Japan Invades China and Commits Mass Atrocities at Nanjing
Full-scale war with China brings the capture of Nanjing and weeks of mass killing and rape
Quick facts
- Nanjing captured
- 13 December 1937
- Estimated deaths at Nanjing
- c. 200,000 (combined military and civilian)
- Comfort women system
- 1932-1945; est. 200,000 women coerced
- Japanese government acknowledgment
- 1993 Kono Statement
What happened
The Second Sino-Japanese War began in July 1937, and after securing early footholds in China, Japanese forces committed what the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum's Holocaust Encyclopedia calls brutal war atrocities, the best known being the Nanjing Massacre, which began when Japanese troops captured the Chinese capital on 13 December 1937. History.com records the toll as an estimated 150,000 male prisoners of war killed, an additional 50,000 male civilians massacred, and at least 20,000 women and girls raped over the following weeks, with entire villages destroyed. Separately, from 1932 until the end of the war, the Imperial Japanese government operated a system of military-run "comfort stations," recruiting or coercing an estimated 200,000 women and girls, mostly from Korea and China, into sexual slavery for Japanese soldiers, described by the Association for Asian Studies as "the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history."
Why it matters
The Nanjing Massacre and the comfort women system remain the central, still-contested issues in China-Japan and Korea-Japan relations, shaping diplomatic disputes and public memory into the 21st century. Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary acknowledged government and military involvement in the comfort station system in a 1993 statement, though the acknowledgment continues to be criticized by victims' advocates as incomplete.
How we know
The Nanjing Massacre is documented through Japanese military records, foreign diplomats and journalists present in the city at the time, and postwar war crimes tribunal testimony; the comfort women system is documented through survivor testimony, wartime military records, and Japanese government-commissioned historical studies including the 1993 Kono Statement.
Sources
- HISTORY (A&E Networks). The Rape of Nanking begins · Reputable sourcehistory.com · The domain "history.com" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Association for Asian Studies. Teaching about the Comfort Women during World War II and the Use of Personal Stories of the Victims · General sourceasianstudies.org · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match).
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Related timelines
- World War II → · See the World War II timeline for how the war in China connected to the wider Pacific War and Japan's alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.