This article examines the origins of the Nanking Massacre narrative, tracing its roots to U.S.-led wartime propaganda rather than Chinese initiative. It highlights the bravery of Chinese educators Song Gengyi and Li Tiantian, who challenged the politically enforced “300,000 victims” figure and opposed state-driven hatred, only to face immediate repression by Chinese authorities. Through detailed historical analysis, Masayuki Takayama exposes how the figure was constructed, amplified by GHQ-era Asahi Shimbun reporting, and later entrenched by Jiang Zemin. Essential reading for understanding propaganda, historical manipulation, and the courage of individuals who speak the truth under authoritarian regimes.

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Song Sensei Was Great — “There is no data supporting 300,000” / “We should not continue to hate” — Astonished to find truly admirable women in China

April 15, 2024 / April 7, 2022

This article is taken from Masayuki Takayama’s serialized column that adorns the final pages of this week’s newly released issue of Shukan Shincho.
This essay once again proves that he is the one and only journalist in the entire postwar world.
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for everyone around the world.

Song Sensei Was Great

The grand fabrication known as the Nanking Massacre is often said to be something the Chinese themselves devised.
That is not true.
The Chinese may be good at imitation, but they do not possess that kind of creative imagination.

“But wasn’t it Chiang Kai-shek who had the British correspondent Harold Timperley write about the Nanking Massacre?” people say.
That is also incorrect.
Timperley had actually worked for a long time at the American opinion magazine Asia.
The magazine was managed by R. Walsh, the husband of Pearl Buck, and was under the umbrella of the U.S. Committee on Public Information (CPI), which directed anti-Japanese propaganda.
The CPI consisted of the Secretary of State, the Secretaries of the Army and Navy, and representatives of the press, and it used American newspaper correspondents and missionaries stationed in China to carry out anti-Japanese propaganda.

William Donald of the New York Herald, who flew to Xi’an with Soong Mei-ling during the Xi’an Incident, was one of them, and he threatened Zhang Xueliang into releasing Chiang Kai-shek.
Though only circumstantial evidence exists, it is said that at this time Donald conveyed the words of U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR): “America has chosen Chiang Kai-shek and given China Manchuria and Mongolia. Now, as promised, strike Japan.”

After that, Chiang Kai-shek caused the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, massacred more than 200 Japanese civilians at Tongzhou, and finally attacked the Japanese concession in Shanghai with an elite force of 60,000.
As FDR intended, Japan was drawn into a quagmire of war with China, expanding its front from Nanjing to Wuhan.

FDR used the CPI to conduct propaganda that “wicked Japan is invading good and innocent China.”
The fall of Nanjing was used as material for this campaign.
American correspondents unanimously reported that “thousands were killed and women were assaulted.”
Missionary Bates, despite being a servant of God, also fabricated statements at the Tokyo Trials, claiming “the Chinese were killed in piles.”

However, the American-made Nanking Massacre narrative failed to interest even the Chinese themselves, who sensed it was an excessive lie.

Later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Having killed 200,000 innocent civilians, America needed a counterbalance—and thus brought up Nanjing again.

First, the Asahi Shimbun, which had submitted to GHQ, reported on December 8, 1945: “Twenty thousand people were killed in four days within the city of Nanjing, and chopped-up flesh was scattered everywhere.”
Yet at the time, an Asahi photographer on site had been taking pictures of smiling citizens and children standing alongside Japanese soldiers.

But twenty thousand was too few to counterbalance the atomic bombs.
Thus, in the judgment at the Tokyo Trials, the figure was raised by one digit to 200,000.
This was their assertion that the number corresponded to the two atomic bombs’ civilian death toll.

A respectable scholar would question such an arbitrary leap, but many scholars were not respectable.
Sho Fujiwara of Hitotsubashi University and Tokushi Kasahara of Tsuru University actively supported the 200,000 figure.
Fujiwara, for example, added a comment—like a Ken Shimura comedy line—saying, “Yes, this is Japanese poison gas,” in response to the smokescreen photo brought in by the Asahi.
He was a scholar to whom truth meant nothing.

Kasahara likewise used, as a frontispiece, a photo of women peacefully walking home under Japanese military protection, yet captioned it: “Women of Jiangnan abducted by the Japanese army,” “Raped and killed.”
He too felt no hesitation in lying.

However, Jiang Zemin, eager for ODA, clung to the “300,000” figure and had those characters engraved at the Nanjing Memorial Hall to cement it as fact.

It was the female teacher Song Gengyi of Shanghai Aurora Vocational School who questioned this during class.
“There is no data whatsoever supporting 300,000.”
“We should not continue to harbor hatred,” she taught.
She explained that Nanjing was fictitious and that the numbers were also fictitious.
A student secretly filmed this and posted it online, and she was immediately “dismissed” (People’s Daily).

The uproar continued.
Li Tiantian, a female teacher in Hunan Province concerned for Song’s safety, wrote on SNS: “I support her claims,” “Punish the student who tattled instead.”
Authorities rushed in, arrested Li, and—“with the approval of her family” (Yomiuri)—threw her into a psychiatric ward.

I am astonished that there were such admirable women in China.
By contrast, the Asahi Shimbun, which has long propagated the Nanking Massacre, has not reported a single word about what happened to them.
On the contrary, they rolled out Yoshida Yutaka, disciple of Fujiwara, to reaffirm the self-flagellating historical view.
Do they feel no shame calling themselves a newspaper?