Captivating History - Second Sino-Japanese War: A Captivating Guide to a Military Conflict Primarily Waged Between China and Japan and the Rape of Nanking

In China, the war with Japan is called by a variety of names, including the official Fourteen Years' War of Resistance, with it being referred to as the Eight Years' War of Resistance earlier on, and it is also sometimes referred to as part of the Global Anti-Fascist War, which, of course, it was.

In today's Japan, the war is most often referred to as the Japan-China War, but when the war actually began, the Japanese government referred to it as the North China Incident. That changed shortly thereafter when Japan invaded Shanghai, and the war became known as simply the China Incident, which was clearly an understatement. The word incident resulted partially as a result of there being no formal declaration of war and also due to Japans desire to downplay their actions to the international audience.

Even today, when it is clear to almost everyone who was to blame for the war in China, some Japanese, within the government and without, call the war the Japan-China Incident. This incident cost upward of twenty million lives.

When World War II broke out in the Pacific, the war in China became the Greater East Asia War, which was far more accurate, as the conflict was fought over thousands of miles and involved, in one way or another, China, Japan, the United States, Great Britain, India, and the Soviet Union.

To understand the Second Sino-Japanese War, we need to go back to the First Sino-Japanese War. However, to understand that war, we need to go back a bit further to examine how the two countries got to that point. Of course, what happened in the centuries before the Second Sino-Japanese War does not bear directly on our subject, but that does not mean it did not have some effect.

Roots

Historians and now genetic ethnologists (those who study the genetic roots of peoples and their migrations) tell us that Japan was originally populated by the Jomon people, a distinct ethnic group that still lives on in the DNA of the Ainu, a people who live in the northern areas of Japan, predominantly on the northern island of Hokkaido, and who are distinctly different from most Japanese. These people are related to many of the indigenous peoples of northern Asia and distantly with the native peoples of North America.

People from the Asian mainland, known as the Yayoi, migrated to Japan and intermingled with the native groups already there; simply put, this resulted in the modern Japanese. This all took place approximately from 300 BCE to 300 CE. Over time, a unique Japanese culture was born.

There are many things at which the Japanese excel, and one of them is absorbing and adapting foreign technologies and cultures into their own. For the first few centuries after their arrival, the Yayoi people, who eventually formed into the modern Japanese, imported much of their culture from the Asian mainland. This included their system of writing, religious and philosophical beliefs, and even clothing and court habits. As time went by, these were changed to fit what was becoming a unique and geographically isolated culture. Chinese characters became Japanese, and ideas such as Buddhism underwent changes and became unique to Japan, for example, Zen Buddhism.