#rape of nanjing

[lesbianamalvada]

First ARC I ever received and it was straight ass. I get dark romances and enemies to lovers are hot, like I get it. But I'll never understand writing a fantasy story based on THE WORST atrocity that ever happened to your people. Probably up there as one of the worst atrocities of all time. And you make the main character a spineless pick-me traitor who falls in love with a colonizer prince who commits the fantasy version of Unit 731. 0/5 stars.

[littlegildedswallow]

I'm 5 feet tall with a delicate build, and I work out regularly. No amount of body-building changes the fact that the average man could easily wrap his entire fucking hand around my neck and EASILY choke me to death, or break my wrists or my fucking spine. That terrifies me. It terrifies me than in a real one on one fight to the death, I'd probably be the one dying. I'm thinking of that video where a woman stabbed a guy with a big knife like 15 times, and he still kept fighting, whaling on her. What the fuck are those tiny "self defense" blades supposed to accomplish ? My best bet would probably be to slice his jugular or push my thumbs into his eye sockets, but how the fuck am I supposed to do that if he's restraining my arms. It TERRIFIES me that I can't fight, and even if I could, I'd probably not stand a chance against the average man, and definitely not if there were more than one.

Do any of you know self defense tips that ACTUALLY work? No convoluted moves. If a brute has got me in a fucking chokehold, I won't be thinking about the steps of popular self defense moves. I'll be panicking, losing strength and consciousness. The way i see it, my best bet would be carrying a fucking dagger, but even that requires intense training to learn how to use efficiently.

[frida-kahl-of-the-rocky-horror]

History repeats itself

[ayx79]

[boricuacherry-blog]

I am being sued for defamation for Okinawa Notes. During the Battle of Okinawa, the Japanese military ordered the people on two small islands off of Okinawa to commit suicide. They told them that the Americans were so cruel that they would rape the women and kill the men. They said they were better off killing themselves before the Americans landed. Each family was given two grenades. On the day the Americans landed, more than five hundred people killed themselves. Grandfathers killed sons, husbands killed wives. I argued that the leader of the defending troops stationed on the island was responsible for those deaths. Okinawa Notes was published almost forty years ago, but about ten years ago a nationalistic movement began that seeks to revise history textbooks in order to erase any mention of the atrocities Japan committed in Asia, during the twentieth century, such as the Nanjing Massacre and the Okinawa suicides. Many books have been published about the Japanese crimes in Okinawa but mine is one of the few still in print. The conservative faction wanted a target, and I became that target. Compared to when the book was published in the seventies, the current right-wing attack against me seems far more nationalistic, part of a resurgence in emperor worship. They claim that the people on the islands died out of a beautifully pure feeling of patriotism for the emperor.

-Kenzaburo Oe, 2007

[ilovegirlssomuch123]

Holy shit check the rbs op is going to bat for literally north korea

It’s incredible just how quickly you find racist shit when looking through a terf account

[hrizantemy]

"...Hybern’s invasions—actual horrors. It’s not just some battles between armies; it’s full-on carnage and destruction. The soldiers aren’t just killing—they’re raping women, torturing people, and completely dismantling the lives of anyone they come across."... It reminds me of imperial japan invasions, I was pretty sleeping during history classes but the way hybern acts is like a short small badly searched homework about some of the war crimes committed, such as nanjin massacre (before someone says it is racist to say this kind of thing, as i saw it happening once in twitter) like there was so much shit happening and some got records, I don't recommend searching it for people with triggers bc that is bad, that all truly happened.

Yes, absolutely. I think people sometimes forget that SJM draws a lot of inspiration from real-world history, especially when it comes to war and the atrocities that come with it. The way Hybern’s armies are described—committing acts of senseless violence, rape, and destruction—isn’t just fictional horror. It reflects the very real and brutal history of what happens in wars throughout time, like the Nanjing Massacre you mentioned, or countless other examples of war crimes that have been committed.

It’s uncomfortable, but it’s important to recognize that this kind of cruelty has existed—and still does. When SJM writes about Hybern, it feels like a deliberate attempt to showcase the reality of war, even in a fantasy setting. It’s not just battles between armies where everything is noble and heroic; it’s the devastating, inhumane cost of war on innocent people.

I think it’s valid to draw comparisons to history, like with Imperial Japan or other wartime atrocities, because it adds context to why Hybern’s actions are so horrifying. This isn’t about being racist or insensitive; it’s about acknowledging how SJM is likely pulling from real-life events to make Hybern’s evil feel all the more visceral and real. It makes their actions deeply unsettling because, unfortunately, we know things like this have happened in our world. And you’re right—those records are harrowing, and people with triggers should be cautious if they decide to look into them.

It’s a heavy topic, but I think recognizing the parallels helps to fully grasp the weight of what’s being portrayed in the story. Hybern’s army isn’t just a villainous force; it’s a reflection of real human atrocities, which makes their actions hit so much harder.

[troythecatfish]

Self Proclaimed “Cultured Weebs” when you ask them what they know about the Rape of Nanjing & Unit 731:

[valkyries-things]

IRIS CHANG // ACTIVIST

“She was a Chinese-American activist, historian and bestselling author. Her writings and teachings memorialised the stories of Chinese immigrants and their descendants, and continue to be invaluable sources on human rights, WWII and Cold War history, the Asian-American experience, Sino-American relations and the future of American civil liberties. She is best known for her best-selling 1997 account of the Nanjing Massacre, The Rape of Nanking, and in 2003, The Chinese in America: A Narrative History.”

[hantenguclonesimp-minuszoha]

Little bit history. Yay! Not.

I just learned about the Rape of Nanjing.

I will never look at Japan the same way again.

[flufflepuff-reads]

Tԋҽ Pσρρყ Wαɾ (Spoiler Free Review)

Aυƚԋσɾ: R. F. Kuang Rҽʅҽαʂҽ: 1st May 2018 Gҽɳɾҽ: Grimdark Fantasy Rαƚιɳɠ: 5 stars

"𝐒𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠. 𝐒𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐚𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤 𝐭𝐨 𝐧𝐨𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠"

Pɾҽɱιʂҽ:

War orphan, Fang Runin, tries to avoid being sold to an old man by applying to Nikara's most elite military academy. When she gets in, it is not the end of her struggles, at school she is faced with racism and abuse, all while a new war looms on the horizon.

"𝗪𝗮𝗿 𝗱𝗼𝗲𝘀𝗻'𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝗼'𝘀 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁. 𝗪𝗮𝗿 𝗱𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝗿𝗲𝗺𝗮𝗶𝗻𝘀."

Rҽʋιҽɯ:

The poppy war is probably one of the best built up fantasy novels of all time. It is a beautiful display of great world building, wonderful and real, complex characters and beautiful writing. This story has meaning, it has purpose and it does what other authors have shyed away from. However this story is NOT for the faint of heart. It is, although sometimes funny, first and foremost a war story. It is ugly, disgusting, brutal and it's real. It is real, because this war happened.

The poppy war is an alternative retelling of the 2nd Sino-Japanese war, set in a fantasy world that is HEAVILY based on china and it displays The Rape of Nanjing, one of the ugliest and darkest massacres in human history, in great detail. The gods and magic might not be real, but this war was. I have never ever heard or read something as vile in any other sort of media, this isn't a typical hero story. Kuang does not shy away from the undescribable horror that this massacre was and she does not lessen war in any way in this book. Trust me, this is not what you are used to.

Eventhough I felt the book was perfect, I struggled with the moral question of wether or not using a real massacre like this in a fantasy novel was ethical for a very long while. Who knows. I am not the authority to decide this matter, but here are some of my thoughts:

Kuang is by far not the first author to base a fantasy novel on real events and real wars, perhaps the most famous example would be J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings, however there is a fundemental difference in the way they do. Tolkien makes it a typical hero story, he poses no question wether or not war is right or wrong, he doesn't make it possible for you to question who the good guy is, because the Orcs are made specifically to kill and destroy, they live no other life, they serve no greater purpose. He may not be romanticising war, but he definetly lessens your understanding and expections of and around it. Kuang does the opposite, she shows you a real war. Nobody in her story is right and without fault, nobody gains anything from this war, all it brings is pain, death and suffering in abundance. To me, reading this book felt like a wake up call, suddenly I had to realise that war was nothing like I imagined, because no matter how hard I'd have tried, I could never have imagined these horros. These horrors which were the ends of real peoples lives, not too long ago. I think this understanding of things and our own world is important. In a very rough way this book educated me on a matter I had unknowingly closed my eyes on, and to me that is worth something. I think this book has a far greater purpose than just entertainment and if you think you can stomach it, I think you should read it.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Journal pages:

[captain-price-unofficially]

A 14 year old girl in the Nanjing hospital, who was gang raped in captivity 7-10 times daily for a month. The ordeal left her with permanent organ damage and three STDs.

[mykingdomforapen]

courage of stars ch2 | writer's commentary

Wow, people are still reading this fic!! Amazing!! Thank you so much gang, I so appreciate it...

Shorter notes today, however still a couple of things that would get too wordy for an author's note on Ao3, so let's get to it!

***

Cheng Xiaoshi looked back and immediately skidded to a stop. Behind him were his parents, but so were a wave of hundreds of parents clinging to their children. Instead of a stone path of combed dirt, everyone was running and tripping over wild, untamed trees. The sound of sirens howled in the distance.

Cheng Xiaoshi cried out to his parents, but he had lost his voice along the way. He didn’t understand what they were running from, or to where they were going, but his heart thundered with their fear. He wanted to run with them, far from the planes and the bombs that pelted the city below.

So if it isn't clear in the narrative, Cheng Xiaoshi is essentially traveling through time in this whole section. Particularly, he has stumbled about sixty-some or seventy years into the past, during the Japanese invasion during the Second World War. The Japanese bombed China quite a bit, and quite frequently as well. Civilians had to run to the mountains for safety, wait until the damage was done, and then come back down. Give or take some time, the bombers come back, and then up the hill the civilians went once more.

***

He was no longer on the mountaintop among the fleeing civilians. He was in a disheveled room, furniture thrown aside and clothes shredded on the floor. The soldiers with their rifles and bayonets were laughing and talking in a language that Cheng Xiaoshi could not understand. At their feet, a young woman was splayed out on the wooden floor, eyes dull with death.

He was too young to understand why the soldiers laughed at her, bloodied broomstick in hand. In truth, he would never be old enough to understand why. It was impossible to accept.

He knew this was the little children’s mother. Somehow, he knew this was a year before his soul crossed their path on the mountain.

One of the reasons this story's rating is bumped up to an M. One of the many atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army at the time was violent and nightmarish sexual assault, which was often paired with bodily mutilation. This is most famously done in Nanjing (aka Rape of Nanjing, or the Nanjing Massacre) on a massive scale. So my understanding of these children were that they were not originally from Guidu, but have come here to escape.

***

I should also note that Peidi University is not a real university (as far as I'm aware). It is a fictional name!

***

The second box–his father’s antique cameras, that Cheng Xiaoshi swore he would keep in better condition. A Dalai camera from the fifties, that his grandfather once used before Cheng Xiaoshi was born. A Qiyi camera that his father collected–the first official Chinese camera, now wrapped up in his mother’s old scarf to protect from gravity and time. A Nanjing model that he remembered Baba telling him stories about the camera’s history, but Cheng Xiaoshi couldn’t remember any of them.

Shoutout to this website for giving me a wonderful list and history of Chinese-branded cameras created during the Cold War! Cameras were such a high-end rarity for a great deal of the 20th century, so it was always special when someone had one, and was able to take family photos with it. I always laugh at Hasan Minhaj's joke in his Homecoming King special on Netflix when he talks about how his mother was the most sought after woman in town because her family had a camera(!!), because that's so very relatable.

[boricuacherry-blog]

Japanese armies invaded China's northern provinces and quickly captured the ancient Chinese capital Peking (now called Beijing), where Pamela Werner was murdered in 1937 [before the Japanese invasion - the case is still unsolved]. In this war, the Japanese enjoyed overwhelming superiority in numbers, training, and weapons.

While fighting was happening in Northern China, the Japanese launched a second front on the city of Shanghai, on the eastern coast of China. They captured Shanghai also in 1937. They were then able to move up the Yangtze River and lay seige to the Nationalist capital Nanking (now called Nanjing).

By the time of Nanking's capture, the Japanese already controlled large sections of China, and war crimes against the Chinese became commonplace.

This all took place during the Sino-Japanese War, in particular, the second Sino-Japanese war between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan, with the first war having taken place in 1894.

When Nanking fell to the Japanese troops, they immediately slaughtered thousands of Chinese soldiers who had surrendered to them, as well as civilians. For six weeks, life for the Chinese in Nanking became a nightmare. Bands of drunken Japanese soldiers roamed the city, murdering, raping, looting and burning the city at whim. At least twenty thousand Chinese women were raped in Nanking during the first four weeks of the Japanese occupation, and many were afterward mutilated and killed.

**Warning: Disturbing Content**

******************

When the bodies of murdered Chinese turned the gutters and the Yangtze River red with their blood, the Japanese were forced to refine their methods of slaughter in the interest of preventing the spread of disease. Batches of Chinese civilians were sent to slaughter pits, where they were buried alive, hacked to death with swords, used for bayonet practice, or poured with petrol and burned alive. The Japanese even posed with their dead victims - burned corpses, bayoneted babies, headless bodies, and disembowled women. Sons were forced to sodomize their own mothers and then were usually murdered. Unlike the Nazis, who tried to hide or at least obscure the scope of their atrocities on civilians, the Japanese flaunted theirs in full view of horrified foreigners with cameras, most of whom tried futilely to stem the slaughter, even as they recorded it on film.

"The Japanese took souvenir pictures of what they did, particularly to the women. Many were forced into pornographic poses before, after or during mutilation and death," said Iris Chang, the author of bestselling book The Rape of Nanking. "I had to omit the worst pictures from my book because I feared they might cause it to be banned from school libraries. And school libraries are where I want it most to be."

In fact, the ritual gang-rapes perpetuated by the Japanese Army would have only been hearsay if not for the photographs the soldiers themselves took of their crimes to send back home as souvenirs.

Though her grandparents managed to escape just before the Japanese entered Nanking, Chang found herself consumed with documenting the massacre before the last of the survivors passed away. In Nanjing she located 10 survivors, including one who was a pregnant teenager when the city was sacked.

"She actually fought off the Japanese soldiers who tried to rape her," said Chang. "They bayoneted her 37 times. She was photographed afterward at the hospital. She lost the baby, but somehow lived through it. She's obviously a very strong woman."

One woman, who was eight at the time, remembers her father being shot, and she and her mother being raped by soldiers. She still suffers to this day from the brutal attack.

Following the massive destruction of Nanking, China's capital was left in ruin. The Japanese government installed a puppet government headed by General Matsui Iwane (who declared the attack on Nanking) and his lieutenant, Tani Hisao, to rule over Nanking, where they maintained power until the end of World War II, after which both Matsui Iwane and Tani Hisao were tried and convicted of war crimes, leading to their execution. Unfortunately only a few Japanese were tried for their crimes against humanity in Nanking, with Japan refusing to even acknowledge the massacre even happened, as well as most people outside of Asia never having heard of it.

One week after the surrender of Japan on September 2, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur - the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers - ordered the arrests of Japanese suspects, including General Hideki Tojo. Twenty-eight defendants, mostly Imperial military officers and government officials, were charged. Seven defendants were sentenced to death by hanging and 16 defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment.

The defendants were:

Sadao Araki

Kenji Doihara

Kingoro Hashimoto

Shunroku Hata

Kiichiro Hiranuma

Koki Hirota

Naoki Hoshino

Seishiro Itagaki

Okinori Kaya

Koichi Kido

Heitaro Kimura

Kuniaki Koiso

Matsui Iwane

Jiro Minami

Akira Muto

Osami Nagano

Takasumi Oka

Shumei Okawa

Hiroshi Oshima

Kenryo Sato

Mamoru Shigemitsu

Shigetaro Shimada

Toshio Shiratori

Teiichi Suzuki

Shigenori Togo

Hideki Tojo

Charges were dropped for Shumei Okawa because he was found to be mentally unfit for trial. Two defendants, Yosuke Matsuoka and Osami Nagano, died of natural causes during the trial. Six defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. One defendant, Matsui Iwane, was sentenced to death. On December 23, 1948, the defendants were executed at Sugamo Prison with Allied Council as witnesses. Six defendants were sentenced to life in prison. Koiso, Shiratori, and Umezu died in prison while the other 13 were paroled between 1954 and 1956.

Eleven countries came together to form the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), convened on April 29, 1946 to try the leaders of Japan for joint conspiracy to start and wage war.

*Japanese History*

Before the massacre, Japan had recently been Westernized and modernized - but in weaponry alone - as they themselves were less than a century out of their Samurai past, with each soldier still reeling from the harsh authoritarian regime under which they served. Japan was an extremely isolated country and the general attitude was overwhelmingly nationalistic.

Living in isolationism for hundreds of years, the old world Japan of 1853 had been shocked into modernization by U.S. Navy Commodore Matthew Perry, who - with just four modern steam warships - had entered Tokyo harbour, trained his canon on the Emperor's place, then demanded and received from the Japanese government precisely the trade treaty that American politicians had long required. Japan's highly militaristic Imperial culture spent the next few years importing into their island as much Western weaponry as they could, taking advantage of the new Western technology to revive its Samurai informed ultra-authoritarianism both at home and abroad.

Right before the Japanese captured the Chinese city of Peking, overt hostilities were felt, due to the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 1937, when shots were exchanged between the Chinese and Japanese on Peking's outskirts. Thereupon full-scale hostilities began between the two nations.

There were the Nationalist Chinese and the Communist Chinese. Nationalist Chinese leadership had been holding their forces in reserve for a future struggle with the Communist Chinese, which hindered them in repelling the Japanese. By contrasts, the Communist Chinese, from their base in North Central China, began an increasingly effective guerrilla war against the Japanese troops in Manchuria and North China.

[radfemsiren]

The things happening in Khartoum are nearly identical to the Nanjing Massacre in 1937. Idk if you’ve read about that but it seems that people are, in a horrific way, repeating history.

Yes, it’s very horrific and upsetting. We can never forget about the women of Sudan, we have to keep talking about it, drawing attention to it… mass rape and torture absolutely do repeat over and over again, and women and children are always the primary victims. There are still new photos revealed about the evil that happened in nanjing, and it makes me wonder what will be revealed years from now about Sudan…

[suugrbunz]

and dont fucking get me started on the war crimes committed by japan that they didn't face any charges for such as the rape of nanjing or the "comfort" women... they massacred towns and raped girls of many ages... does that excuse the racism in the pacific? no but frankly my dear, i think there's a bigger issue than the racism that you'll find in the imperial japanese army; Such as bayoneting babies, raping women every day for hours on end, and let's not even discuss their POW camps.