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He first condemned the killing of civilians by indiscriminate bombing and then disclosed the use of poison gas by the Japanese military in its efforts to break through the Shantung front. He continued to stress that the Sino-Japanese conflict was not a bilateral but an international problem. 6 In September, Koo made a much stronger appeal against Japanese chemical warfare and indiscriminate bombing to the representatives of the league. ”7 He estimated the number of victims of Japan’s indiscriminate bombardments as 10,500 civilians killed and 13,300 wounded between August 1937 and May 1938.

51 While many observers in Nanjing would have agreed that the atrocities there were a prime example of wartime brutality of the Japanese military in China, the Chiang Kai-shek government at the time regarded Nanjing as only one of many such outrages visited on the nation by the Imperial Japanese Army. As in 1938, the government leaders felt that Japan’s most inhumane actions were its gas attacks and aerial bombings. It was only after the war, when atrocities against civilians received much more international attention, that Nanjing became the principal emblem of atrocities committed in China.

Nevertheless, careful readers were able to read between the lines of authorized accounts and learn about the atrocities. For example, Hora Tomio, a historian born in 1906 who later became a renowned chronicler of the Nanjing atrocities, always tried to read newspapers critically during the war in search of truth. 91 By and large, however, perpetrators and eyewitnesses of the massacre stored their experiences in private memories and memoirs, planting the seeds of the subsequent controversy over the Nanjing Massacre in Japan.