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Pawnshop owner thought he had discovered unseen images
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Pawnshop owner thought he had discovered unseen images of the horrors of the Nanjing Massacre
A pawnshop owner's viral TikTok video claiming to have received an album of over 30 previously unseen photos of the Nanjing Massacre has sparked a backlash over the ethics of posting graphic historical material online without expert verification that it's real.To get more news about nanjing massacre photos, you can visit shine news official website.
Evan Kail, the pawn shop owner and TikTok creator who posted about the photos last week, said a customer brought him the album to sell. A relative of the customer was a soldier stationed in Southeast Asia in the late 1930s and apparently documented his time there, Kail said.
"Somehow the guy who took these photos was there for the Rape of Nanking, and he took about 30 photos that are unknown to history that are worse than anything I've ever seen on the internet," Kail said in the video, which has been viewed 25 million times.Kail has been widely criticised for posting images from the album without first authenticating them.
"I thought it was of extreme historical significance no matter what was in it," Kail said in a statement to NBC News. "And so what you saw is what I made, and I did not expect it to go global so quickly. It just completely got away from me."
The client's album, he said, "fucked" him up. "And when I finally made the video, it was just a lot of emotion that I was digesting and speaking without thinking," he said.
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.
The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was the massacre of Chinese civilians and soldiers by the Japanese Imperial Army, following the Japanese occupation of Nanking, then the capital of China, during the SecondChina War. The city's name had previously been Romanised as Nanking.
The massacre lasted six weeks. The Japanese Imperial Army executed residents, looted and burned buildings, and raped tens of thousands of women. The death toll is estimated at between 40,000 and 300,000; mass graves and the destruction of the city have made an accurate count "impossible," according to the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, which has recorded and preserved survivors' testimonies in a digital archive.
Kail said online that the gruesome photos in the album showed corpses piled high in the streets, executions and graphic acts of torture. In his original video, he said he was posting about the album to alert the research community, and that he couldn't post many of the photos on TikTok because they violated its community guidelines.
Some commenters urged Kail to document the photos and post them online to raise awareness of the brutality of the event, pointing out that some people have disputed the estimated death toll or denied the massacre ever happened in order to absolve Japan.In 2012, a Japanese mayor sparked outrage when he said that the "so-called Nanjing Massacre probably never happened". In 2017, Japanese hotel mogul Toshio Motoya faced backlash for distributing a revisionist book in his chain of 400 hotels. The book, a collection of essays he wrote for the hotel's newsletter, claimed that evidence of the Nanjing Massacre was "fabricated by the Chinese side and did not actually happen".