Nanking Massacre Denial - Total Number of Military and Civilian Victims

Total Number of Military and Civilian Victims

The number of victims is estimated based on the various definitions of the geographical range and duration of the event, as well as the definition of who was a victim. The extent of the atrocities is debated between China and Japan, with numbers ranging from some revisionist claims of several dozen or several hundred, to the more widely accepted figure of 300,000, which is the figure commonly accepted by Chinese government.

Estimates of the death toll vary widely because of the circumstances, and because of differences in definition of the geographical area, time period, and nature of the killings to be counted. The Nanking Massacre can be defined narrowly to include only killings within the Nanking Safety Zone, or more broadly to include killings in the immediate environs of Nanking, or even more broadly to include the six counties around Nanjing, known as the Nanjing Special Municipality. Similarly, the time period of the massacre can be limited to the six weeks following the fall of Nanking or it can be defined more broadly to the time the Japanese Army entered Jiangsu province in mid-November until late March 1938. Many scholars have accepted the figure of 300,000 dead as an approximate total, and this figure has become emblematic of the tragedy in China. Estimates of the dead vary, however, notably among revisionist scholars and activists in Japan, who have contended at times that the actual death toll is far lower, or even that the event was entirely fabricated and never occurred at all.

The casualty count of 300,000 was first promulgated by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal. Revisionist historians have attacked various accounts underlying this figure. Higashinakano, for instance, has claimed that Harold Timperley, whose reports form part of the basis of the Tribunal's findings, was reporting only hearsay; he also claims that Timperley was associated with the Kuomintang, and that his book about the Japanese military was written as propaganda. His claims that Timperley's text was invalid, and therefore that the figure of 300,000 dead was "unreal", drew a response from Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, who suggested that Higashinakano's assertions and conclusion were not "sensible":

Higashinakano jumps to this conclusion in all earnestness because he clings to a hypothetical fixation that the Atrocity never happened. This forces him to seize any shred of evidence, whether sound or not, to sustain and systematize that delusion.

A number of Japanese researchers consider 100,000–200,000 to be an approximate value. Other nations believe the death toll to have been between 150,000–300,000.

One methodology for estimating the number of civilians who died during the Nanjing incident is to employ a "population balance" computation which estimates the population of Nanking before its fall to the Japanese and compares that number to the estimated population at some time after the fall. Estimates of the population of Nanjing after the fall of the city to the Japanese range from 200,000 to 250,000. There is a much greater variance in the estimates of the population of the city prior to the Battle of Nanjing. These estimates range from 150,000 to 700,000. Using the low end of this range, massacre denialists have argued that the population of Nanjing did not change appreciably between the start of the Battle of Nanjing and afterwards. On the other hand, massacre affirmationists use the high end of the range to justify claims of as many as 300,000 civilians massacred. Affirmationists also point out that there were large number of civilian refugees that fled to Nanking ahead Japanese advance from various provinces and regions such as Shanghai, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, Henan etc that were not recorded as part of Nanking's population at the time of the massacre.

David Askew analyzes a number of primary sources to conclude that "the civilian population of Nanjing was 200,000 in the weeks leading up to the fall of the city; that it remained 200,000 for the first 4 weeks of the occupation; and that it increased to 250,000 by January 10, 1938."