Nanking Massacre Denial - Total Number of Military and Civilian Victims - Burial Records

Burial Records

After the battle of Nanking, the Japanese military entrusted the burial of the dead to the Chinese. The International Military Tribunal for the Far East used the burial records of about 40,000 bodies by the Red Swastika Society, a voluntary association in Nanking, and the burial records of 112,267 bodies by the Chung Shan Tang (Tsung Shan Tong), a 140-year-old charitable organization, as evidence of killings of the Japanese military. The combined total was about 155,000.

A question often raised by many massacre denialists is the credibility of burial records of the Chung Shan Tang. Although their reports that recorded the burial of 112,267 bodies was adduced to the tribunal, they were actually prepared for the tribunal after the war ended because the original manuscripts were allegedly all lost during the eight years of Japanese occupation.

Of course that does not mean that the Chung Shan Tang doctored their reports. The available Chinese documents of that time showed that the organization started burying the dead bodies scattered over certain parts of the city at the beginning of 1938 at the latest. Forty full-time staff and numerous part-timers buried their countrymen and women inside the city walls until March and worked outside of the walls in April.

It should be noted, however, that none of the other documents written by members of the International Committee or the Japanese authorities in Nanjing mentioned that the Tsun Shan Tang was engaged in burial work, while they recorded that another charitable organization, the Red Swastika Society, buried about 40,000 bodies.

Their burial reports also showed a rather disproportionate number of the bodies buried each month. In the first one hundred days from December to March they recorded 7,549 bodies, about 75 per day. In the last three weeks in April when they went outside the city walls, however, they claimed to have buried an additional 104,718, about 5,000 bodies per day.

Kenichi Ara, a researcher of modern history who graduated from the Faculty of Literature of Tohoku University, showed evidence in an article of the Sankei Shimbun newspaper that Chung Shan Tang's burial report of 112,267 bodies had been entirely forged and that they had actually buried no bodies. The record of the Red Swastika Society's burial of about 40,000 bodies also has several contradictions and Itakura thinks that their figure was padded.

According to Susumu Maruyama, a Japanese soldier who worked as the supervisor of the burial teams of the war dead in Nanking, burial was completed around March 15, 1938, three months after the Japanese occupation, and the total number of the buried was around 14,000–15,000――far different from the 300,000 that people had claimed. Massacre denialists claim that these were bodies from soldiers killed in battle, not in a civilian massacre.