Then the japanese officer proposed a test of my

Then the Japanese officer proposed a test of my courage. He unsheathed his sword, spat on it, and with a sudden mighty swing he
brought it down on the neck of a Chinese boy cowering before us. The head was cut clean off and tumbled away on the group as the
body slumped forward, blood spurting in two great gushing fountains from the neck. The officer suggested I take the head home as a
souvenir. I remember smiling proudly as I took his sword and began killing people.''
After almost sixty years of soul-searching, Nagatomi is a changed man. A doctor in Japan, he has built a shrine of remorse in his
waiting room. Patients can watch videotapes of his trial in Nanking and a full confession of his crimes. The gentle and hospitable
demeanor of the doctor belies the horror of his past, making it almost impossible for one to imagine that he had once been a ruthless
murderer. "Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water,'' Nagatomi said.
"They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements.
I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into
an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil.''
From "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II" by Iris Chang.
Published by Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright 1997 by Iris
Chang.

Eyewitness History: The Rape of Nanking, 1937
The following eyewitness account appears in:: Rabe, John, The Good Man of Nanking, Erwin Wickert (ed.) (1998); Chang, Iris, The
Rape of Nanking (1998).
Context
In 1931, the Japanese occupied the Chinese province of Manchuria transforming it into a Japanese puppet
state. It was the first step in Japan’s drive to control all of China. Six years would elapse before the Japanese
took the next step in their plan of conquest.
In early July 1937, Japanese and Chinese troops clashed in Peking in an incident at the Marco Polo Bridge.
Using this as justification, the Japanese launched a full-blown assault on the city at the end of the month
utilizing massed infantry, tanks and airstrikes. It did not take long for the city and the surrounding area to fall to
the Japanese.
The fighting moved to the south in August when the Japanese attacked Shanghai and pursued the retreating
Chinese army up the Yangtze valley to the national capital at Nanking. The Japanese began their attack on
that city early in December, forcing its surrender on December 13. Then the horror began.
The population of Nanking was subjected to an uncontrolled butchery that came to be known as "the Rape of
Nanking." As the Japanese army poured into the city, fleeing residents were shot or bayoneted. Thousand of
suspected members of the Chinese Army who had shed their uniforms for civilian clothing, were apprehended,
their hands tied behind their backs and led en mass to killing fields where they were shot, beheaded, used for
bayonet practice or killed in some other gruesome manner before being dumped into mass graves. Thousands
of others were buried while still alive. Rape was rampant as thousands of women were repeatedly forced into
brutal sex and often murdered once the lust of their attackers had been satisfied. The carnage lasted for six