After Nanjing fell on 13 December 1937, Japanese Imperial Army troops spent six weeks killing, raping, and burning. Surrendered soldiers were executed along the Yangtze; tens of thousands of women were raped; the city was looted. That the atrocity occurred is established beyond doubt by foreign witnesses, survivor testimony, and Japanese soldiers' own diaries. What remains contested is scale: scholarly estimates range from tens of thousands to the 300,000 on China's national memorial. Japanese nationalist denial is not a dispute about evidence but a political stance. The unresolved reckoning keeps the massacre a live wound between two nations.
For about six weeks in the winter of 1937, a captured city became a byword for the horrors of war. The Japanese army had taken Nanjing, the Chinese capital, and what followed was mass murder on a scale that staggered the foreign witnesses who saw it. Soldiers machine-gunned prisoners along the river, killed civilians in the streets, and raped so many women that the event is also known as the Rape of Nanjing. A small foreign-led committee sheltered perhaps a quarter of a million people inside a safety zone, saving many lives despite repeated violations. That the atrocity happened is not in serious doubt. How many died is fought over to this day, and a strand of denial in Japan keeps the wound open between two nations.