, I guess the English term for that city is Nanjing, but I believe the Chinese pronunciation is Nanjing, so I'm just going to go with Nanking. It's written by Iris Chang. Okay, so we're already getting so intense. Iris Chang was a second-generation American.

Her parents had fled China after World War II. And while neither of them, neither of her parents had witnessed the rape of Nanking themselves, they were so traumatized by World War II. And you're like, wait, I feel like China wasn't really a part of World War II. We didn't really talk about them at the forefront. Like they were there, but they weren't the biggest players, right? Well, not really. China had their own war going on at the same time during World War II.

And it was with Japan. So she was traumatized learning about these horror stories, about the war in China. And she realized when she got to school in America, there was such a disconnect. Even in world history, not a single textbook, not a single one of them mentioned the rape of Nanjing. So she just felt like the world had collective amnesia and had forgotten about it or didn't care.

But her family is her ancestors, her family friends. They still remembered it. She knew people who had nightmares from it. They were still plag family friends, they still remembered it. She knew people who had nightmares from it. They were still plagued by the horrors of it, and they would never forget. So she sought out to write this book, and I'm just going to warn you, it is a lot. Like you can clearly tell how passionate Iris is about this subject, and her writing is heartbreakingly beautiful. You can almost see in your head

what she's trying to describe to you and it makes you want to cry. Iris chants sadly committed suicide while she was working on a different book, her fourth book. And the reasons behind why anyone takes their own life is complex. There's a lot of reasons that stack up on top of each other and it's that it creates this daunting mountain

that just seems impossible to even see behind. It's just this big mountain in front of you and it blocks all the light and I'm sure Iris had a lot of reasons but a lot of people say that this book could have been part of the reason. It is such a dark subject matter that the years of research that she poured into the book, the things that she heard, the things that she researched, I mean, the rape of nenging is one of the darkest cases that we will ever cover. So with that being said, trigger warning, there's a lot of violence. Just gruesome bloody violence.

Picture this. You get into a car and you're driving. You're going to go from city A to city B. It's a 200 mile drive. You Google it. If you go steady 60 miles an hour, you should finish the drive in like three and a half hours, not including the rest stops.

You got to fill up the tank. You got to get some snacks at that creepy gas station in the middle of nowhere. OK, it's fine. It's going to be a nice little road trip. And it's nothing impossible. That is until you start driving. And maybe your eyes are playing tricks on you.

Because you've been focusing so hard on the increasingly blurry lines of the highway. You didn't even notice. But the whole 200 mile drive. You see people on this side of the road holding hands. They're standing right next to each other. All holding hands staring blankly at you. It's like a human chain. A human fence,

and each person is covered in blood, like soaked in blood. The human fence goes on for the whole 200 mile drive. You're like, okay, I can't do this. I'm not gonna drive all the way over there. I can't keep looking at these people holding hands. Like, it's so creepy. I don't know what to do. So you pull off the highway.

You find a train station instead. You just take the train to your destination. Maybe you're too tired of driving. I mean, that's why you're hallucinating, right? The train station is eerily quiet. You're the only one at the platform. You're waiting for the next train. It pulls up and the doors open and each railroad car,

each train is jam-packed with bodies, dead bodies. Some of them have their eyes open, some have obvious signs of torture wounds on them, and all of them are dripping blood. The blood is dripping onto the platform floor before the door's struggled to close back up. You obviously don't board the train. You wait for the next one.

Feel like today's just weird, right? The next one is the same, it's filled with dead bodies. Fourteen trains have opened up in front of you and each one was filled to the brim with dead bodies bleeding out. And then finally a train opens up and it's empty. But you kind of don't want to get on. You're like, oh, this is really creepy. I feel like I'm in some sort of nightmare that I can't get out of. So you just stumble out of the train station. Maybe you've been underground too long. Maybe you need some fresh air. Maybe even walking to the destination is better.

So you start walking along the highway. Then you see an accident ahead. 85 giant trucks. You know those 10 wheelers? They're like, oh, what's in those things, right? God knows. It's probably Amazon packages, but who knows? 85 of them had gotten into an accident.

They'd crashed into each other, and all their truckloads were spilling onto the highway floor. Each of those 85 trucks was filled to the brim with blood. 1,200 tons of blood was splashing onto the highway. Do you know how heavy 1,200 tons is? That's 2.4 million pounds. That's the weight of a giant cargo ship or nine adult blue whales, three Boeing 747 airplanes,

or 148 elephants. But in blood, splashing onto the highway floor, you start feeling nauseous. You're like, OK, this is some sort of nightmare. You finally, somehow, make it to the destination, into the city, and you have a little address on a piece of paper. That's where you're gonna stay.

Maybe it's a hotel, maybe it's an Airbnb. It's a high-rise building, you know that. But instead of a glass-down building where a nice, you know, one of those modern complexes, your face-to-face with a 74-story building where bodies are just stacked on top of each other, and it reaches 74 stories. That's a thousand feet in the air of just a stack of dead bodies. So you're standing there and everyone around you is ignoring the stack of bodies, the 74 story building

of bodies of dead bodies. And you're like, am I crazy? What is going on? Why is everyone acting like this? Okay. this is not normal. This is like nightmare level, worse than a nightmare. And you're like, Stephanie, what is this? I thought this is a true crime podcast, emphasis on true. It is, OK? So an incident so horrific had happened in history that in the matter of weeks, hundreds

of thousands of people had died, not before being brutally tortured in the most sick-depraved ways that we will ever talk about. It's said that if the victims were to hold hands and stand right next to each other, like a human fence, they would cover over 200 miles. Their blood collectively would weigh 1,200 tons, enough to fill 85 10-wheel trucks. If the victims were stacked on top of each other, they would fill 2500 railroad cars, or 14 trains, or their bodies would reach the height of a 74-story building.

So it is true, because this is the rape of Nanjing. And it was brutal. And there was a lot of rape, okay, a lot of it. It's estimated that 80,000 women were raped in the span of seven weeks by enemy troops. But sometimes it wasn't enough for soldiers who raped these women. Some of the soldiers felt it was necessary to then murder these women. And you know what they say, dead victims can't talk. The method of murder was just sick and twisted. The killers would assault the women till they were elbows deep. And from there they would reach in and pull out their intestines by disembowling them,

or they would take a shortcut. Somewhere said to have just cut holes into women's stomach and rip out their insides, slice out their breasts, nail the women alive to walls, to church doors, to walls of government buildings, to send a message. Hey, if you're out there, you could be next. But that gets boring, it's a little too predictable, right? And it becomes mundane after a few thousand times of seeing, you know, the first thousand women nailed to the church door,

you kind of get sick of it. So soldiers started breaking into family's homes, holding the whole family hostage, and while pointing weapons at them, they would force the dads to rape their own daughters in front of the whole family., they would force the dads to rape their own daughters in front of the whole family. Then they would force the sons to rape their own mothers in front of the whole family, then they would force the brothers to rape their own sisters. They wanted the whole family to watch because if they didn't kill them afterwards, after making them do all of this, the whole family would probably want to die anyway. It was sick torture, honestly. That's what it was.

Women were gang raped by 20 soldiers at a time, and then as a final act of dehumanization, soldiers would shove a bamboo stick up their anal cavities before killing them. So there would be women laying around Nanjing, the city, with just bamboo sticks impaled into their bodies. Nobody was safe in the city with just bamboo sticks impaled into their bodies. Nobody was safe in the city. Girls younger than eight years old, if it was too difficult to assault a girl that young, it's said that the soldiers, the rapist, would slice her open down there to assault her more easily. Elderly women, older than 70, they were all being raped. They were being raped by soldiers, by objects soldimized, by bamboo sticks. Many women in their 80s, they were found raped to death.

That was their cause of death. Witnesses said that they saw troops raping girls as young as 10 years old and then cutting them in half, literally, with a big sword when they were done. Absolutely, nobody was safe. Pregnant woman were not safe. At least one pregnant woman was kicked to death on the street in broad daylight. Another victim who was nine months pregnant was raped so severely that she suffered

not only a stillbirth, but a complete mental breakdown. After gang raping pregnant women, soldiers would slash open their stomachs and rip out their fetuses. For fun. For amusement. Sometimes the mother would still be conscious. Mothers with young children suffered too.

They would try to find refuge in the city. They're trying to find the safe zone, but they would be caught by a group of soldiers and then they'd be gang raped. And if their child cried or screamed or made any noise because their mom was being brutally assaulted and murdered, the soldiers would suffocate or stab the baby in front of the mother while she was being brutally assaulted. A diary entry from a witness wrote, Around 5 p.m., three soldiers came and forced a woman to throw her baby away after raping

her. They laughed as they walked off. Nobody was safe, like it didn't matter, your age, socioeconomic status, religious standing, even Buddhist nuns were gang-wrapped to death. The troops would go from door to door, dragging husbands, fathers, brothers, off to be executed, and women would be forced into gang rapes. Surely, the troops will be facing hell, right? I mean, this is not a free for all, this is not back in, I don't know, the cave man

days, it sounds very caveman you know surely the superiors are gonna find out what they're doing what kind of evil vile acts that they're doing in the name of freaking war and they're gonna die they're gonna be hanged for war crimes how can you do this in the name of your country not really so one higher up commander with set to have told us troops if you're gonna rape these women you better either pay them or kill them in some out of the way place after you're done with them. Woman that lived in the city of Nanjing started to kill themselves at alarming rates. They either suffered a rape and could not live with the trauma, they could not live with the idea that it could happen again, or they could not live with what they saw happen to their loved

ones and then the idea that it could happen to them, they couldn't live with that. So they started flinging themselves off of buildings, jumping into rivers. I mean, there was no escape but death. There was a safe zone in the city of Nunging, but to get to that safe zone, women would have to risk running into a soldier and being raped and murdered. But if she stayed home, she was kind of a sitting duck. There were looters and soldiers going door to door in residential areas to steal, rape, and kill. Soldiers even set traps for a woman around the city.

They started going around and telling women, did you know that there's an underground market where all women are safe. We can exchange bags of flour for chicken and ducks. It's kind of like a swap meat, okay? But when the woman snuck out to the market to get small scraps of food for their starving children to exchange little pieces of rice for maybe God, maybe a piece of chicken or protein, they would be faced to face with troops. Troops that would

gang rape them, kidnap them, and force them to be sex slaves, or just disemballing to capitate them right after their rape. And it wasn't a discreet thing either. Women were raped in all locations, in all hours, out in the middle of public in broad daylight, while crowds of witnesses, fellow soldiers just either watched and discussed, but did nothing to stop it, or they cheered them on. Women were raped in school churches, in one church, a woman was gang raped by 17 soldiers. A church.

It was every day, 24 hours a day. The rapes, there was not an hour where an innocent woman was not being dragged off and raped by a soldier. And I feel like, okay, but Stephanie, the bodies, what about the bodies of all the women that were raped and murdered? How can they hide this many woman, 80,000 women, where rape do you say? I mean, how do you even hide those bodies like that? They were left out on the streets.

I know it sounds like a fake story, but just picture this. Imagine a desolate war torn city, and there's just corpses of people and women just littering the streets, the main streets, the alleyways everywhere. You would be walking down the main street where maybe used to just walk down the street to go to church and to grab some supplies at the local shop and go to your favorite restaurant, maybe your friend's house is down this street.

But now it's empty, it's desolate. If everything has been burned to the ground, it's filled with ashes and blood and bullets everywhere. There's just dead bodies everywhere lying on the street. Some of the woman's bodies, their legs were still spread open and as acts of humiliation, the killers had rammed wooden rods, bamboos, sticks, twigs, weeds, whatever they could get their hands on,

beer bottles, firecrackers, and they had stuffed it into the woman's orifices. Sometimes, those soldiers would grab a man and hold him at gunpoint and they played a sick mind game with him. They would tell him, hey, if you go have sex with that dead corpse over there, we'll let you live. And he couldn't, you know, the civilians they refused to commit necrophilia, so they would be murdered and left on the street next to that woman.

I mean, nobody was safe. This older's had the most fun, torturing people during sex. Sometimes they would grab Buddhist monks and tell them either rape this woman right here or we kill you. If you don't know Buddhist monks, they, they're celibate. If he raped her, then they would kill them both. If he didn't rape her, they would cut off his penis and let him bleed to death, and they would rape her themselves before killing her.

In the end, both of them would die horrible deaths. Other girls were tied naked to chairs or beds or even poles in public areas to be raped. Chinese witnesses described the body of an 11-year-old girl who died after she was raped continuously for two days straight. She's 11, 11 years old. A witness said, and I quote, the blood stained swollen and ruptured area

between the girl's legs created a disgusting scene difficult for anyone to look at. Okay, I know, I just threw you in for a loop. I'm just like throwing you into the thick of it. You're like, how did this even happen? What are you talking about? I've never even heard of this during history class. This incident, the invasion of Nanjing

is often called the forgotten Holocaust. The level of torture, the sheer number of victims, is insane. But for the large part outside of China, it was largely forgotten. That is, till a guy on TikTok brought it to mainstream media. OK, I know it sounds noble, but I don't know. There's a lot of debate around this guy. I'm sure you guys have seen it.

Maybe you've seen it. The TikTok went viral recently getting over 31 plus million views and it was a pawn shop owner that wanted the public's help. He claimed he had come across this, this book of rare photos of the rape of Nanjing and he didn't know what to do with it. The photos didn't belong to him. They were brought in by a customer who wanted him to sell the album. So he's like I don't feel comfortable selling this to a private person because, you know, the rape of Nanjing is hotly debated as a controversial incident in humanity in history. So maybe I should have it sent to a museum. He said the photos were so disturbing to even show on TikTok. He later posted a few to Twitter which got severe backlash. The first incident being that a lot of people

didn't like that he posted these pictures. The second being that a lot of people questioned the authenticity of these photos. They are not the most graphic ones, I believe he posted on Twitter, but they have since then been taken down, I believe. And to make matters worse, the pawn shop owner initially admitted that he didn't get the pictures authenticated

before he made that TikTok. So a lot of historians were like, why did you, that's like the first step anyone would have is to get the pictures forkin authenticated because why would you sit here and be like, I have never been seen before photos of the rape of Nanjing and just reopen these trauma wounds for an entire country and then not have it authenticated yet, it just seemed really weird. He just said that he wanted a museum to have it, to preserve history, so that history could be taught and not forgotten. But it's also said that when China's embassy reached out

because China has, okay, listen, whatever your political views on China, China has the biggest museum, and really the only museum that is dedicated to the rape of Nanjing and it's in the city of Nanjing. So a lot of historians feel if any museum is going to have that book, it should be in Nanjing, right? But he said he didn't really want to give it to China because he felt like they were going to use it for political gain. So it's a little bit weird. It seemed like his

motivations were a little bit confusing and listen, for all I know, this guy could have meant well. He could have been meant, you know, he could have meant to do the best thing that he thought, but I like to give the people the benefit of the doubt. But it really is a strange situation that a lot of historians were up in arms about. And later it seemed that the pictures and the books were probably not from the rape of Nanjing. He said this about it. He said, even if the whole book turns out to be fake, it started a productive conversation. I've accidentally educated so many people

about this subject, so not all is lost here, which is true in a way, because I feel like before this, nobody really talked about the rape of Nunging in a big context other than maybe historians or history buffs or people who were affected by it. So I guess it makes sense but also not really because you never really went in depth about the rape of nudging. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about the rape of nudging. But first we have to talk about wartime superstitions because it's a thing. I mean

wartime is interesting because even the most non superstitious people seem to get superstitious during war. I feel like it has to do with the fact that you're in the front lines. The enemy forces could be in on you at any time. Maybe, you know, you could knock on wood a few times in war. Sheer's stupid luck might be the only thing that keeps you alive. What's the harm? This particular group of troops though, they had a lot of superstitions. They believed that consuming and eating the penis of the enemy would take away their

strength and their masculinity and their power, and it would give it to the person who was chomping down on the sausage. Literally. That's why when you walked through this conquered city, you would see men's corpses thrown to the side with their penises cut off. Another superstition said by one of the surviving soldiers was that their whole troop believed that raping a virgin during war would make them more powerful in the battle. The soldiers would even rip off the pubic

care of these virgin victims and wear them in these decorative not broaches, but like lockets. They're army tags. They would tape some pubic care. Yeah. They believed a virgin pubic hair. Yeah. They believed a virgin pubic hair possessed magic powers, powers that could protect them against injury. So I already know how this war is going to go down.

And this story involves Japan, China, and Nazis. And I don't think that I can get more heated, more complicated with the state of world politics then. And now, and I feel like even covering the story feels like I'm walking through a minefield of bonds just ready to go off in my face at a moment's notice and I just I really hope that I can share this story with you and we can just see it for what it is. People's lives were lost. People were murdered. People were raped. That's all it is. This story is not meant to be like these are the bad guys and these are the good guys. These are the victims.

And we should make this country pay for what they did. I have not enough knowledge, and not even an Iota of authority to say something like that. It's just a bloody, bloody part of history that isn't frequently talked about, and it should be. So, this story is not to be hateful towards modern day Japan, or anyone. I doubt that there's a single nation in this world that has not spilled innocent blood for greed and for colonizing things.

I was chained even set in the book, looking back at the millennia of history. It appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin, one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war. So I guess after that long list of dislainers, we're just going to get straight into the

intensity. Again, I feel like I'm walking through a minefield, but we're just going to go in. I never thought that I would see the Nazi swashdika and the Red Cross symbol side by side. But it happened. A lot of people that do talk about the rape of Nanjing will use this phrase. They would say that the rape of Nanjing was so bad that even Nazi officers decided to step in and help the victims. Okay, I'm not really sure how to feel about this statement because it feels like it's some sort

of sick comparison, some sort of competition, but there is some crossover, if you will. There is a Nazi officer involved in today's story. And honestly, this whole event in history is just so complicated and so nuanced and bizarre, but overall depressing. But yeah, the Nazi symbol and the Red Cross symbols were side by side in the city of Nanjing to let everyone know that they were here to help. Whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist

in the office parking lot, or being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift, whether you're doing a dance to your favorite artist in the office parking lot. Are being guided into Warrior I in the break room before your shift. Whether you're running on your Peloton tread at your mom's house while she watches the baby. Or counting your breaths on the subway. Peloton is for all of us. Wherever we are, whenever we need it, download the free Peloton app today. Peloton app available through free tier, or paid subscription starting at $12.99 per month. Why would you break into these apartments? For money, for drugs, whatever was in there.

Why aren't you afraid of getting caught at doing this? No. Who's going to catch us? What of police? It was the height of the crack era, and instead of locking up drug dealers, some New York City cops had become them. I would suit up in my uniform and we're going to want some drug dealers, and I know how to do it really well. This is the inside story of the biggest police corruption scandal in NYPD history and the investigation that uncovered it all.

Did you consider yourself a rat? 100% I save my soul just like everybody else does. Listen to and follow the set, an Odyssey originals documentary podcast series available now in the Odyssey app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your shows. I'm not a big guy man but I love being that dirty mother f***er. It was a weird time in history, for sure. World War II was a weird time in history. It was a long and bloody war. It officially ended in 1945, but it started for different points for everyone around the world. For America, it feels like the war started when Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

For Europeans, it started when 1938, when Hitler attacked Poland. Africans are like, no, it started when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia in 1935. And in East Asia, many will say, many will argue, that the war started in 1931, when Japan occupied a region of Northeast China called Manchuria So at the time it was it really wasn't a fair fight if I'm being honest with you Japan's army back in the day before World War II will before World War II's end was unstoppable I mean Japan's army was so organized so developed, they had this advanced machinery, they had weapons of mass destruction essentially, and they had a really good team of military strategists

who knew how to fight and take over full cities. It just wasn't physical. Like they employed all the mental and emotional tactics of war. Like they were giving the 48 laws of war, whatever you call it, like they were that, they were that playbook. And just as Hitler dreamed of taking over Europe and Russia, it's that Japan had dreams to control the entirety of East Asia.

And they started with Manchuria. And slowly other Chinese territories started to fall down to Japan, Beijing, the capital. Then we had Tianqing, Shanghai, and finally Nanjing. Side note, after Beijing fell under Japanese control, the Republic of China was like, okay, well, Nanjing is going to be our new temporarily capital. So naturally, Japan wanted Nanjing, and they would do anything to take Nanjing, it seemed. And they really would.

Nanjing would fall, and for seven full weeks, it was total and utter hell. For seven weeks, it's estimated that more than 300,000 civilians were tortured and slaughtered. Which side note, that's not the total fatality list in the war of China between the Chinese and Japanese, but some sources say that over 11 million Chinese people died in the war with Japan. Yeah, I mean it's a number so big that I can't even begin to imagine or even to understand the number. But the story today is really not just about numbers.

It's about what happened to the victims before they died, which is like side note, this was not the first war between Japan and China. They had the first senior Japanese war in 1894 and the two countries fought over power in Korea. So that's great. Love that for us. Japan would ultimately win that war. And now they're in Korea. So, that's great, love that for us. Japan would ultimately win that war.

And now they're in their second war, and you're like, what is it about this time? What is war really ever about if it's not power in greed? Straight up, just power in greed, that's all it was. And it was gonna be very, very bad. Like you could just tell before the invasion of Nanjing, the propaganda that was going on between both parties, I mean, the hatred was dripping.

So today we're only talking about, I guess the people who at the upper hand, because that's kind of how it happens, right? But Japan's government was distributing a lot of anti-Chinese propaganda to the public. It's that that Japanese media depicted Chinese people as being less than civilized. So they were depicted as pigs and dogs.

There were even newspaper articles about, quote, noble Japanese officers who held contest. And they were competing to see who could decapitate more Chinese soldiers in combat. Like not even kill, but decapitate. It was a bizarre, gladiator-style contest, like it was romanticized. The news outlets portrayed Japanese officers as heroes

that were valiantly fighting for their country by Decapitating as many people as they could they would literally praised for every Chinese life that they took and I wouldn't be mentioning This unless it is important, but it adds to the context of things and before anybody gets on their high horse propaganda is everywhere like it You would think that it's not in the free world, but it definitely is. And propaganda is strong in times of war. Strong. So yeah, a lot of Japanese troops and soldiers felt heroic by killing Chinese soldiers because

they were told over and over and over again by their government that it was heroic. So they did it behind a facade that honestly, I think a lot of these soldiers even believe themselves, that they were doing something good. Which is why, before even nudging, Japanese veterans remember being ordered to raid tiny villages in China as, essentially, like target practice, they would practically beat up everyone in sight, stab them, slash them with BNAs.

BNA is like a mix between a sword and a dagger. It's shorter than a sword, think like a knife, but longer and more aggressive, very big. And they essentially just stabbed everyone that they found in tiny villages. A lot of soldiers went through raping any woman that they could get their hands on, and they would just do whatever they wanted.

They would set entire villages on fire. There was a city called Suzhou, which is one of the oldest cities in all of China. They're known for having so many of very like historical sites. So they're known for their delicate silks, their palaces, temples. People call it the Chinese Venice is what they called it back in the day because it was just beautiful. There's like a beautiful river running through it and it feels like Venice. And there honestly is still a lot of historical buildings now, but there probably would have been more if it weren't for the war.

They pretty much rated it and burned it down. I mean, they plundered the whole city for days. They burnt down ancient landmarks. They abducted thousands of Chinese women for sex slavery. The invasion caused the population of Suzhou to drop from 250,000 at the time to lessen 500 people. People either ran, died, or they were kidnapped. The same thing happened all over China.

A suburb outside of Shanghai was just gutted, like every part of it was gutted. A British correspondent traveled there and he wrote about what he saw and he said, there is hardly a building standing which has not been gutted by fire. Like smoldering ruins and deserted streets, it's such an eerie feeling. The only living creatures I saw were dogs that were unnaturally fat from feasting on corpses. In the whole city, which should contain a densely packed population, because we're talking suburb of Shanghai, one of the most populated cities of the entire country. He only saw five Chinese civilians. They were old men hiding in a compound, reduced to tears, just crying. But this was still nothing compared to what was going to

happen in Nanjing. A few days before they planned to attack on Nanjing, something went horribly wrong. Okay, this is, I think this is where it really all started. And this has nothing to do with Japan as a country or the people of Japan because it's one letter written by one person that set this whole series of events off, and it's so scary that that can happen in more. The general that was supposed to be in charge of the whole operation is named General Matsui, and he was really sick. He had chronic tuberculosis, long story short,

there was a lot of leadership confusion, but it seemed like Prince Asaka of Japan was in charge. And someone, probably not him, maybe someone in his office had sent out a letter to these troops that they were heading into Nanjing, and it basically read, for Nanjing, it needs to be a secret. It has to be destroyed. The troops read it and they were like, okay,

well, we know what that means, right? We gotta kill everyone. It's gotta be a secret. The only people who can keep secrets are dead people. So, now it's unclear who the hell sent this order, but it was sent. Later one of Prince Asaka's staff members who worked on his intelligence team came out

and said that he sent it. Some troops that were in action said, it doesn't matter who sent it, it was the only way we would have done it anyway without that order. And you're like, wait, why? Why would you have done that anyway? Well, let me explain. The Japanese troops were outnumbered in Nanjing. It was going to be 50,000 Japanese troops against half a million civilians and 90,000 Chinese soldiers in Nanjing. They were expecting a bloody fight, but when they got there, their other strategies are already worked. Remember how I said Japan was very developed

in their military? China was not. So Japan had all the mental psychological games down when it comes to war, which I feel like is sometimes half the fight, right? And Japan, they always thought, well, if you can't outnumber them, we got to employ the art of war tactics.

They started putting up these propaganda posters all over Nanjing before they invaded, saying things like, hey, trust us, we're your friends here. Like, we don't want to hurt you. The government doesn't want to hurt you. We just need to take the city so that we can advance in the war and like nobody has to die They were constantly telling the civilians of Nanjing like you were have to die as long as you surrender to us Like it's not a big deal. We're gonna treat you with respect

We're gonna feed you we just need to set up shop here for a little while like we're just we're gonna stay here without paying rent But in the condition that you get to live like it's a pretty fair trade, right? Like I'm not gonna kill you? Basically, if you surrender, we're gonna go easy on you. So they start hanging up these beautiful flyers that are just... It looks like a diversity poster. It looks like we're gonna cum by y'all into the sunset together. And even though China was winning in sheer numbers,

they were not nearly as equipped, well organized, or even well trained compared to Japanese troops. So they thought, you know what? Maybe it's a good idea to surrender. At least we're not gonna die. well organized or even well trained compared to Japanese troops. So they thought, you know what, maybe it's a good idea to surrender. At least we're not gonna die. We don't have to leave our families, fatherless and husbandless.

So the first day of invasion, a lot of Chinese soldiers started surrendering to the Japanese troops. Most of them even threw their weapons on the side on the ground to show good faith. And the Japanese troops took them in as war prisoners. And the number of people they took prisoner is out of this world. A former Japanese soldier would say, we were getting ready to fight

a bunch of Chinese soldiers, but instead we were met with mass surrendering. Like it was a magnificent view. We walked in on 7,000 people all gathered in one place with this tiny branch, like a dead branch. One of them was holding and it had a piece of white cloth hanging on the other end. Just waving. They were surrendering. And all these people, they thought that Japan would go easy on them that there would be fair and a peaceful way to end the war. And so they were delighted, okay?

Japan was like, yes, but now we have a problem. We took in all these war prisoners, so technically we're liable for these war prisoners. Like, we're not going to let them out, but we don't have food. Like, we don't even have, we don't know what to do. So the officers are like, okay, well, if we can't feed them, we got to kill them. We shoot them, we kill them. Because we're only going to take more people as war prisoners, and we can't risk them ganging up on us and overtaking us. We obviously have to kill them. It's going to eliminate the food shortage,

but also there's going to be no retaliation. It's the lowest risk solution, the lowest risk if you don't consider the blood on your hands. It was honestly ruthless logic. I don't even know what else to say. The logic was confusing and hypocritical. One officer said he was stunned by the Chinese army's willingness to surrender and reluctance to fight back. He said, you know, we were taught to believe suicide is better than surrender or even being captured. So in Japan, if you don't fight to the death and war, you're considered a shame. And this has been part of ancient

Japanese culture for a long time. It's not just a shame to yourself, but to your whole family. Quitters are shameful. You're not allowed to give up or you're gonna let your whole country go down. A lot of Japanese soldiers believe this wholeheartedly. They were indoctrinated by the army as well. So they would rather give up their life than give up their freedom.

And they would do all of that in a heartbeat. They don't wanna face the shame that they would get from everyone around them. You know, you got to fight the bloody death for your country. The officer said that he was baffled that there were more Chinese soldiers surrendering than there were Japanese troops. He's like, think about it.

If they had just gathered up in a collective way and tried to fight us, they would have overpowered us. But here they were standing in front of us, surrendering. They could have easily overpowered us, but they chose peace. He was mad at them that they chose peace. He was like undisgusted by them. Now, the reason that I say hypocritical is because he said that the Chinese soldiers were scared men, who constantly asked for water and asked for reassurance that they weren't going to be killed. He said that he felt disgusted by the Chinese soldiers for being so cowardice, and even when as far as I say, I felt ashamed of myself for ever feeling scared of the Chinese

troops. The way that they surrendered, to me they were like a bunch of insects and animals crawling. They all walked into surrender like ants crawling on the ground. They looked like a bunch of homeless people with ignorant expressions on their faces, a herd of ignorant sheep with no ruler order just marching in the darkness whispering to each other. They did not look like the enemy that was supposed to scare us and shoot us. It was impossible to believe that they were the enemy soldiers we had been warned about. Yeah. And then he went on a rant about how most of them were 12 and 13.

Which, how do you not hear the irony of your words? What are you expecting from 12 and 13, which how do you not hear the irony of your words? What are you expecting from 12 and 13 year old boys? They're literal children. So the first night Japanese troops took in Chinese soldiers who surrendered, which side the reason that I'm like telling you exactly what this soldier's thought is, giving you a mindset on how they felt about these Chinese soldiers

and how they even felt about Chinese people surrendering to them. It wasn't seen as an act of truly desperation. They want to live. They're doing this for their families. There was no humanity involved. These soldiers are like ill, disgusting. They're like insects crawling for forgiveness. So this is how they're looking at these people.

And not all the troops, obviously, but a good vast majority of them. And we know what happens when people get into groups. I mean, this is what happens in the army. That's why war time climbs exist because you forget that you're an individual with morals and you just keep going and egging people on and it seems like the more you go, the worse it gets. So that's essentially what's happening.

Now the first night, the Japanese troops took in the Chinese soldiers who surrendered. And for the night, they would be safe. The next day though, the prisoners were separated. Some of them, a few hundred of them were taken to different locations around the city to be shot. Japanese troops were like, hey come here, we're gonna let you go here and this is uh we're gonna stay for a while until we're done capturing the city. They were just taken to different locations outside of the city and shot and killed. Some were taken to large houses to be murdered and those would later be called slaughterhouses.

And most of the prisoners were taken to a place near Mufu Mountain. It was near the Yangtze River and an estimated 57,000 civilians and former soldiers were executed near the river. Or it was bad. Okay, so the troops woke up to the prisoners. And at first they had like 15,000 prisoners, right? And they told them, here's the plan. Calm down everyone,

here's the plan. We're going to take you to a small island in the middle of the Yang's River. You're going to stay there while we take over the city. Obviously, it's not a four-season's resort, but you're going to be taken care of until the war is over. And we really appreciate you for turning yourself in. So while that's the plan, before we go, we need a first tie everyone's hands behind their backs. You know, it's like an insurance policy for us, but we've been good to you tonight, right? So you're gonna cooperate? Okay, perfect. We just don't want you to escape and I don't know, try to kill us. They had over 15,000 people. It took them all morning and all afternoon to tie their hands behind their backs. Then the troops led the prisoners and started walking and they walked and they walked until they were close to the young

The river bank and as they were waiting they noticed that they weren't They were being lined up in rows in front of the river, but there were no boats There were no boats. So how are you supposed to get to an island in the middle of the river when there's no boats? Nothing like they're not expecting a yacht or a cruise, but there's not even like a wooden boat. The prisoners realized that they were not going across that river, at least they weren't going to a live. As soon as all of them were lined up, the Japanese guards surrounded them, holding machine guns up at them.

And for a while, the Japanese soldier just degraded them. Like, can you imagine lining people up to kill them? And before you do, you're like, how dare you look at you. You all gave up your cowards. Did you know you're all cowards? What would your mom think? Is this what you were taught? You're like little insects, little pigs.

What would your wife and children think when we rape them? And then they open fire into the crowd of 15,000 people for an entire hour. They just shot at the prisoners for an entire hour. They said that the only sound that you could hear above the loud noise from the guns were just screams and cries from the prisoners. I mean, just imagine the sheer number of bodies,

just the gourd, the blood. Imagine being one of those prisoners somewhere in the center of the formation. Maybe you're watching those around you being shredded apart by bullets and falling to their knees and you're there. Like you have nowhere to run. You're just waiting for your turn. To be ripped apart, to scream out and pain and all you can do there is stand and wait and watch and whore. There's nowhere to run. There's bodies piling up to

your waist. Even if you could somehow run out of that pilot, they would surely shoot you down. Of course, many prisoners pretended that they were dead, or they tried to run into the river, and all of them were shot down. At the end of the hour shooting, I mean, the troops just went through the mosh pit of dead bodies shooting into them. They found all the ones that were pretending to be dead and finished them off. And then they shot more bullets into the dead bodies for good measure. And now, once the sound of the bullets being fired had quieted. The troops there at Drenelin was coming down, and the big question was, what on earth are we going to do with these bodies now?

The cleanup itself was going to take days. This was only a small fraction of the total number of victims claimed in nudging, so where are the bodies going to go? Honestly, it was a biohazard. All of nudging was a biohazard. There were too many bodies, too many corpses. Bodies were being thrown into ditches by the thousands. A large mound of corpses were just doused with gasoline

and set on fire. There were so many bodies in that little mound that the fire couldn't even cremate them. They couldn't even be burned to ashes. So now they were just left with charred corpses everywhere and the troops just started dumping them into the river. The troops actually started bringing more Chinese prisoners to shovel the corpses into the river.

So they brought prisoners and were like, hey, we're gonna have you put these corpses into the river and when they were done with the original corpses, these new prisoners that had put them in the river would be lined up at the river's edge and executed with machine guns. Their bodies would fall back into the river to join the dead. At one point, Japanese soldiers attempted to kill all the prisoners by beheading them, but it was taking too long, and it was taking too much physical strength, so they just went

back to using machine guns. There were so many bodies everywhere that the Yangsie River literally ran red. One Japanese journalist later said, I remember there was a pond just outside of Nanjing. It looked like a sea of blood with splendid colors. I wished that I had a color film camera at that moment because what a shocking shot that would have been. So very quickly, the troops executed all the Chinese soldiers

and now there was no one to protect the civilians of the city. The troops were gone, and they went to town. It said that the Japanese troops occupied government buildings, banks, warehouses, I mean, they were just going crazy. They were shooting at random civilians on the street for no reason. They used all sorts of weapons, knives, machine guns, revolvers, rifles. They shot into crowds of elderly women and children, like they opened fire into every corner

of the city and it wasn't just the main roads. They went through the alleyways, the back roads everywhere. Senior housing apartments, residential apartments. The city was littered with corpses or victims who were barely alive, moaning and screaming for help, and help would not come. The city was painted red with blood, and I'm not being dramatic. It's said that nearly virtually every single street and alley and ditch was a river of blood. There were dead bodies in every corner, corpses were piled up against building walls by the lakes,

by the ponds, by the river, and the most insulting thing about this whole situation. There were still posters hung up everywhere from the troops. The ones urging Chinese people to turn themselves in, because it would be peaceful. In the touching words that read, trust our Japanese army. They will protect and feed you. The posters were now splattered in Chinese blood.

Side note, the entire place was bloody chaos. A witness said, you cannot imagine the disorganization of the city, the dumping of filth and every kind of waste everywhere, trash and human flesh petrified on the streets, because Japanese troops didn't permit anything to be done without their permission. Not even the disposal of garbage or corpses.

So they lay there. For days, army tanks just drove over several feet of corpses on the main roads, just turning their remains into what witnesses called minst meat. The public property damage was close to $19 billion. In the city of Nunging, private property loss was at least $3 billion, mostly from our said. Fires in Nunging were raging for more than six weeks. Soldiers torched building after building, it didn't matter what kind of building. I mean, churches, embassies, department stores, shops,

mansions, tiny little residential huts, they were all coming down. The community couldn't even put out the fires because the troops had seized the fire equipment. A third of Nanjing had been obliterated in six weeks. This doesn't even include the irreplaceable cultural artifacts taken by the Japanese Army or personal belongings. The troops filled warehouses with their stolen treasures.

Stolen warehouses lined with precious rare jade, porcelain artwork, rugs, paintings, gold and silver treasures. More than 200 pianos were housed in a single storage unit. They would all be transported back to Japan, and they did not just steal valuables. They stole cooking utensils and bedding, and they stole food from poor citizens. They stole food from people without homes.

A German report noted in astonishing incident, the troops forced 5,000 citizens to line up so that they could steal all their belongings. The troops knew that these 5,000 citizens were like the poorest of the poor in the city. For all 5,000 all day, it took troops to steal from 5,000 civilians. They got $180 for it. It's also noted in the German report that troops

stole dirty rice from starving civilians and people without homes. They didn't need it. The troops were not in need of food. They were stealing it for no other reason than to take. And none of it was in the name of war. Not that I would justify anything, but none of this was necessary. The troops would go around telling random civilians

to do something, like put your hands in the air, but they would say it in Japanese. And none of the civilians would do it because they don't know Japanese, and they would be shot down. If they wanted to come up with a defense for their actions, they would say, oh, well, I thought it was a Chinese soldier because they don't understand Japanese, which doesn't make sense because none of them do because they're all Chinese. What? But most of that didn't even make sense because how did you think that

this three-year-old toddler was a Chinese soldier? Or how did you think that that 93-year-old grandma, I mean, she was definitely a spy, right? Because that makes sense. I mean, it was bad. But worse was what the troops did for sport. They started turning the killings into a game. Like they thought it was hilarious, mental torture. They would divide up the Chinese prisoners into groups. Group A, Group B, Group C, and so on. Group A would be forced to take a big grave in front of everyone. Then they would be ordered to throw Group B into the grave that they just dug,

alive. And sometimes they would have family members, neighbors, friends in the next group. You could hear the screams coming out from the soil. And then it would go silent. And then group C was ordered to dig graves. And then to bury group A. And then group D was ordered to bury dig graves. And then bury group C and so on and so A. And then Group D was ordered to bury, dig graves and then Barry Group C and so on and so forth. And they called it live burials. And it was almost like the spectator sport. It was used for entertainment.

But visually, maybe it was too tame because you could hear the screams and you visually see the torturous looks on everyone's faces when they realize what's happening to dig a grave only to bury your community members or to watch as someone dug a grave that you knew you were going to be thrown into. Like sure it was fun, but it could be better.

Sometimes the troops ordered prisoners to be buried up to their chest or neck, and then the soldiers would run through the area of just head sticking out and to capitate the heads. Like it was like groundhog day, but with a knife. Sometimes they would just drive tanks over the heads, squashing them until they exploded, and the others would just watch knowing that they were next.

Sometimes they just messed around, like they were playing golf with the heads poking out of the soil, and they would use the heads as golf balls. But when that was too much work, they had another variation, where victims would be buried to the chest, and the troops would send German shepherds to tear them apart. A few survivors said they had seen trained German shepherds attack innocent civilians, sometimes they would specifically attack only their genitals, and rip open their stomachs

to drag out their intestines. Like it was a string toy. The Japanese soldiers were turning into little boys who played with their food, like they were losing all their humanity. They started decapitating, disemboweling, and dismembering victims for fun. They would march to the center of the city, force other passurbys to watch them nail prisoners to wooden boards and run them over with tanks, slowly, letting everyone hear the sound of each crushing bone, little by little, saving their head for last, so that the nailed victim could even see his feet being crushed into mushed, putting underneath him, knowing that there was no escape. The troops tied people up to trees and started using them for knife practice.

At least 100 men were tortured by having their eyes stabbed and their nose and ears sliced off, and then being set on fire. Another group of 200 soldiers were nailed to the doors of a school in the city, and the troops started stabbing them over and over again with large sharp needles. They stabbed through their eyelids

and into the mouth throughout everywhere. Sometimes they would make firework shows. So they would grab 10 Chinese civilians and tie them up together. Spray them with gasoline, light them on fire, and they would almost move as like a light show when they were on fire. Or more entertainment was grabbing a big group of people, dragging them to the top of a rooftop of a tall building, and then lighting the building on fire from the bottom floor. So they watched from the ground as prisoners jumped off the roof to their death before... being lit on fire.

Others didn't, and they were consumed by the flame. Another form of amusement was dousing victims with fuel, and instead of lighting them on fire, the soldiers would shoot at them, and the gunpowder would cause the people to explode, like a little firework. Like, it was a show for these people, for their entertainment. In one famous incident, Japanese troops forced hundreds of men, children, and women into a town square soaked them with gasoline, and then fired at them with machine guns. It was like their 4th of July fireworks display.

And this is just a fraction of what they did. They even started experimenting with acid, dousing prisoners with all sorts of things, putting acid in their eyes and their mouth, forcing them to drink it. They would take a newborn baby and they would skewer babies with a knife. They started hanging people by their tongues with iron hooks, and the pain alone is unthinkable,

but they would continue to torture that victim while they were being hung by their tongue. They was getting to the point where someone had to step in. And that person was a German businessman and Nazi party leader by the name of John Rabi. So, John was very well connected. John had good diplomatic relations with Japan and the Nazi party. And he negotiated with the Japanese troops and nudging to create a safety zone where they won't pillage and they won't plunder the city, a safety zone for refugees.

So, John even opened up his own home to house refugees. He harbored hundreds of Chinese women on his property. They set up these tiny straw huts in John's backyard and they would just sleep there. The soldiers were kind of annoyed but they knew better to mess with John. It seemed like the setup was, John gets to keep a little bit of civilians, and as long as the troops don't rape and murder in front of him, everything was going to be okay. But that's the thing about war. Once you do something so horrible, you feel the need to up the stakes, up the ante, it's kind of like gambling.

Like, you get your taste of evil freedom, and I'm not saying that this is everyone in war or everyone in the Japanese troops that were stationed in Nanjing. I'm just saying that it was some people in these specific troops. They had a taste and they wanted more power. So some of the soldiers would sneak into John's property at night to rape women in the straw huts. It got to the point where John straight up

gave the woman a giant whistle to blow if they were being raped in the middle of the night. And they would blow the whistle and John would come running out. He barely left his home at that point. He was so scared that the woman would all be raped kidnapped and slaughtered if he just looked away for one second. It happened so often that John found himself running out of his house groggy from sleep,

just to see a soldier raping a woman in a hut. Even when they were caught, it's like, John could do nothing. I mean, the superior officer would come in, pick up the soldier, and their idea of punishment was a swift slap to the face. They're like, see, John, you see, and I, for an eye, she was raped, and he has a slightly tingly cheek for doing that for the next five minutes. John was disgusted and outraged. He started ranting in his diary. Side note, the rape mentality was really bad. One of the rapist, soldiers, whatever,

said that if we were just raping them, I think it would have been OK. I mean, I shouldn't say that it was OK. But the problem was, after we raped them, we always stabbed and killed them, because dead bodies don't talk. So the Japanese soldier is saying that about the international outrage that came right after the rape of Nanjing.

He was saying it would have been okay if we just raped all the women, honestly. But it's the fact that we killed them, that's why like internationally people were like, what are you doing? Another rapeist soldier said, perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her like she was a human or a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig, an animal. Soldiers would come in and rape girls of all ages. The girls would be crying, begging on their knees for help, and if John thought that this was bad, the rape in his own backyard was nothing compared to what was happening on the streets. On the streets were the mutilated corpses of hundreds of women.

Legs still spread nude. They were all raped, tortured, and murdered, and John couldn't do anything. He was so upset that he wrote to Hitler. Okay, I don't know. I'm just telling you what happened, but so many questionable things here. But he wrote to Hitler to complain about the conditions and nudging. This is before, to my knowledge. This is before the Nazis had went full into the concentration camps. So I guess he was like, oh, guys, we got to be more, I don't know. OK. He wrote about how the soldiers would be more than pleased to rape and kill every single person

left in the city if they don't do something about it. There were girls younger than eight years old being raped, women over the age of 70 being raped. He wrote about the rape of Nanjing. And as far as we know, Hitler never responded to John. It's just a bizarre situation. A paradox really, because John Rabbe and Nazi would actually become a hero in Nanjing. Let's talk about Tang Shenzhen, or we're gonna call him Tang. He was 25 years old when the city of Nanjing was invaded.

Tang and his friends had an idea. They were going to camouflage the door to their house,. They were going to camouflage the door to their house, and they were going to unscrew the door to their house, fill that space, this empty door space with bricks. So from the outside, it looked like a smooth brick wall, and maybe the entrance was on the other side. That's what it would look like. And for a minute, it worked.

They sat huddled on the ground listening to the screams and gunshots firing outside their house, and then Tang said, it's like he was possessed. You just had this urge. He really wanted to see a Japanese soldier with his own eyes. All his life, he had heard about Japanese people and how they look similar to Chinese people, but why do they hate each other? We don't know.

But he had never seen a Japanese person. And now he had the chance. Listen, I don't know. The stress of war might do something weird to the brain, but Tang was fixated, I tell you, on seeing a Japanese soldier. He kept begging his friends to let him out so that he could see a Japanese person in real life. And they begged him, no, you can't do this.

But they were risking bringing more attention to them by arguing behind this brick wall. So Tang's friends gave in. They risked their own safety, took down a small portion of the brick wall and let him out. And almost immediately Tang regretted that. He stepped on the corpse not too far from the fake brick wall. There were bodies of women, children, men, elderly everywhere, dead. Every wall was colored red with blood. He said blood was splattered everywhere as if the heavens had been raining blood. And then behind Tang, he saw nine Japanese soldiers

walking straight for him. There was another Chinese man in their way, so they grabbed his head by the hair and us to capitated him in one slice. Tang saw blood rushing out of the man's neck. And while the soldiers decided to keep the head for a little while as a trophy, if you will, Tang said in that moment, he was so terrified to move, to think he could only think about how his

family would never know what happened to him. Tang was thrown into a herd of hundreds of Chinese people being directed by Japanese troops with weapons. They were ordered down the street, and Tang had no choice but to march alongside the other prisoners. Near them, they saw corpses filled, covered, and blood, and a lot of them were missing their heads. I them, they saw corpses filled, covered in blood, and a lot of them were missing their heads. When a so bad tang wanted to die, everything he saw he would never forget. When the marching stopped, tang looked around,

and they were near a pond in a freshly dug pit with 60 corpses already on the ground. They're standing on dead bodies. And then the fun began for the soldiers at least. They started having a competition of who could decapitate the prisoners faster. So they split off into teams of two. And each team, soldier one would be head the prisoner

in front of them with a sword. And soldier two would pick up the head and toss it into a pile of decapitated heads. And in the end, they would count the heads and see which team had won. The rest of the prisoners were waiting to be decapitated and watching in horror. But what could they do?

Other soldiers were stationed with machine guns to gun down any attempt to escape artist. Tang remembers how the soldiers were laughing and even taking pictures. So Tang is standing there waiting for his turn, thinking about, wow, my family is never going to find my body. They'll never have answers. They'll never know if I was able to flee to a different city,

or if I died where I died, how I died, who killed me, they will never get closure. He was deep in his thoughts when all of a sudden, the soldiers had a change of plans. They were getting tired from all the decapitating. It was quite the arm workout. So they started shooting into the crowd of prisoners, just free shooting.

And the person in front of Tang toppled back with that momentum and Tang fell back into the pit. Nobody noticed that he was alive. He ducked his head and waited and waited. And honestly, his plan would have never worked if the soldiers continued on with their decapitation plans, but here we are. The killing spree lasted about an hour

and Tang laid still, feigning death, while bodies were piled up on top of him, just covering him. Most of the soldiers got tired and left. Two soldiers remained to keep stabbing into the pit for good measure. Tang was stabbed five times, he did not scream a single time, he did not make noise, he did not move, and then he fainted from the pain. Later that day Tang's friends made it out of their house and started looking for him. Witnesses reported, oh Tang, that's your friend. He went to the prisoner's

march. Like he was marched off to the pit. So they snuck their way to the pit. The soldiers were long gone, nothing but the putrid smell of blood in urine was left, and they wanted to find Tang's body to make sure that he was laid to rest. But instead, they found a miracle. They found Tang injured, but alive under the dead bodies. They rushed him back home. And in that pit that day, hundreds of people had died. Tang was the only survivor. Then we had Li Xiaoying.

Li was 18, and she was the bride of a military technician. So when the city was about to be invaded, her husband had to leave on a train packed with a bunch of Chinese troops. And Lee had to stay, she was too pregnant, even bored, the train she was seven months pregnant. And nobody knew how bad Nanjing was gonna get. They thought it was safer for her to stay in Nanjing,

than to get onto an overcrowded Jampag train. Now when the invasion started, Lee and her father fled to the safety zone. They're hiding in the basement of a local elementary school, and they thought that they would be somewhat safe here, but a few days later, Japanese soldiers broke in and dragged all the young men out, all the ones that could put up a fight. That's not a good sign.

She was in the safety zone, but she had heard stories, the hurtled whispers of what the soldiers do to women, and for the sake of her body and for herself and for her baby, Lee tried to take her own life by slamming her head against the concrete wall. A little bit about Lee, okay? She was not raised in a traditional household. Her parents did not teach her to be in a accommodating girl

or to be submissive and let the men lead. She was raised by a bunch of men who wanted her to be able to stand up for herself. Her mom had passed when she was young. She had her dad, her uncle, and her brother, and they were all either soldiers or policemen. So they knew in this patriarchy the only thing to keep a girl safe was to not get swallowed up, like she needed to have a fighting spirit. So Lee was tough from the get-go.

She had a bit of a short temper, I'm not gonna lie. Lee wanted to learn kung fufu really bad and her dad refused Not because she was a girl, but he said if she learned that she would terrorize the bully boys in the neighborhood Like she would bully the boys. It would be bad Even without Kung-fu, she's torturing the neighborhood boys, so we can't do that So when Lee slammed her head on the concrete wall She thought that her life was to come to a short end, but she didn't die.

Instead, someone had taken her to an empty room in the basement. She woke up on a small mattress. She starts hearing footsteps outside the door. They're coming. They're going to come grab her. She could hear the screams of other women being dragged out of the other rooms, and then the door opened.

One soldier walked in, eyeing Lee, and she was lying frozen on the mattress and slowly he walked looking her up and down and before he realized what was happening, Lee made her move. She jumped up from the mattress and grabbed his BNA from his belt and flung him against the wall. He grabbed her wrist and got his BNA back. Side note, the soldier is in full battle gear and Lee is wearing a cotton cheapow, which restricts her movement by a lot. So she's playing up a good fight. She kept kicking the soldiers. He literally could not fend for himself

here to call for backup. So two more soldiers ran into the room and for a few seconds they all stood shocked. Like, are we seeing what I think we're seeing? But then they snapped out of it. They aimed their mayonnaise at Lee. She grabbed the original soldier, used him as a human shield, but the soldiers did get her. They slashed her face, knocked at her teeth, and when she felt the blood fill in her mouth, she was so angry, she spitted into their eyes. There was blood everywhere.

At least at that moment it was weird, it was stupid, probably, but I had no fear in my head. I was just pissed. But in the end, a soldier plunged his knife into her stomach and she blacked out. They left her for Dan. When the remaining survivors found her, they got Lee's dad, who was not taken by the troops

he was elderly. And they just started silently digging a small grave behind the school for her. But in the last second, before burying her, someone noticed bubbles forming in her mouth, blood bubbles. She was breathing. They rushed her to the hospital, stitched her up. a second before burying her, someone noticed bubbles forming in her mouth, blood bubbles. She was breathing. They rushed her to the hospital, stitched her up.

She suffered a miscarriage while she was seven months pregnant, which is a really long time, but she would be in pain for the rest of her life. She had a hole in her nose that would leak mucus forever. The whites of her eyes had been stabbed, but thankfully she didn't go blind. But whenever she felt sick or the weather was a bit dry, she would have tears uncontrollably running down her eyes had been stabbed, but thankfully she didn't go blind. But whenever she felt sick or the weather was a bit dry, she would have tears uncontrollably running down her eyes. There were scars all over her face. They were obvious, and terrible, and they

made her feel ashamed. But thankfully, even after her traumatic miscarriage, she was able to conceive again. She had children and later grandchildren and, when interviewed by Iris Chang as a grandma. She would say her biggest regret in life was not learning kung fu from her father, otherwise she would have enjoyed the pleasure of killing all three Japanese soldiers that day. Then there's Robert. Robert Wilson was a surgeon.

Actually, he was the only surgeon left in Nanjing. All the other surgeons had fled, but Robert was 33. He came from a family of Methodist missionaries and fleeing was not an option for him. So just a bit side note, Robert had the knowledge and the skills to be a surgeon. He grew up in the US, but he was born in Nanjing. His parents had worked as a minister

and taught middle school in Nanjing. By the age of 17, he went to Princeton University and later Harvard Medical School. So the guy is very smart. And after graduating, he went to Princeton University and later Harvard Medical School. So the guy is very smart. And after graduating, he went back to Nanjing and he worked at the University of Nanjing's hospital. When the invasion started, Robert's wife and his kids, they all fled.

But Robert was like, I have to stay. Because I was born here, and I feel like the people of Nanjing are my people. He didn't have the resources or the speed to help as fast as the troops were torturing and killing. Robert wrote to his wife about the horrors that he saw every single day, not only was his life in danger every day,

but when little girl he saw, there was a bomb about to go off, like a little grenade, and she turned away and crouched down into a fetal position to protect herself. But it blew her entire buttocks off her body. It ripped it off her body. He extracted large pieces of shrapnel from people's bodies, soldiers who lost arms and legs and private areas, castrated eyeballs.

Eyeballs being gaged out. He had to help thousands and thousands of mutilated people showing up at the hospital. But the worst part was when he was done. They would just be sent right back out into the danger zone. There was no safety, there was no home, there was no recovery. Even Robert felt it. He once came home to find soldiers ransacking his entire place. And because they had been in his place for a while, they had known that he was a surgeon, a white surgeon. So they were above harming a surgeon at this point. So they saw him, walked past him, stuffed more things in their pockets and left. Robert said the

most insulting thing was on the second floor. Someone had pooped on the floor right next to the toilet as a good old f*** you. He saw women that were coming to be operated on. They had their stomach slashed open and their stomachs trailing out. Men who the troops tied to burn alive together were coming in charred and horribly disfigured. Another woman came in. Her head was nearly cut off. It had to be held in place. She tried to explain to Robert that she was taken by Japanese soldiers to their medical units. She was by the day to wash clothes, so all day she just washes Japanese troops clothes and then she would be raped at night by

frustrated soldiers. At night she was raped by 15 to 20 soldiers but if you were considered pretty or young you would be raped 40 times in one night. When they were done with her and they thought her time was up they slashed her neck. She pretended to die and when they left she crawled all the way to the hospital, holding her head so it wouldn't fall off. Those are just some of the stories of survivors. Most victims would never really get to share their story. So for an incredibly short period of time,

the rapes stopped because General Matsui, the general that was supposed to be in charge of the invasion, remember him? He was visiting Nanjing. He had heard it went well. The invasion was successful. They had conquered the city. So the troops, they were going to hold this big parade to celebrate their win.

But the troops were like, Matsui is not going to be okay with what we did. We've been running this thing underneath him for a while. He's not going to, sure, crimes happen in wartime. But we have obliterated the city and like raped anyone. So they strategically cleared a large bowl of art where the parade was gonna be held and a couple of roads to get Metzui from the airport to the, or wherever he was flying in

to the little dinner place and then back. So just strategically, the route that he was gonna take was cleaned of all the dead bodies and all the blood and was put back together. Like it was like a fake set for a movie. But obviously Matsui is smart. He started to suspect that something was amiss during his little celebratory dinner party. He called the staff conference the next day and ordered all unnecessary troops to be transferred out of Nanjing.

Matsui discovered the truth and he sat there and he told his aide. I now realize that we have unknowingly brought a most grievous effect on this city. Matsui discovered the truth, and he sat there, and he told his aide. I now realize that we have unknowingly brought a most grievous effect on this city. When I think of the feelings and sentiments of many of my Chinese friends who have fled from Nanjing and the future of our two countries, I cannot but feel depressed. So it seems like... This is why I want to say it's very tricky. It seems like General Matsui, he was taking orders from Japan.

But he wanted to conquer, he wanted to invade Nanjing. But I don't think that he wanted it like this. War crimes happen because not every single soldier is going to be supervised all the time. There are bad apples, but he was never wanting the obliteration and the rape of an entire city. Like this was beyond war, this was beyond strategy, this was beyond winning award for your country. This was just rape. He said, I personally feel sorry for the rage that had been on to these

people, but the army must continue its course. I offer my sympathy with deep emotion to a million innocent people. Matsui rebuked 300 officers, commanders, and others for their orgy of violence in Nanjing. And before leaving Nanjing, Matsui did something nobody expected. He didn't interview with the New York Times, and he told a correspondent that the Japanese Army is probably the most undisciplined Army in the entire world, which that's a very big thing to say. Okay, I know it sounds like nothing compared to what this people of Nanjing had gone through, but these are really scathing words. People said in the history of Japan, no official that was that high up had said such mean things about their own troops, especially to an enemy nation.

Because remember, this is World War II. Japan and the New York Times, the US, not on good terms. Matsui was in Nanjing for two days. His disapproval did nothing really, because right after he left the raping and pillaging continued. Side note, Matsui would later be hanged for war crimes. So they kind of just blamed him for what happened in Nanjing, even though technically he wasn't in charge, but like he was. But I don't know, I feel like more people should have been hanged for war crimes. So they kind of just blamed him for what happened in Nunging, even though technically he wasn't in charge, but like he was. But I don't know, I feel like more people should have been hanged for war crimes, but it was a handful of people. So news gets out via the

New York Times and other media outlets that Japanese troops have pillaged and raped women all over Nunging. Now, this next thing I'm going to say is both disturbing and controversial and alleged. So keep this in mind. It is alleged that the higher up generals in the Japanese military realized that the world was judging the shit out of them. For the rape of tens of thousands of innocent women, this felt like the olden days, like who goes to a town and just completely rapes everybody.

Like what are you barbarians? Like this is weird. People were yelling at them. So rather than stopping their troops and trying to control the sheer number, I mean they can't really control them like that, and reprimand them for their actions, literally throwing these rapists in jail,

it's a legit that the higher ups decided that they would have to create an underground rape network for the soldiers to release their wartime frustrations so that they would never go into a city and just ripen as in people. Essentially, yeah, it's alleged that they created an underground system for military sex trafficking called comfort women.

Yeah. Now, there is a lot of tends history between China and Japan or between even Korea and Japan about comfort women. I believe to this stage, Japan has not acknowledged the existence of comfort women, but there have been survivors from all over East Asia and Southeast Asia from anywhere between Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, to East Asia, South Korea, China,

everywhere to say that comfort women existed and survivors have come out to talk about their experiences, their traumas as comfort woman, but it has not been acknowledged by the government, which is why I say it's alleged. So allegedly, the government purchased lured or straight up kidnapped between 80 to 200,000 women from China, Korea, Philippines, Indonesia, and a lot of other places in Asia. And created brothels for their troops allegedly to rape women so that they would never be caught

raping local women. And the rape of Nanjing would never happen in another city because that would be bad press internationally. Because war is one thing. Killing soldiers is one thing. You know, going into a town and raping women and children, that's not really approved of. Now the government again has denied this.

They insist that if there were illegal brothels catered towards the Japanese troops, it was run by private business owners. So like pips, you know. But allegedly, there seems to be documents and records of existence of these brothels in the Japanese Defense Agency's archives, but I don't know. It's a legit. So it's not that, oh, it's a legit that these existed. It's more so a debate about who created the brothels.

That's the debate. The first official comfort house, a ledgerly open year in Nanjing in 1938. And it was just sex trafficking. I, like, these women, comfort women, as I guess what they were called, well, no, that's what the public calls them. To a lot of troops, it's said that they were called public toilets.

So, they were treated as objects. They were gang raped. They were objects for troops to release their pent-up wartime anger, energy, and frustrations on. The women were seen as tools subhuman. They were on the same level to these soldiers as a bowl of rice. It was thought that you need to feed troops so they can fight in the war. You need to let troops rape so they can fight in the war.

For these women, there was no comfort. There was only hell. Allegedly, many women repeatedly tried to commit suicide while being held hostage in these comfort brothels. It said that if they didn't take their own life, they were murdered, or they died of painful diseases that took over their entire bodies. Those who did survive, they would endure a lifetime of shame and isolation and trauma.

What's interesting is that even now in Nanjing, there is almost this veil of secrecy and this veil of shame of usually when something like that happens in history. Usually when something like that happens in history, you will have a lot of babies born from rape, but there has not been a single reported baby born in Nanjing due to the rape of a Japanese soldier. But statistically that wouldn't make sense. So there is a lot of shame involved for these women that just re-traumatizes them even more. It's that that in one of these comfort houses there was a girl, a 15-year-old Chinese girl, who was taken, and she had witnessed the murder of her entire family. And for a month and a half, she suffered through two to three rapes a day.

The only reason that she stopped being raped was because she had contracted so many diseases from the constant rapes that no soldiers wanted to rape her anymore. One day there was a nice Japanese soldier who spoke Chinese. And maybe he wasn't, I don't know, maybe he did visit the comfort house. I don't know why he took pity on her, but he saw her sobbing in the corner and was like, what's wrong? And she told him that she was being raped and he felt so bad, he picked her up, drove her back into the city of Nanjing and handed her a piece of paper of the address to the local comfort zone, or to the local safe zone.

She rushed there and thankfully she got medical help. Speaking of safe zones, the safe zones were not that safe. I mean, evident by what happened to lead, right? But the soldiers made a game of snatching women from safe zones to rape. They were called, these raids were called the lottery. They would go into safe zones trying to kidnap women to rape that, like a game.

Sometimes they were just raped. Sometimes the women were brought to the comfort homes to be kept for other soldiers to rape. And finally, January 1st of 1938, Japan inaugurated a new city government for an unging. Essentially, most of the pillaging in rape was going to be over. The city was staffed with Chinese officials, but the Japanese officials controlled them. Shops were starting to open up again. People were going back to work, but conditions were horrible.

Even if you were suspected of not being loyal to Japan, you would be killed. You were encouraged to spy on your neighbors, to stitch on your own family members. Taxes were insane. Rent extortion was out of control. I mean, after all everything that this villains went through, it was not good.

All the extra money was being used to finance the salaries of the new Japanese officials in power. Japanese employers treated many locals, the Chinese laborers like slaves, they would kill them at the slightest infraction. A woman was beheaded for using the restroom. A man was tied up with a rope and stone to death after being

falsely accused of stealing a Japanese man's sweater. The Japanese officials drained the city of its gold and money and replaced it with worthless military currency, like not even Japanese currency, but like military currency. Then it got worse. The Japanese employers and officials started using opium as a form of payment. They started drugging all this villains, because a group of addicted people are easier to control, and it's easier to excuse why you might enact acts of violence on them.

So, OBM is a depressant. It's a highly addictive drug that for the short term causes euphoric feelings for the long term, it's horrendous. It was just another way for the officials to control everyone. They wanted to drug them up and get dependent on them for their next fix. Heroin cigarettes were being given out for good work. Kids as young as 10 years old were hooked on heroin. At that point, about one-third of the population was hooked on drugs.

And if you're like, why didn't they just not take it? Well, they're not getting paid. And the horrors of what they just saw in Nunging, like this is their only inkling of hope, the only way to deal with intense trauma. Some citizens even saved up all their opium and tried to overdose to end their lives. But that's not all.

The officials had opened up a medical facility with a giant brick wall around it, and it was called Unit 1644. Listen, anytime there's war and there's a thing called Unit Something, I'm over it, because they were doing human experiments in nudging. They were injecting and feeding Chinese prisoners with varieties of poisons, germs, lethal gases,

injecting them with lethal doses of acetone, arsenic, cyanide, nitrate, I mean, everything. When Japan surrendered in World War II, that's when they were forced to pull out of China, and it was bad. They blew up that entire unit and destroyed all their data before Chinese troops could reach Nanjing. The only reason we know about the experiments

is because former scientists confessed to an American interrogator after the war. So after Nanjing, after the war, only a handful of Japanese war criminals would be tried and punished for their crimes, and all the rest would die as Japanese heroes. And it's said that the reason that Nanjing is so controversial. Yes, it has to do with the atrocities committed because this is not, this is like crazy wartime cruelty.

But it's said that Japan destroyed all documents about Nanjing before the Allied forces came in to confiscate war material. So now it almost seems like it's turned into a he said she said. And another reason was that right after the war, now I don't know how accurate this part is because it's not really in the textbooks, it's more of a speculation, right? But it's not that after the war, China was very focused on becoming an economic powerhouse in the global scale. In Japan, yeah, they had been weakened,

but they were still very important. So instead of sitting there and say, look what you did to us in Nanjing, they decided instead to go for economic strength for them now. So because they waited so long to say, hey, look what you did to us in Nanjing, there were some arguments with Japan, with Japan being like, it wasn't as bad as you said it was, or it didn't really happen like that at all. And you're only bringing this up now because you wanna start some shit about it.

Why didn't you say right after? So that's why there's a lot of heated emotions between the two countries. I mean, it seems like there's always been quite a bit of tension between the two governments. But I mean, I get it. Maybe you could say the details are debatable here and there, but it would be a slap in the face for all the victims if we sat here and said it never happened.

It doesn't matter what country you're from. It doesn't matter which government you think is better or better for their people. It really doesn't matter. That's not the point of this. The point of this is that people died and they were senselessly killed in the name of war. And if history has taught us anything, it's that we are doomed to repeat ourselves. So the least we can do is try to learn and not do. Just a final note, Iris Chene committed suicide in 2004. She shot herself through the mouth of the revolver. It's said that her mental health had been suffering up until that point in she had a mental

break. She was working on research for her fourth book, and Iris' family said her depression was caused by a myriad of factors. Genetics, her multiple miscarriages, her dozens of Chinese herbal supplements, overworking herself, being sleep deprived, heavy doses of psychologically damaging prescription medicine, and I assume the heavy subject matter she researched

and ultimately grew attached to, contributed to her spiral. At one point, Iris Chene became paranoid and afraid that Japanese right-wing extremists were out to get her because of that book. So I guess we try not to forget, right? And we try to sympathize with the victims. Iris Chene once said, when you believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years. But when you do not believe you have a future, you think in terms of generations and years,

but when you do not believe you have a future, you live not just by the day, but by the minute. And can you imagine how long every single minute was for these victims during the invasion? And that is the story of the rape of Nanjing. I know it was kind of historical today, but I felt like it was an important case, especially with the TikTok guy going viral. I saw a lot of comments that were like, wait, what happened? I did not learn this in world history. And honestly, I didn't either. I'm not going to lie to you that TikTok guy sent me into a spiral and I was like, okay, I've heard about this book, The Rape of Nanjing. I got to read it, so give it a read. It is depressing though, so just be warned.

Stay safe out there. I will see you guys on Wednesday for the main episode. Bye! Give it a read. It is depressing though, so just be warned. Stay safe out there. I will see you guys on Wednesday for the main episode. Bye!