Historical records defy ignorance

"How many people did the invading Japanese forces massacre in Nanjing? The official figure is 300,000 but there is no data to support this. There are only thousands of victims whose names and identities are known."

This is what Song Gengyi, a lecturer at Shanghai-based Aurora College, said when teaching her course on Dec 14, the day after the eighth National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre. After a video recorded by one of her students was posted and spread online, the college dismissed her on Thursday.

Song has left the college, but it is necessary to make the issue clear. It is true that not all the identities are known of the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre, the most notorious crime committed by the Japanese forces immediately after they captured the city, but that's only one atrocity testifying to the cruelty of the invading Japanese forces. Having massacred both residents and unarmed soldiers and plundered the city of Nanjing, the Japanese forces destroyed as much evidence as they could to try and escape the judgment of history.

Besides, the then Kuomintang government was so poor in social governance that it could not even accurately make clear how many residents were in the then capital.

Neither the Japanese forces' attempt to destroy evidence nor the Kuomintang's poor governance is sufficient reason to deny the number of victims was higher than the recorded figure. It was after World War II that a special committee on investigating the war crimes of the invading Japanese forces that determined a rough total for the number of victims.

In its verdict in the trial of Hisao Tani, who was held accountable for the massacre and sentenced to death, a court in Nanjing wrote clearly that "The Japanese army collectively massacred 190,000 Chinese people, while over 150,000 corpses of those killed randomly were buried later." The International Military Tribunal for the Far East also recorded the Nanjing Massacred in its verdict.

All these have long been historical conclusions. Song might not have meant to belittle the atrocity, but her words actually help the right-wing political forces in Japan to whitewash one of the most notorious war crimes.