This was viral on TikTok a few weeks ago. It was determined to be fake and probably a stunt to get followers and attention.<p>According to NBC: "Kail told NBC News that the photos turned out to be from Shanghai, not Nanjing. He said he couldn’t elaborate further on the advice of his lawyer." (<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/pawnshop-owner-nanjing-massacre-photos-historians-dispute-tiktok-rcna46531" rel="nofollow">https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/viral/pawnshop-owner-nan...</a>)
Oh God I don't want to click that. I've seen one photo on wikipedia of a woman with a sword in her vagina and I did not need that.<p>EDIT: Although I do not want to see it, perhaps I should and I regret this has been flagged. The Japanese were never held responsible for this, certainly not at the level of the Holocaust perpetrators, and perhaps that's because there's not enough exposure. When you see photos, like the dead bodies in the gas chambers, it offends your humanity at a level that begs a response.
I don't really want to click on this link, but have read some horrific descriptions of the event.<p>Anyone care to share what the link contains and why its on the front page of HN?
OK I "vouched" for this submission because I was in the middle of typing a long comment, and then it got flag-killed. Now that comments are reopened, here's the evidence I wanted to attach:<p>The claims of Pawn Man's Tiktok is at best, the fantasy of a very excited collector. Weeks after this Tiktok went viral, Pawn Man sat down with New Yorker and sent copies of the photos to an expert, who declared all of them to be <i>not</i> from Nanjing (i.e. they were either reproduction of past famous war photos of China, or personal non-war photos taken by the sailor) [0]<p>But the non-authenticity of the album could be evident in minutes to anyone who saw his Tiktok; I didn't see his video until it landed on Twitter, but when I checked back on Tiktok, there were at least a few comments alluding to how the few photos glimpsed in the video were obvious duplicates.<p>On Twitter, it was easy to prove this: take a screencap of any of the Tiktok photos [1], and you'd find hits in Google Image search — which immediately disproves his claims that these photos were "never seen" and all taken by a single U.S. sailor. I DMed him this info within an hour of his tweets and he never acknowledged it; not much longer afterwards, actual historians thoroughly explained/debunked every photo and aspect of the album shown [2]. But Pawn Man never acknowledged this obvious proof, and over the next week kept the charade that he believed the album truly contained never-before seen war atrocity photos<p>edit: I'll say this: the Pawn Man seems like a genuinely smart and nice guy, definitely great at social media. The fact that so many people believed him sight unseen (I gave him benefit of the doubt at first) is testament to that. But if you'd like additional evidence, check out this r/ireland thread about a Tiktok of his two weeks prior, for a completely different "museum find"; that TikTok was quietly deleted btw:<p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/wx88dk/so_an_authentic_picture_of_james_connelly_that/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/ireland/comments/wx88dk/so_an_authe...</a><p>[0] <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/on-tiktok-an-album-containing-old-wartime-photos-causes-havoc" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/on-tiktok-an-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1565271791408488448" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/dancow/status/1565271791408488448</a><p>[2] <a href="https://twitter.com/fakehistoryhunt/status/1565357318698635266" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/fakehistoryhunt/status/15653573186986352...</a>