Tungchow Mutiny

The Tungchow Mutiny (通州事件), sometimes referred to as the Tōngzhōu Incident, was an assault on Japanese civilians and troops by East Hopei Army in Tōngzhōu, China on 29 July 1937 shortly after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident that marked the official beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War.

In early 1937, Tōngzhōu was capital of the East Hopei Government, a Japanese puppet state controlling the strategic eastern district of Beijing. In July, a detachment of approximately 800 troops of the Chinese 29th Army, under the command of General Sung Che-yuan and loyal to the Kuomintang government, camped outside the walls of Tōngzhōu. Refusing to leave despite the strong protests of the Japanese garrison commander, the Japanese did not know that General Sung had reached an agreement with East Hopei leader Yin Ju-keng, who hoped to use Sung's Kuomintang troops to rid himself of his Japanese overlords.

On 27 July, the Japanese commander demanded that the Kuomintang soldiers disarm. When they refused, fighting erupted the following day, and the outnumbered and outgunned Chinese troops were trapped between the Japanese and the city wall. However, the Kuomintang Chinese troops' unwillingness to surrender in what was essentially a suicide mission strongly affected the Japanese-trained 1st and 2nd Corps of the East Hopei Army who were attached to the Japanese army. When East Hopei Army units refused to press the attack, Japanese troops bombed their barracks on the evening of 28 July. On midnight of 28 July, some 5000 troops of the 1st and 2nd Corps of the East Hopei Army mutinied, turning against the Japanese garrison.

In addition to Japanese military personnel, some 260 civilians living in Tōngzhōu in accordance with the Boxer Protocol of 1901 were killed in the uprising (predominantly Japanese including the police force and some ethnic Koreans). According to contemporary sources, the majority of women were raped and brutally massacred. Female bodies were found lying on the floor with brooms inserted in their violated genitals; several severed heads of café waitresses were found lining up on a café table in a manner of atrocity exhibition; a woman had her head chopped with a machete, after which the Chinese perpetrator raped the body in a necrophilic act; the intestines was savagely taken out of the body; a child was found dead with a barbed wire nose ring pierced in the nostrils. Only around 60 Japanese civilians survived and they provided both journalists and later historians with firsthand witness accounts. To complete their orgy, the Chinese set fire and destroyed much of the city.

The massacre shocked the Japanese public and anti-Chinese sentiments were further intensified in Japan. The popular Japanese slogan in those days was "暴戻支那膺懲(Bōrei Shina Yōchō)" or its shorter version "暴支膺懲(Bōshi Yōchō)", both of which mean "To punish China the outrageous". The Japanese military adventurers stationed in China used this bloody incident to justify further military intervention under the pretext of protecting Japanese lives and properties in and around Beijing. After World War II the Japanese defence team at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal) submitted the official statement made in 1937 by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan as the inevitable cause of the Sino-Japanese conflicts, but presiding judge Sir William Webb KBE rejected it as evidence.