Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller Page B

international reporters. "A few uninvestigated cases of rape were reported" was the way Life magazine cautiously chose to inform its readers.
    Despite the cynicism brought to bear by the Western press, stories of systematic mass rape in Nanking were unusually persis tent, so much so that the "Rape of Nanking" soon passed into common usage as the world-wide metaphor for that city's invasiop. In June of 1938 the Nanking International Relief Committee, the missionary group that reained in the city, completed a survey of damage in the Nanking area. Its sixty-page report was a model of the detailed fllinutiae of devastation. Injury and death to the Chi nese population was reported on a percentile basis, broken down by age, sex, previous employment and mode of death. Property loss from fire and looting by Japanese soldiers was estimated in neat, round sums from street to street. Loss of labor animals and damage to winter crops found permanent validation in separate columns marked water buff alo, oxen, donkeys, wheat, barley, broad beans, field peas, and, irony of ironies, rapeseed. As for the act that gave
    its name to the Rape of Nanking, the compilers of the official report had only this to say: "Among the injured females, 65 per cent were between the ages of 15 and 29, although the terms and method of inquiry excluded rape per se."
    Rape in Nanking might have passed out of history then and there, relegated in typical fashion to the dubious area of unsup ported wartime rumor. But as it turned out, the Allied Powers elected to hold an International Military Tribunal for the Far East once the global war was finished. In order to prove the awesome crimes against humanity, facts that a few years before had been inaccessible-"excluded" from the ever-so-proper "terms and method of inquiry"-suddenly loomed important. One of the de fendants in the docket at Tokyo was General I wane Matsui, the man in charge of the Nanking invasion.
    No raped women were called to testify at the Tokyo tribunal, but there were witnesses enough. The star witnesses, by and large, were the very same missionaries who had chosen to exclude rape from their official report of war damage. As it turned out, they had not been unmindful of the crime. Rather, the enormity of it appar ently had paralyzed them. A page from the Nanking diary of American missionary James McCallum was entered into evidence:

    Never have I heard or read of such brutality. Rape! Rape! Rape! We estimate at least i,ooo cases a night, and many by day. In case of resistance . . . there is a bayonet stab or a bullet. We could write up hundreds of cases a day.

    Mrs. Shui Fang Tsen, director of dormitories at Ginling Col lege, a missionary institution, submitted a lengthy deposition. At the start of the invasion the missionaries proclaimed Ginling an international safety zone, and the college grounds became a refuge for more than ten thousand frightened women and children. The "safety zone" hardly proved safe for women. According to Mrs. Shui, "Japanese soldiers would enter the grounds on the pretext of looking for soldiers, but were in fact looking for our girls." On the night of Decemoer 17, 1937, a gang of soldiers forcibly entered the college and carried off eleven young women. Nine later made their way back to the grounds, "horribly raped and abused." "We never heard any more of the other two girls," Mrs. Shui reported. This was a typical incident.

    Witness af ter witness told similar stories-girls dragged off by gangs of four or five men in uniform; abducted women forced to wash clothes for the Army units by day and to "service" as many as fifteen to forty men at night; women forced to perform sex shows for troops at play; fathers forced at gunpoint to rape their own daughters. Many ,of the stories had similar endings. When a group of soldiers was finished with a captured woman, a stick was some times pushed up into her vagina; in some cases the woman's head was severed. A statement from Mrs.