This article was compiled for educational and historical documentation purposes, based on records from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), witness testimonies, and historical archives. The content does not aim to glorify violence or advocate for any political ideology.
In December 1937, General Iwane Matsui led his army into Nanking. What followed over the next six weeks became a horror that has never faded from the memory of mankind. Eleven years later, he stood before a court of law — not as a victorious commander, but as a war criminal.
General Iwane Matsui: The Man and His Ambitions
In the history of war crimes of the twentieth century, there are names one cannot speak without feeling a heaviness in the chest. Iwane Matsui is one of them. Not because he was the man who pulled the trigger on each innocent civilian — but because he was the man who stood above it all, looking down on a burning Nanking, and never ordered it to stop.
Born on July 27, 1878, in the city of Nagoya, Iwane Matsui came from a family with a long military tradition. He graduated from the Imperial Japanese Army Academy in 1901 and steadily climbed to the highest command positions. Unlike many generals of his era, Matsui was known for his deep understanding of China — he had served as a military attaché in Beijing, spoke fluent Mandarin, and claimed to be a friend of the Chinese people.
The tragic irony is this: the man who called himself a “friend” of the Chinese people became the commanding officer of the most brutal massacre in the history of modern East Asia.
Profile:
- Full name: Iwane Matsui
- Born: July 27, 1878, Nagoya, Japan
- Died: December 23, 1948 (age 70), Tokyo
- Rank: General, Imperial Japanese Army
- Charges: War crimes, crimes against humanity
- Sentence: Death (by hanging)
- Place of execution: Sugamo Prison, Tokyo
The Road to Nanking
In August 1937, as the Second Sino-Japanese War erupted on a massive scale, Matsui was given command of the Central China Area Army — a formidable force comprising dozens of divisions. The objective: capture Nanking, the capital of the Republic of China, and force the government of Chiang Kai-shek to surrender.
After the brutal fighting at Shanghai, Japanese forces advanced directly toward Nanking. On December 13, 1937, Matsui’s lead units entered the city. Chinese defenders had retreated or surrendered. Nanking — home to nearly one million people, and tens of thousands of soldiers who had already laid down their weapons — fell under Japanese control.
And then, hell began.
Six Weeks of Terror: The Nanking Massacre
From December 13, 1937, to the end of January 1938, Japanese forces under Matsui’s overall command carried out a systematic campaign of mass killing. According to evidence presented at the post-war trials:
Hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war were killed — historians place the death toll between 200,000 and more than 300,000 people. Mass executions took place along the banks of the Yangtze River, in mass graves outside the city walls, and in the narrow alleyways of the old quarters. Approximately 20,000 women were raped. Many were killed immediately afterward. Property was burned and looted openly for weeks on end.
A small number of foreigners — missionaries, professors, journalists — remained in the city and organized the “Nanking International Safety Zone” to shelter tens of thousands of civilians. These witnesses — Germans, Americans, Danes — would later become some of the most important sources of evidence at trial.
“What I witnessed cannot be described in human language. For weeks on end, we heard gunfire every night. In the morning we woke to find bodies lying in the streets. No one was allowed to go out and collect them. The smell of death spread throughout the entire city.” — Excerpt from the testimony of American missionary John Magee before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946
What Did Matsui Know — and What Did He Do?
This was the central question of the trial. Matsui did not personally fire a weapon or order each individual killing. In the early days of the occupation he was, in fact, ill and absent from the city. But when he returned to Nanking on December 17, 1937 — four days after the massacre had begun — he was given a full briefing on the situation.
Matsui wept. He summoned his subordinate commanders and rebuked them. But he issued no immediate order to stop. He punished no one at the top. He took no effective measures to halt the atrocities that continued all around him.
That was Matsui’s crime: not that he directly ordered the killing — but that he knew, that he had the authority, and that he did nothing sufficient to stop it.
The Tokyo Trial: A Conqueror Faces Justice
After Japan’s surrender in August 1945, the Allied powers began hunting down war criminals. In April 1946, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East — commonly known as the “Tokyo Trials” — formally convened at the former Japanese War Ministry building in Tokyo.
Iwane Matsui was one of 28 defendants. The proceedings lasted more than two and a half years, with over 400 hearing sessions, thousands of pages of records and evidence, and testimony from hundreds of witnesses across Asia.
Evidence That Could Not Be Denied
The prosecution presented evidence that demolished every argument Matsui’s defense put forward. German diplomats stationed in Nanking — including those who held no particular sympathy for the Chinese — had filed reports describing the horrifying scenes of the massacre. A 16mm film secretly shot by John Magee during the first weeks of the occupation was screened in the courtroom. The diary of John Rabe — a German who had been a member of the Nazi Party yet saved tens of thousands of Chinese lives — provided a meticulous day-by-day record of the massacre.
Matsui attempted to argue that he had not known the details of what was occurring, that his illness had prevented him from maintaining proper control of his subordinate units, and that what had happened in Nanking had been “exaggerated” and “distorted.”
The court rejected every one of those arguments.
On November 12, 1948, after more than two years of proceedings, the Tokyo Tribunal delivered its verdict. Matsui was found guilty under the principle of “command responsibility” — a commander must be held accountable for the crimes of his subordinates when he knew or should have known, and failed to take the necessary measures to prevent them.
Sentence: Death.
“I have failed to control my army. That is my disgrace.” — Iwane Matsui, testimony before the Tokyo Tribunal
The Last Night at Sugamo Prison
On the night of December 22, 1948, in a cell at Sugamo Prison in Tokyo, Iwane Matsui sat alone with his thoughts. He was 70 years old, his health badly deteriorated after years of confinement. By all accounts he was completely calm — making no pleas, shedding no tears, showing no remorse in the way people might have expected.
Matsui was permitted to perform a final Buddhist rite. He sat in meditation and recited sutras. According to the prison warden, he did not sleep that night — he simply sat in silence in the darkness.
Strangely, in the years following the war, Matsui had constructed a small shrine in Atami Prefecture to honor the spirits of both Japanese and Chinese soldiers who had died in the conflict. He said he felt anguish over what had happened in Nanking. But that anguish — if it was genuine — had come far too late.
The Morning of December 23, 1948
At 00:01 on the morning of December 23, 1948 — which was also his 70th birthday by the Japanese calendar — Iwane Matsui was led together with six other convicted war criminals to the execution chamber at Sugamo Prison.
The seven men — among them former Prime Minister Hideki Tojo — mounted the scaffold one by one. Matsui walked without assistance, his head held up, his eyes fixed forward. According to those present, not one of the seven showed fear in his final moments.
At precisely 00:01, the sentence was carried out.
General Iwane Matsui — supreme commander of Japanese forces during the Nanking Massacre — died on the soil of his own country, in the darkness before dawn, without seeing the sun one last time.
Legacy and Questions Without Answers
Matsui’s death brought down the curtain on one of the largest historical trials of the twentieth century. But it did not bring down the curtain on the questions that trial had raised.
The Tokyo Tribunal’s verdict established a legal principle that endures to this day: military commanders must bear responsibility for the crimes of their subordinates — even when they did not directly order them — if they knew or should have known, and failed to act. This principle, later known as “command responsibility” or the “Yamashita Standard,” was incorporated into the 1977 Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions and remains a cornerstone of international humanitarian law.
But history is never simple. Many researchers in the years since have argued that Matsui was not the true architect of the massacre — that some of his subordinate officers, such as Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima, directly commanded and even encouraged the most brutal acts, while escaping prosecution entirely.
Those arguments have academic merit. But they do not change one truth: more than 300,000 people died in Nanking. And the supreme commander knew, had authority, and did not do enough to stop it.
Millions of survivors of the Nanking Massacre and the descendants of victims were never asked whether the death sentence was adequate, whether it was enough. For them, no sentence could ever be enough. No tribunal could restore what had been lost.
But the Tokyo Trial and Matsui’s death sent a message: that those who hold power — no matter how high their position, no matter how great their victories — cannot escape accountability for what they did, or for what they should have done and did not.
That is a lesson the world is still learning — and still needs to learn.
Primary Sources:
- Records of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), 1946–1948
- John Rabe’s diary — The Good German of Nanking
- Timothy Brook, Documents on the Rape of Nanking
- Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997)
- R. John Pritchard & Sonia Magbanua Zaide (eds.), The Tokyo War Crimes Trial
- Archives of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall
- Testimony of John Magee and Western missionaries, IMTFE records