1. Chinese Propaganda
  2. Japanese Propaganda

The Nanking Atrocities

Media Blackout



"We heard yesterday that the Japanese News Agency, Domei, reported the population returning to their homes, business going on as usual and the population welcoming their Japanese visitors, or words to that effect," wrote one of the missionaries in the Nanking Safety Zone, Robert Wilson, in his diary on December 21, 1937.



Article 12 of their censorship guideline for newspapers issued in September 1937 stated any news article or photograph "unfavorable" to the Army was subject to a gag.

The 13th Article affirmed that reports and photos concerning arrests or interrogations of Chinese soldiers and civilians that would give "an impression of torture" wouldn't be approved.

The 14th prohibited any "photographs of atrocities" but endorsed reports about the "cruelty of Chinese" soldiers and civilians.121



Without knowing about international condemnations, people in Japan celebrated the defeat of their enemy country's capital nationwide with the press setting off the jubilant atmosphere by such headlines as "Banzai on the summit of Purple Mountain!" "Two great functions commemorating the victory to be held by Tokyo Asahi newspaper," and "Nanking entirely conquered: Historical grand ceremony three days ahead in the walled city."123

Propagation of Positive Images

Japanese troops giving out cigarettes to Chinese prisoners of war.



"Some newspaper men came to the entrance of a concentration camp and distributed cakes and apples and handed out a few coins to the refugees. And a moving pictures was taken of this kind of act," wrote another missionary, James McCallum, in his letter to his family on January 9, 1938.


Sato Shinju, a photographer for Tokyo Nichi Nichi newspaper who stayed in Nanking until December 24, 1937, recalls a comparable occasion in the city. "The Army told us they were going to give some food and snacks to Chinese kids, and asked if we were interested in taking pictures of the scene," says Sato. "They did not force us to go there, though. I assume they just wanted good publicity.... It was like an informal press conference."125

The Asahi newspaper carried a photograph that might be the scene Sato was asked to take pictures of on December 24, 1937. The photo was titled "Peace restored in Nanjing" and the further caption noted, "Soldiers of the Imperial Army are giving candies to the refugees."126

Other propaganda was aimed at the Chinese populace in Nanking. Upon entering the city, the Army distributed handbills that read, "Remain in your homes. Your neighbors from Japan want to restore peace."127

George A. Fitch of the YMCA wrote in his diary:

While wholesale executions proceeded without interruption, Japanese army planes dropped leaflets from the air: "All good Chinese who return to their homes will be fed and clothed. Japan wants to be a good neighbor to those Chinese not fooled by monsters who are Chiang Kai-shek's soldiers." On the leaflet was a colored picture of a handsome Jap soldier, a Chinese child held Christ-like in his arms. At his feet a Chinese mother was bowing her thanks for bags of rice.128

Discrediting the Missionaries

A Japanese military postcard. Soldiers playing with Chinese children.


To deal with the widespread condemnations abroad, the Japanese government tried to gloss over the atrocities by blaming subversive activities of some Chinese and by discrediting the "exaggerated" accounts given by the missionaries that were starting to circulate in the United States.


Although he did not directly mention Nanking, Williams implied that the atrocity stories were misguidedly reported in the United States. The pro-Japanese book claimed "the Chiang Kai-shek people" primed the foreign missionaries with "wild tales of alleged Japanese atrocities" and had them write "harrowing letters."129

A Japanese newspaper, Osaka Mainichi, published such pamphlets as Common Sense and the China Emergency or The China Emergency in the English language that featured articles like "Japan's Sole Aim - Peace of East Asia" or "Chinese Live in Japan Peacefully," the tenor of which suggested Japan did not desire the "hideous war" and was by no means responsible for its provocation.

A newspaper-style four-page magazine, Japanese American, carried headlines such as "Nippon Saving China from Reds Writes Williams," "Atrocity Stories Exploded as Real Facts Are Shown," and "U.S. Enjoys Favorable Balance in Trade with Japan; Not with China."130 A leaflet printed late 1937 or early 1938 included a headline that reads "False Atrocity Stories Again Flood America!!!" referring to alleged use of poisonous gas shells, and other inhumane attacks by the Japanese troops in Shanghai and Nanking.131

A Japanese propaganda poster.
Click here to see how a Japanese wartime propaganda film, Nanking (1938), depicted the lives of Chinese refugees (RealPlayer required). Courtesy: Nippon Eiga Shinsha


The efforts to harm the reputation of the American Missionaries bore some fruits. A missionary in Japan, Arthur D. Berry, for instance, wrote to the Christian Advocate, "The stories of Japanese military forces deliberately destroying hospitals and schools in China, and deliberately slaughtering innocent Chinese people are slanderous lies."132

In America a letter from one subscriber to Reader's Digest claimed, "It is unbelievable that credence could be given a thing which is so obviously rank propaganda and so reminiscent of the stuff fed the public during the late war." According to the magazine, it received similar comments from a number of readers.133


"You were misinformed as far as Nanking was concerned," wrote back John Magee, an American missionary in the Nanking Safety Zone, in a personal letter to McKim. After describing case after case of mass executions and rapes by the Japanese soldiers, Magee continued:

There was a small amount of looting of some shops by Chinese just before the Japanese entered. It is true that the homes of many people immediately outside the city walls were burnt down by the soldiers for defensive purposes, and this was certainly an outrage.... It is true that Chang Hsueh Liang's troops, which showed up so miserably in the fighting, looted between here and Shanghai but there [they?] were executed by the hundreds. It is certainly unjust to have publicly accused the Chinese of such horrible things that happened here.134





Wilson's diary on January 31 read, "We are branded as a lot of liars. The Japanese Embassy people tell people that everything we say is imaginative. That might be a lot truer if I were not a surgeon and have to patch up the results of their excesses."136

In a letter to H. J. Timperley, a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, Miner Searle Bates wrote on March 3, "There has been a steady stream of lying charges against the University in the Sin Shun Pao, the propagandist organ widely distributed in Shanghai and East China generally."

"I don't think there's any way that they [the missionaries] could bias their accounts because they were just telling the facts," says the archivist of the Yale Divinity School, Martha Smalley.

"They were not particularly fond of the Chinese government. They recognized a lot of corruption. So I don't think they were proponents of the 'Chinese view.' I really don't think the claim [to discredit the missionaries] has too much basis."137

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  1. Documents of the Rape of Nanking, 219.
  5. Ibid., 43.
  9. Ibid., 31.
  17. Documents of the Rape of Nanking, 246.

End of A Propaganda Organization - Jikyoku Iinkai in the United States


Williams, who wrote in his 1938 Behind the News in China that "the Chiang Kai-shek people" talked the foreign missionaries into writing about "wild tales of alleged Japanese atrocities" in their "harrowing letters,"138 indeed worked with a Japanese organization, Jikyoku Iinkai, to propagate the doctrine that Japan was not an enemy to the United States.139



Legally registered as an employee at a Japanese steamship line, Nippon Yusen, Frederick Vincent Williams, or "Wiggy," operated as a correspondent of an English language newspaper published in Tokyo. Jikyoku Iinkai funds were deposited under Williams' name in the Yokohama Specie Bank. The Japanese Consulate General in San Francisco was also frequently seen to have put money in his bank account.


Among the three American conspirators the most prolific writer was Ralph Townsend, a former college professor who brought back strong Japanese sympathies from his several years of service as a consular officer in China. "After he visited Japan in 1937," wrote the Washington Post, "propaganda began to hum on the West Coast."

Townsend wrote a number of pamphlets and books such as The High Cost of Hate, America Has No Enemies in Asia, and Seeking Foreign Trouble,140 made numerous speeches and radio talks, and edited an anti-British magazine, Scribner's Commentator.


A former newspaper man, David Warren Ryder, was given the same prison term as Williams. According to one witness, it was Ryder who developed the scheme for wholesaling "pro-Japanese publicity" in the United States and initiated the large-scale operations.


Obana was sentenced to a rather light punishment, two to six months' imprisonment. The Post quoted the presiding judge Goldsborough as saying, "It is to be said for Obana that he did not try to be crookedly smart, he was not disloyal to his country, he attempted no betrayal."141

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  1. Williams, 113-116.
  3. For detailed citations, see the holdings of the California State Library System under Ralph Townsend. The list could be also seen at http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist8/tokio2.html.