In December of 1937, invading Japanese soldiers attacked Nanking - now called Nanjing - looting and burning large sections of the Chinese city. By some estimates, in the four months that followed, the Japanese soliders in Nanking killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and raped nearly 80,000 women.
The horror and heroism of what is now called the Nanking Massacre, its historical context and the current controversies surrounding the event will be the focus of a talk by Yale historian Beatrice Bartlett at 4 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 31, in the Divinity School's Marquand Chapel, 409 Prospect St.
In conjunction with Professor Bartlett's talk, the Divinity School has mounted an exhibition titled "American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre," featuring first-hand documents and photographs about the historic event from the collections of the school's Day Missions Library. Both the talk and the exhibit are free and open to the public.
The atrocities that occurred in Nanking -- which Japan has not acknowledged to this day -- were observed by 27 Westerners, including 15 Americans who remained in the city throughout the period. Nine of the Americans were Christian missionaries, and their letters, diaries, reports, and photographs document the incidents.
"It is a horrible story to relate; I know not where to begin nor to end," said one of those witnesses, James H. McCallum, in a letter written Dec. 19, 1937. "Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape, rape, rape! We estimate at least 1,000 cases a night and many by day. In case of resistance or anything that seems like disapproval, there is a bayonet stab or a bullet ... Those who are suspected of being soldiers as well as others, have been led outside the city and shot down by hundreds, yes thousands."
Masses of terrified Nanking citizens crowded into the Safety Zone, an area established and protected by missionaries and several other Westerners -- including John Rabe, a German and a loyal member of the Nazi party whose diary was recently tracked down by Iris Chang, an independent researcher working at Yale. One of the two extant copies of Rabe's diary in the United States was recently donated to Yale by his granddaughter.
According to Nancy Chapman, president of the Yale-China Association, the "savagery" that occurred at Nanking is "emblematic of a larger pattern of exploitation characterizing Japan's relations with China throughout the 20th century, while the failure of the Allies to impose significant war reparations on Japan left many victims of the war feeling that their suffering had gone unrecognized and uncompensated. ... The Japanese government's seeming reluctance over the years to confront honestly and fully the nation's wartime record, and especially the emergence in Japan in the 1980s of right-wing politicians and revisionist historians, who publicly dismissed accounts of the massacre as exaggerations and even fabrications, allowed memories of the Nanjing massacre and other wartime atrocities to fester like open wounds.
"Not surprisingly," she adds, "there is a sense of outrage and urgency that characterizes the efforts of historians and others committed to setting the record straight."
For further information, contact Martha Smalley, research services librarian and curator of the Day Missions Collection at the Yale Divinity School Library, 432-6374.