Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Long before Japan’s “official” declarations of war on December 7, 1941, Japan was carrying out a full-scale undeclared war on China from 1937 onwards. In that war, the Japanese military killed millions of Chinese, often in barbaric ways such as using tied-up Chinese prisoners for bayonet practice to toughen the attitudes of Japanese soldiers, killing several hundred thousand Chinese civilians at Nanking in December 1937–January 1938, and killing many others in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid of April 1942. Although denial of these killings is widespread in Japan today, they were well documented at the time, not only by Chinese but also by foreign observers, and by photographs taken by Japanese soldiers themselves.