The total death toll of the Nanjing Massacre is a highly contentious subject in Chinese and Japanese historiography. Following the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Imperial Army marched from Shanghai to the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, and though a large number of Chinese POWs and civilians were slaughtered by the Japanese following their entrance into Nanjing on December 13, 1937, the precise number remains unknown. Since the late-1960s when the first academic works on the Nanjing Massacre were produced, estimating the approximate death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of scholarly debate.

Currently, the most reliable and widely agreed upon figures place the massacre victims within Nanjing City Walls to be around 50,000, mostly massacred in the first five days from December 13, 1937; while the total victims massacred as of the end of March 1938 in both Nanjing and its surrounding six rural counties far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000. Hence, depending on the timeframe and the geographic scope, an empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range is from over 40,000 to under 200,000.

The center of the debate rests on the validity of burial records and oral history. A lesser debate rests on who among the dead should be included as "massacre victims". Numbers smaller or larger than the empirically verifiable, scholarly valid victimization range have been put forward by Japanese revisionists and the Chinese Communist Party. Some of the lowest estimates have counted only 10,000 deaths,"永久保存版 - 三派合同 大アンケート," Shokun!, February 2001, 183-192. while the government of China maintains that approximately 300,000 people were killed.

Background

In July 1937, war broke out in northern China between China and Japan, and by August the fighting had spread to the city of Shanghai.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 40. After capturing Shanghai the Japanese Army decided on December 1 to continue its military campaign to the capital city of the Nationalist government of China, Nanjing, which is roughly 300 kilometers west of Shanghai.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 50. Although the Japanese succeeded in surrounding Nanjing and defeating the Chinese garrison stationed there by December 13, few of the Chinese soldiers within the city formally surrendered.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 66-68. Instead they threw away their uniforms and weapons and hid among the city's civilian population.F. Tillman Durdin, "Japanese Atrocities Marked Fall of Nanking," New York Times, January 9, 1938, 38. Over the course of its subsequent occupation of Nanjing the Japanese Army hunted down the former Chinese soldiers within the city and in a large number of cases summarily executed them.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 91-93. At the same time soldiers of the Japanese Army also committed random acts of murder against civilians, and engaged in torture, rape, arson, and looting.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 129-137. These events are collectively known as the Nanjing Massacre.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 82.

Early estimates The Nanjing Massacre was reported internationally within a week of occurringMasahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 81. and the first estimate of the full death toll was published on January 24, 1938, in the New China Daily.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 167-168. Here Australian journalist Harold Timperley was quoted as stating that 300,000 civilians had been killed. However, Timperley's source for this number was the French humanitarian Father Jacquinot, who was in Shanghai at the time of the massacre, and it might also have included civilian casualties of the Battle of Shanghai. Timperley included a second estimate in his book published later the same year, Japanese Terror In China, which quoted "a foreign member of the University faculty" as stating that "close to 40,000 unarmed persons were killed within and near the walls of Nanking".HJ Timperley, Japanese Terror in China (New York: Modern Age Books, 1938), 46, 51. The source of this information was Miner Searle Bates, an American resident in Nanjing who had used the burial records of the Red Swastika Society in his calculations.David Askew, "Part of the Numbers Issue: Demography and Civilian Victims," in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 98.

These same estimates were commonly cited by reporters and the media. In his 1941 book The Battle for Asia, Edgar Snow states that 42,000 were massacred in Nanjing and 300,000 in total between Nanjing and Shanghai.Edgar Snow, The Battle for Asia (New York: Random House, 1941), 57.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 177-178. The 1944 film The Battle of China claims 40,000 were killed in the Nanjing Massacre.

Another early estimate was that of China's state-run Central News Agency, which reported in February 1938 that the Japanese had slaughtered 60,000 to 70,000 POWs in Nanjing.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 110. The same month a representative of the Nationalist Government of China claimed that the Japanese had killed 20,000 civilians during the Nanjing Massacre. However, in a 1942 speech Chiang Kai-shek raised that figure to "over 200,000 civilians".Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, "The Messiness of Historical Reality," in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 3-5. In 1938 the Red Army of the Chinese Communist Party reported the total death toll at 42,000 massacred. John Rabe, the German head of the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, estimated that between 50,000 and 60,000 Chinese were killed in Nanjing, though this estimate included both military casualties and massacred civilians.

After the end of the war between China and Japan in 1945, these estimates were in turn supplanted by the findings of two war crime trials, the International Military Tribunal of the Far East and the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. In one estimate the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal put the death toll at more than 300,000, though the Tribunal also recorded other estimates including one of 430,000.Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity As History," Sino-Japanese Studies, November 1990, 16. The International Military Tribunal of the Far East tallied up 155,000 victims of the massacre, though in their verdict against General Iwane Matsui this figure was modified somewhat to "upwards of 100,000 people".Ikuhiko Hata, "The Nanking Atrocities: Fact and Fable," Japan Echo, August 1998, 47-57.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 203, 219-223. However, the prosecution at these trials made little effort to verify the accuracy of their death toll estimates and a considerable amount of dubious and now discredited data was accepted by both tribunals.Minoru Kitamura, The Politics of Nanjing: An Impartial Investigation (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2007), 140-141, 155.

The first historian to make an academic estimate of the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre was Tomio Hora in his 1967 book Kindai Senshi no Nazo ("Riddles of Modern War History"), who argued in favor of 200,000.Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 60. Since then the death toll of the massacre has been a major topic of discussion among historians across the world.Tokushi Kasahara, "数字いじりの不毛な論争は虐殺の実態解明を遠ざける," in 南京大虐殺否定論13のウソ, ed. Research Committee on the Nanking Incident (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobo, 1999), 74-96.Daqing Yang, "A Sino-Japanese Controversy: The Nanjing Atrocity As History," Sino-Japanese Studies, November 1990, 18, 22-24. However, emotional arguments and political interference in the debate have tended to hinder the construction of an academic consensus on the number of people killed in the atrocity.Takashi Yoshida, The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 182.

Sources and application David Askew, a historian at Ritsumeikan University, states that the death toll of the Nanjing Massacre can be calculated by modern-day historians on the basis of four types of sources. The first type of source is oral history, but he calls this "the most problematic methodology in researching the incident" due in part to large discrepancies between the testimony of Japanese and Chinese eyewitnesses.

The second type of source is the burial records written down by Chinese charitable associations. The IMTFE stated that a total of 155,300 corpses were buried in and around Nanjing after the fall of the city, based on statistics from the Red Swastika Society and the Chongshantang, though many historians now discount the accuracy of the burials recorded by the Chongshantang. Consequently, Askew estimates that the true number of corpses buried in and around Nanjing was 17,500, whereas military historian Masahiro Yamamoto puts the number at 43,000.Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2000), 113. By contrast, Kasahara generally supports the higher burial estimates presented at the IMTFE, though he concedes that not all of the Chongshantang's figures can be accepted "at face value".Tokushi Kasahara, "Massacres outside Nanking City," in The Nanking Atrocity, 1937–38: Complicating the Picture, ed. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 66-69. However, both Kasahara and Yamamoto have noted that burial records can be problematic in ways that can exaggerate or underestimate the true death toll of the massacre. On the one hand, burial statistics combine massacre victims with Chinese combat casualties and thus exaggerate the death toll. On the other hand, they fail to include corpses that were destroyed rather than buried and thus underestimate the death toll.Tokushi Kasahara, 南京事件 (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1997), 220, 223, 226-227.

The third type of source is Japanese military records, which recorded the number of POWs the Japanese Army executed. However, Askew notes that Japanese units often exaggerated their body counts. When Yoshiaki Itakura, an independent writer who became one of the leading researchers of the Nanjing Incident,Minoru Kitamura, The Politics of Nanjing: An Impartial Investigation (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 2007), 6. analyzed the records of the Japanese Army, he multiplied his final tally by 0.6 in order to account for exaggeration and reached the total of 13,000 to 19,000 massacre victims.Kazutoshi Hando et al., 歴代陸軍大将全覧: 昭和篇(1) (Tokyo: Chuo Koron Shinsha, 2010), 141-142. Though Ikuhiko Hata has also used Japanese military records to calculate the death toll of the massacre, he does not account for exaggeration as Itakura did. Bob Wakabayashi, a historian at York University, found out on the basis of the records of the Japanese Army alone could prove that at very least 29,240 people, or more likely 46,215 people, were massacred by the Japanese in Nanjing in the opening weeks; when considering evidence other than military records, Wakabayashi concluded the total deaths in Nanjing and its neighbouring six rural counties in a 3-month period to be "far exceed 100,000 but fall short of 200,000".