Japanese forces entered Nanjing on 13 December 1937 after a pursuit up the Yangtze from Shanghai and, over roughly six weeks, executed surrendered Chinese soldiers and men of military age, killed civilians, burned large parts of the city and committed mass rape. Foreign residents who remained set up a Safety Zone that sheltered some 200,000 to 250,000 people and recorded what they saw in diaries, letters and films. The figures are sharply disputed. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East found in 1948 that over 200,000 Chinese civilians and prisoners of war were killed in and around the city in the first six weeks and recorded some 20,000 cases of rape in the first month; the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal of 1947 put the toll at more than 300,000, the figure inscribed at the memorial hall in Nanjing and used by the Chinese government. Japanese scholars differ widely: Hata Ikuhiko's estimate is around 40,000, other Japanese historians give figures between 100,000 and 200,000, and a revisionist current in Japan claims the massacre was greatly exaggerated or fabricated. Successive Japanese governments have acknowledged that killings of non-combatants occurred while declining to endorse a figure, and the Japanese foreign ministry states that it is difficult to determine the number of victims.
The Japanese Central China Area Army killed prisoners and civilians and committed mass rape after capturing the Chinese capital
Nanjing held over a million people before the Japanese advance and much of the population fled; the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone estimated 200,000-250,000 civilians sheltering in the zone, to which are added residents outside it, some 70,000-90,000 disarmed Chinese soldiers, and the rural populations of the surrounding counties where killing also occurred - roughly half a million people in total.
The low end is the estimate of the Japanese historian Hata Ikuhiko, which counts killings within the city walls over a shorter period; the high end is the finding of the 1947 Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and the figure maintained by China. The Tokyo tribunal's figure of over 200,000 sits between them. The disagreement turns on the geographic and temporal boundaries used, on whether executed prisoners of war are counted as massacre victims, on burial-society records whose reliability is contested, and on the politics of memory in both countries.
The killings, mass rape and burning of the city are documented in the diaries and reports of the foreign Safety Zone committee, in Japanese soldiers' diaries, in burial society records and in the evidence heard by the Tokyo and Nanjing tribunals.
China