1. The Chinese have apparently a special liking for talking about the cruel methods of murder used by Japanese soldiers at Nanking, such as, to quote from Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, decapitation, slicing off women's breasts, disembowelling women, live burials, castration the carving of organs, the roasting of people, hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks, slicing babies in thirds and fourths and so on. But all these atrocities are what the Chinese soldiers have been using for centuries past, but unknown to the Japanese.
2. To emphasize the inhumanity of the Japanese soldiers, they often go even as far as to say that Japanese soldiers took pleasure in tossing a little child into the air and piercing it with their bayonet as it came falling down. According to a famous Chinese history book, this is one of China's traditional methods of killing children, but this is in no way Japan's practice. Here again, they are telling their own story, not ours.
3. Why, then, are the Chinese so fond of repeating an exaggerated and distorted story of "Nanking rape"? One reason may be that, by so doing, they can make the world forget their own brutality: Remember that cannibalism or the practice of eating human flesh still persisted in China as recently as thirty years ago.
The second possible reason is that, by shifting the world's blame for their brutality onto the Japanese, they wish to be in a morally superior position to the Japanese.
The third is probably that, by making out Japan to be a fiendish nation, they wish to justify their aggressive political design.
4. All the Japanese, including newspaper reporters and news cameramen, who were then in Nanking, admit that a large number of plain-clothes Chinese soldiers (unlawful belligerents) were executed by the Japanese troops, but unanimously assert that there were no large-scale or systematic atrocities committed against civilians. The strange thing is that despite the world-famous tale of the holocaust of hundreds of thousands of Chinese or knee-deep pools of blood in the city of Nanking, not a single panoramic photograph of heaps of corpses in Nanking is known to us nor has even a single person come forth who has witnessed the scene of the holocaust. It may be safe, after all, to conclude that the repeated story of the slaughter of more than 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanking is one of the biggest lies ever told in history.
Japanese historians say that such charges stem from wartime hostile propaganda, possibly easily believed by the Chinese public even if such scenes were never actually witnessed, because they were precisely the ways in which Chinese often killed each other throughout their history, including this period. Many Chinese had suffered such fates at the hands of fellow Chinese, and the average man or woman knew next-to -nothing about Japanese culture. Such people make easy prey to Chinese propaganda.
The list includes killing opponents by 1) frying them alive, 2) driving nails into their bodies, 3) cut off ears and gouge out the eyes, 4) skinning the faces alive, 5)cut the bodies open while alive and pull out the internal organs, 6) pierce a rope through the nose and pull the victims around, and the list goes on.
Of these, methods 3), 4),5),6) were actually implemented against Japanese civilians and soldiers in Chinan in May of 1928 and in Tongzhou in July of 1937.
