The
Nanking Massacre: Another Crime of
Obedience?
Background
on Crimes of Obedience by Kelman and Hamilton:
In Crimes of Obedience, Kelman and Hamilton argue that the My Lai Massacre “is an instance of a class of violent acts that can be sanctioned massacres: acts of indiscriminate, ruthless, and often systematic mass violence, carried out by military personnel (KH 12).” They argue that sanctioned massacres share a number of features, including the context and the target of the violence. Sanctioned massacres “tend to occur in the context of an overall policy that is explicitly or implicitly genocidal: designed to destroy all or part of a category of people defined by ethnic, national, racial, religious, or other terms (KH 13).” In the case of My Lai, Vietnamese people were looked at as “expendable” and their death was a strategic necessity according to orders given to armed soldiers, therefore resulting in the death of thousands of rural Vietnamese. The second feature of sanctioned massacres involves the target of the violence. In sanctioned massacres, the targets are unthreatening and do not engage in hostile actions toward the perpetrators of the violence (13). These victims are often defenseless citizens such as children and old men, apparent by the countless dead in My Lai. For Kelman and Hamilton, looking at the psychological forces that might motivate people to commit such inhumane acts of violence is not adequate in studying crimes such as My Lai. Instead, it is more useful to examine “the conditions under which the usual moral inhibitions against violence become weakened (KH 16).” Kelman and Hamilton identify three social processes under which these conditions occur: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. These three social processes are exemplified in the massacres at My Lai in Kelman and Hamilton’s study and will now be applied to the events that occurred at Nanking.
Application
of social processes to Nanking Massacre:
The three social processes, authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, used by Kelman and Hamilton in studying My Lai can also be used to analyze the events that occurred at Nanking in 1937. Similar to the tragedy at My Lai, thousands of defenseless Nanking citizens were brutally attacked, raped, and killed by Japanese soldiers (see link to historical background for more details). This section will attempt to use the three social processes presented by Kelman and Hamilton to explain the many tragic events that occurred at Nanking.
According to Kelman and Hamilton, “through authorization, the situation becomes so defined that the individual is absolved of the responsibility to make personal moral choices (KH 16).” The individuals performing the actions do not feel personally responsible for their behavior due to the explicit orders or implicit encouragement of an authority figure. In an authority situation, people behave according to their role obligations rather than their personal preferences, causing them to obey without thinking about the consequences (KH 16). The authority structure present in the Japanese army most likely contributed to the massive violence that occurred at Nanking. Early in the training of Japanese soldiers, the pressure to conform to authority is ingrained and reinforced. According to former soldier Azumo Shiro, the Japanese army was not an army for the people of Japan, but rather the emperor’s army. The Japanese Imperial army consisted of obedient soldiers who served the emperor’s interest. Soldiers were trained to obey like robots (Tong Video). “Vicious hazing and a relentless pecking order” usually eliminated any spirit of individualism in a Japanese soldier. “Obedience was touted as a supreme virtue, and a sense of individual self-worth was replaced by a sense of value as a small cog in the larger scheme of things (Chang 31).” This type of intensive training focused on extreme obedience to authority helps to explain how the social process of authorization, as described by Kelman and Hamilton, played a role in the Nanking tragedy. In the soldier’s minds, they were doing the right thing since they were executing orders from an upper authority.
Prior to Japanese entrance into Nanking, commanding officer Prince Asaka forged a set of orders that basically conveyed the message that acts of violence against the people of Nanking were required, as well as the message that such acts, even if not ordered, were permitted and approved of by the Imperial headquarters. Once in Nanking, Japanese soldiers showed no hesitation towards the brutal killings and rapes of defenseless old men, women, and children. After all, the killings and rapes had been authorized and approved by their superior officers. Not only was the killing and raping authorized, but explicitly encouraged by commanding officers. High-ranking officers would even hold killing contest among the soldiers to see who could kill or rape the most people in one day. The structure of the authority situation, in conjunction with the early obedience training received in the military, clearly influenced the violent acts committed by the Japanese in Nanking.
The authorization process contributed to the violent murders and rapes committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking similar to the way it contributed to the brutal acts of violence at My Lai. It created a situation where the soldiers became involved in an action without considering its implications and without really making a decision (KH 17). Consequently, the soldiers’ actions became rountinized, making it easier for them to avoid the implications of the actions. In the personal accounts of several Nanking soldiers, it is evident that the focus was on the details of the job (for example - how and where they should kill and rape) rather than on the actual meaning of their action. Soldiers would line victims up with their heads positioned downward so that beheading them would be quick and easy. Commanding officers would often hold “killing contests” among their soldiers in order to sharpen their swordsmanship skills. According to a testimony at the War Crimes Trail, officers would continuously yell “Kill and count! Kill and count!” as soldiers participated in these killing contests. Obviously, humanity was not an issue for the soldiers at Nanking. The competition would involve capturing a group of Nanking citizens, lining them up close to a deep burial pit, and then one by one decapitating them. The heads were used to help the soldiers keep count. The soldiers killed and raped in “an automatic, regularized fashion” as typically found in situations governed by routinization (Choy video). Little, if any, thought was given to the moral implications of their actions.
The third social process used by Kelman and Hamilton to analyze sanctioned massacres such as the My Lai incident is dehumanization. Dehumanization of the enemy is a common phenomenon in any war situation (KH 19). In both the My Lai massacre and the Nanking tragedy, the victims are deprived of two essential qualities of being human – identity and community. Identity involves the “standing as independent, distinctive individuals, capable of making choices and entitled to live their own lives” and community involves a sense of belonging to a network of individuals who care and respect one another (KH 19). The process of dehumanization is most evident in the actions of the Japanese soldiers during the Nanking massacre. One of the most common explanations for the atrocities that occurred in Nanking is related to dehumanization. According to Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, Japanese soldiers were “hardened for the task of murdering Chinese.” Various games and exercise were set up by the Japanese army “to numb its men to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking (55).” For the Japanese, the Chinese were thought to be the enemy, and an explicit threat to Japan. This extreme hostility towards Chinese originated from a very early age and only grew stronger around the time period of the Nanking. The dehumanized portrayal of the Chinese was not only forced upon soldiers in their military training, but also engrained in their upbringing and education. For example, throughout their education and military training, the Chinese were portrayed as inhumane, power-driven people equipped to take the most extreme measures in order to secure and spread the institution of communism. After Chinese killed many Japanese soldiers in battles prior to Nanking, this extreme hatred only grew.
The dehumanized victims of Nanking were seen as bodies whose heads helped to keep score in a killing match. Former soldier Azumo Shiro admitted that after one month in the battlefield, he learned to kill people without any remorse (Choy video). It was not unusual for Japanese soldiers to torture citizens by mutilating body parts and burying them alive. Furthermore, women were victims of gang rape, forced to perform countless sexual acts and then brutally killed or mutilated after the soldiers got tired of them. “When raping, women were considered objects for sexual gratification, when killing, they were considered nothing more than a pig,” as one soldier later confessed. Japanese soldiers even went as far as creating a generic term for raping women. According to Kelman and Hamilton, labels help deprive the victims of identity and community (KH 19). The term “Pikankan” was used to mean, “let’s see a woman open up her legs.” Then, the soldiers would say, “it’s my day to take a bath.” Whoever said this phrase first got to rape the woman first, and the second to say it would be the second to rape, and so on. After the woman was gang raped, she would be stabbed and killed, “because dead bodies don’t talk (Choy video).” The Nanking atrocities became routine, and almost banal for the soldiers – clearly demonstrating the influence of dehumanization (Chang 58). According to Kelman and Hamilton, the process of dehumanization feeds on itself – the only way to make sense of the absurd events in which soldiers find themselves is to believe that the victims are subhuman and need to be rooted out (KH 20).
It is difficult to make sense of the brutal and tortuous crimes committed during the rape of Nanking. What motivated Japanese soldiers to commit such unthinkable and brutal acts of violence and torture against the defenseless women and children of Nanking? The social processes of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization offer some possible explanations. Each of these social processes had a role in the Nanking massacre and helps to make sense of the tragedy through a sociological perspective. For additional sociological explanations of the Nanking massacre please refer to the related links on group think, influence, and group conformity.