“What I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story… For it is a story of such crime and horror as to be almost unbelievable… I believe it has no parallel in modern history.” These are words taken from the diary of George Fitch, one of the heroic leaders of the Nanking Safety Zone in Nanking, China. What happened there during the six weeks of Japanese occupation in December 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War is one of the foremost atrocities ever committed in the history of humankind. This is the story of the Rape of Nanking. After suffering the humiliation of being forced to sign treaties with the United States and the compulsory ending of Japan’s economic isolation in 1853, the Japanese people were left with a fierce resentment of foreign powers, which bolstered a wave of nationalistic sentiments and the adoption of the samurai ethic of bushido as the moral …show more content…
This zone was created to protect civilians from getting caught in the cross-hairs of the Chinese and Japanese armies as the latter marched to conquer the city, and it was meant to provide a safe haven for noncombatants until the city passed safely into Japanese hands (Chang, pg 106). The first refugees in the zone were those who lost or abandoned their homes, but after the city fell it housed not thousands but hundreds of thousands of Chinese people (Chang, pg 107). International committee members eventually let Chinese soldiers into the zone, but Japanese soldiers were able to pick out almost every soldier by examining for their hands for calluses, feet for blisters, backs for backpack marks and others indications of war, and though these soldiers were no longer armed, the Japanese murdered every one they could find (Chang, pg