Question

why was the nanking massacre important?

Answer 1

Because in some ways, it was the Chinese version of the Holocaust. There's a reason that it has also been called the "Rape of Nanking".

The Japanese soldiers that took the city (which was the capital of China at the time) treated the Chinese trapped inside like moving targets for weeks. Estimates range between tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands killed in a variety of ways ranging from rape, beheadings, getting shot for simply looking at a Japanese soldier the wrong way, or mass executions. There was even a contest between Japanese soldiers on how many Chinese they could behead in a single day with pictures taken of them and their katanas. Bodies were dumped in mass graves. Order was eventually restored when Japanese officials decided it was enough.

Today, it's still a huge controversial bone of contention between China and Japan. Japan has never really owned up to its war crimes the way that Germany has. While efforts have been made to apologize for it in a formal sense (nearly more than fifty years after the fact), China and other critics have doubted the sincerity of such acts. A few very public officials in Japan have even downplayed or denied that the event had ever occurred much to the aggravation of the Chinese. Koichi Sugiyama, video game composer for games like Dragon Quest, is a known Nanking denier, for example.