The Chasm

When Shiro Mori thought about the war, it was often about Nanking.  It had been sixty years since the December day the occupation had begun, but he remembered it clearly.  He was a corporal in the 50,000-strong Japanese force that advanced, essentially unopposed by organized Chinese army units, into the Chinese capital.  The officers in his unit had given explicit orders that the forces of Imperial Japan were to show no weakness in destroying the Chinese will to resist.  Any Chinese men suspected of being army deserters and trying to blend into the civilian population were to be killed. 

As Mori’s squad moved through the go-downs and houses of Nanking, they were careful to note the locations of houses where young Chinese women could be seen.  Such places could be invaded at will and the women used for “comfort.”  The women were often killed after being raped as a matter of course, though the rapist had no fear of being reported to his superior officers and disciplined.  On the contrary, soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army were entitled to satisfy themselves with the local women as a reward for their military successes and the ferocity with which they fought.  Mori availed himself of this license many times.  The occupation of Nanking had been a good opportunity for the warriors of Japan.

Mori recalled the morning his unit commander ordered a halt in his squad’s advance just outside a portion of the city center that had been cordoned off by yellow banners.  Orders had been issued that Japanese army troops were not to cross the yellow banners that demarcated the “International Safety Zone.”  The incongruity of a yellow fabric stretching around many square blocks of the inner city purporting to act as a barrier to the Japanese Imperial Army was laughable.  Mori’s commander expressed his fury at this unexpected development to his superior, but the orders stood. 

The general staff of the Japanese army had been asked-told really-by the German businessman who headed the Foreign Diplomatic Association that all persons and property within the “International Safety Zone” were to be respected as off-limits to the Imperial Army.  The Association’s German director guaranteed that there would be no hostile fire from the safety zone directed against Japanese army troops.   As preposterous as this directive was on its face, the fact that it came from the ranking citizen of Japan’s German ally in Nanking conveyed a need for caution until Japan’s diplomats could confirm its efficacy.

While they waited, Mori’s squad commenced its bivouac in the ruins of two buildings opposite the safety zone.  After a soup of bok choy and some cured pork liberated from a farm the night before, Mori had walked back toward the northern edge of the city.  Opposite a small rice paddy, he stopped and leaned on a stone wall to watch a stooped Chinese man working purposefully.  Mori remembered shouldering his rifle, carefully sighting his target, and shooting the man in the left temple as he bent over with a fistful of seedlings.  A Chinese woman at the edge of the field screamed and half-ran, fell, and half-crawled through the calf-high water to the man’s body.  Still screaming, she had lifted up the head of the fallen man from the muddy water of the paddy.  Mori took aim a second time and shot her in the chest.  She lurched away from the man she was holding, and the two bodies slipped into the water together.