The savage and brutal methods with which the Japanese carried out their killings were so many and varied as to surpass the human imagination. Some Japanese soldiers considered the act of killing people to be a form of amusement.
For instance, there was one incident in which more than 1,000 people who had been bound and marched into a square were separated into rows and made to stand still. Some were wearing long traditional gowns, while others were wearing western style clothing; some in the group were women and there were also children. The entire group was haggard, disheveled, and barefoot. First, the Japanese doused the people with gasoline and then they opened fire on the crowd with machine guns. When the bullets hit their bodies, the gasoline caught fire. The refugees' burning bodies quivered from head to toe causing the whole scene to flicker from the light of the gasoline fires on their bodies. The Japanese soldiers stood by laughing hysterically and taking pleasure from the scene they had created. (See the [two] files from the Nanjing Historical Archives, "A Record of the Miserable Conditions in Enemy Occupied Areas," Volume V (unpublished), and "A Conversation with Liu Rouyuan After His Escape From Nanjing to Hunan.")
There were some Japanese soldiers who tied up groups of several dozen or several hundred refugees and forced them to march to the edge of a frozen pond. The Japanese forced them all to strip naked, break the ice, enter the freezing water, and "go fishing." In a matter of seconds they froze to death. Some tried to resist but were immediately shot and their corpses shoved into the frozen water. In another incident, Japanese soldiers, for no apparent reason, captured a young man and hung him from an electrical wire. Below their victim, they stacked up a pile of firewood. The wood burned slowly until much of the young man's body had been roasted and charred to a crisp. The soldiers, yelling wildly, departed the scene. On another day, the Japanese set a fire on Taiping Road. After the fire had spread, they forced a large number of shop clerks from the area to extinguish it. But while they were in the midst of putting out the fire, the Japanese soldiers used rope to tie up the fire fighters and tossed them into the blaze to be burned alive.
