On TikTok, an Album Containing Old Wartime Photos Causes Havoc

An antique dealer in Minnesota believed that he had found rare photographic evidence documenting the Nanjing Massacre.

By Simon Parkin, THE NEW YORKER, Rabbit Holes

September 20, 2022

Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker

On the morning of August 29th, Evan Kail, the owner of St. Louis Park Gold & Silver, a Minnesota precious-metal dealership, received a batch of packages containing valuables for appraisal. Throughout the day, Kail, who is thirty-three, picked through the haul, mostly assorted coins and jewelry. He noted the condition of the contents of each parcel and estimated the value, making a mental note of any interesting objects that could be filmed for his popular TikTok account, @pawn.man.

In the early afternoon, Kail arrived at a package that contained, to his surprise, an album of wartime photographs, featuring two embossed dragons rising out of a leather cover. The pictures inside appeared to have been compiled by a U.S. Navy sailor during a tour of the western Pacific in the nineteen-thirties, when American troops were sent to the region to protect national interests, particularly in the Philippines. As Kail browsed the pages, he remembered the message that he had received, three weeks earlier, from the book’s owner: “It’s kind of disturbing.”

Most of the initial photographs showed benign scenes and indigenous vistas: well-swept temples, captive elephants, and buffalo plowing Saigon fields. Around fifteen pages in, Kail turned a leaf and exclaimed, “Holy shit.” Human carnage filled the next five pages: the spilled remains of people caught in heavy bombings; the falling body of a decapitated man, his head already on the ground; the charred, slumped cadaver of the driver of a burned-out vehicle; and what appeared to be an image of a public execution via lingchi, the archaic method of killing known to Westerners as “death by a thousand cuts.” Many of the photographs bore the caption “Nanking Road,” the former name of a Shanghai street, which Kail said that he mistook at first for the city of Nanking.

On December 13, 1937, the Japanese Army entered what was then the Chinese capital city of Nanking—today known as Nanjing. Eyewitness reports by American missionaries and military officers, Nazi Party members, diplomats, and foreign correspondents describe a range of atrocities committed by the invaders. They killed P.O.W.s, disembowelled and beheaded Chinese citizens, and, according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which was held from 1946 to 1948, raped an estimated twenty thousand Chinese women and murdered more than two hundred thousand people. (Many sources state that these figures are conservative.) One Japanese veteran of the invasion later said, “There are really no words to describe what I was doing. I was truly a devil.”

Despite a wealth of corroborating testimony from both victims and perpetrators, the events in Nanjing have often been overlooked and even denied. In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, some records were destroyed by the Japanese Army and others were lost by Chinese authorities. At times, Japanese leaders proved reluctant to admit to and atone for wartime wrongdoing, and the Chinese government initially stifled research into the massacre. Then, in the nineteen-eighties, a cadre of right-wing Japanese politicians and intellectuals attempted to whitewash the atrocities committed in Nanjing by rewriting school textbooks about the events. In 1994, Japan’s newly appointed Justice Minister, General Nagano Shigeto, told a newspaper that “the Nanjing massacre and the rest was a fabrication.” These compound factors had the effect of cumulative suppression. When, in 1997, the late Chinese American writer Iris Chang published “The Rape of Nanking,” it included the subtitle “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.”

Some of this history was known to Kail, who had majored in Japanese Studies at the University of Minnesota. If the photographs in the album he had received were authentic, he reasoned, they might provide additional documentary evidence of a controversial atrocity. For two days, he weighed his options. He estimated that the album could be worth more than ten thousand dollars, which made it an unviable acquisition for his business. “I don’t want to buy anything expensive that is going to sit here months,” he said. “I’ve made that mistake before with wartime memorabilia.”

Kail called the album’s owner. “I don’t think I can buy this,” he said. According to Kail, the man explained that the album had been given to his late father, a building contractor, as partial payment for a job in the nineteen-eighties. The client was a sailor’s widow. Her husband, Leslie G. Allen, Jr., had compiled the scrapbook during his wartime service, and left it to her when he died in 1964, at the age of forty-nine. The album then languished in the contractor’s attic until he died, Kail said, and it was discovered by his son, who contacted Kail. “I will help you find a home for it,” Kail promised.

He had started making TikTok videos while apprenticing at another buy-and-sell business in Minnesota. With a voice that is both mellifluous and urgent, he has proved well suited to the medium. He learned to bang his fist on the table during the first seconds of the video, to grab the viewer’s attention, then launch into an excitable description of the object in question. Within a few months, he had gained thousands of followers. Kail claimed that his boss at the time didn’t like this and asked him to stop posting. “I was, like, ‘No,’ ” Kail said. “I’ve caught lightning in a bottle here.”

Kail left his job and, in April of 2021, set up a rival business. He continued to post videos, filming the appraisal process. Viewers would then message him via Instagram, Facebook, or his private Discord server, with offers to buy what they had seen. Soon, he was spending a quarter of a million dollars each month buying antiques and valuables. Three days after he unpacked the album, Kail decided to make a TikTok video to appeal for help in contacting a museum. He struggled to find an appropriate tone. His usual formula—high energy, frolicsome, all fast cuts—seemed unfitting. “This is the most disturbing thing I have ever seen in my career,” he began, instead. “I’m not even going to say ‘Pawn Man’ in this video.” Then he flipped through the album’s early sheafs, stopping before the first page of violent images, for fear of breaching TikTok’s guidelines, while briefly describing the history of Nanjing.

The video, which Kail titled “PLEASE HELP ME,” contained, by his own admission, “powerful” language, and at least one key error: that the images supposedly taken by the American sailor clearly documented events that took place in Nanjing. “There’s people that deny the Rape of Nanking, and part of their argument for that is ‘Well, there’s such little evidence,’ ” Kail claims in the video. “Guess who just found some.” (Although the number of victims has remained a matter of debate, Nanjing denial is now discounted by all serious scholars; in 1984, when Chinese officials were hesitant to conduct historical inquiries for fear of provoking diplomatic rancor, it was a Japanese investigative team that pioneered research into the massacre.) Kail’s plea for help, however, was heartfelt. He uploaded the video, then headed to a bar with friends.

At three in the morning, he decided to see if the video had any hits. By then, the footage had gone viral in China. It had accrued more than three and a half million views. “I thought, What have I done?” Kail said. The next day, he awoke in the fury of an Internet storm. He had tens of thousands of new followers, many of whom had sent messages of support, criticism, or cynicism. “I actually can’t believe I’m this early for a huge historical revelation,” one commenter to the video wrote. “This is mind blowing,” wrote another, erroneously adding, “To this day Japan still denies that the massacre ever took place.”

Skeptics pointed out that American sailors often filled gaps in these kinds of albums with prints that were sold across Asia at the time as souvenirs. When Kail posted images of the macabre material on Twitter—he said that he did not care about potentially being blocked on this platform, unlike with TikTok—users pointed out that some of these images showed familiar incidents of public execution that predated 1937. The images showed genuine acts of historical brutality in China, most agreed, but at least a few appeared to be mislabelled prints.

Nonetheless, the video had an international impact, particularly among young Chinese people who heard about it. Rana Mitter, a professor of the history and politics of modern China at the University of Oxford, told me that there remains “a strong sense of anger” in China about the Japanese invasion. This sense of historical grievance has been heightened, Mitter claims, by the popularity in China, especially in the late two-thousands and early twenty-tens, of video games that cast players as Chinese warriors fending off the Japanese troops. Mitter also pointed to films such as the Mandarin-language blockbuster “The Eight Hundred,” from 2020, which depicts the defense of Shanghai in 1937.

Kail said that three young Chinese men have, to date, stopped by his store. One hugged him in tears; two brought bouquets of flowers. He also said that the Chinese Embassy and a representative who claimed to be from the Nanjing-massacre memorial hall had contacted him. Kail asked a well-connected friend how he might contact the State Department for support. Then he started wearing a bulletproof vest. “I accidentally created this thing that is a point of high contention and emotion,” he told me.

Kail said that, on the evening he posted the video, the book’s owner sat down with his family for dinner. According to Kail, only the owner’s wife knew that the album had been sent for appraisal. As the family ate, one of the couple’s children began talking about a video that they had seen on TikTok that day, about a trove of important photographs that proved the massacre at Nanjing had happened. Kail said the owner later told him that he had kept mum.

On a recent Thursday evening, I spoke to Timothy Brook, a professor who is a leading expert on China during the Japanese occupation. Kail had sent me a folder containing pictures of the album and had given me permission to share the pictures with any experts in the field. We spoke on Zoom, Brook seated in a quiet spot, his granddaughter audibly giggling in another room.

“This one has nothing to do with Nanjing,” he said, pointing to the lingchi image, of the lacerated body of a victim who appeared to be tied to a pole. It was, Brook said, a print of a public execution in Beijing, which probably occurred in 1904. (Brook co-authored the 2008 book “Death by a Thousand Cuts,” published by Harvard University Press.) He called up another page of images, which included what purported to be shots of the aftermath of an aerial bombing on Nanjing Road, in Shanghai. (“Death from the skies,” the caption reads.) The bombing images are genuine, he said, but “I don’t believe the sailor could have been in these places, taking these photographs.” They were, he said, most likely taken by journalists, or photographers documenting the carnage to be used as propaganda.

Brook identified other images as prints sold by both Japanese and Chinese street venders as a kind of journalistic memento for travellers. “It’s the kind of bizarre exotica that foreigners liked to collect when they visited China during this period.” Kail’s collection, it seemed to Brook, is a hodgepodge of original photographs of American sailors, souvenir prints of violence, and Chinese- and Japanese-issued propaganda shots. (At least five of the images include Japanese-language inscriptions on the print.)

“The way the sailor has presented these pictures exoticizes Asia,” Brook said. “He’s treating China and Japan as places of war and violence, and torture. Which is not to say that the photographs aren’t true, but they must be properly contextualized.” In the days since Kail posted his video to TikTok, Brook said that he had seen Chinese people expressing renewed anger about the events of Nanjing online. “The sad irony here is that, as far as I can tell, none of these photographs are from Nanjing,” he said. Kail later acknowledged mistaking Nanjing Road for the Chinese capital at the time. “My mistake was to cry wolf,” he told me. “I should have been more cautious.”

Brook’s perspective requires a nuance ill-suited to social-media virality. He criticized the Chinese government for fostering, in the nation’s young people, a sense of victimhood that has primed many to respond with passion to a video like Kail’s. “For twenty-five years, the Chinese government has been studiously pointing to Japan for its victimization of China, and recycling stories about how the Japanese don’t think the Rape of Nanking actually happened,” he said. “It’s a way for the government to declare that it has a wholesome, morally superior position, and that China is not a victim of its own choices but a victim of what foreigners do to it.”

For Brook, this viewpoint does not exonerate Japan. “The Japanese Army did these things,” he said. “The world should never forget the atrocities of the Second World War. To capture sight of those who were victimized is a moving and troubling experience.” As Iris Chang wrote in her book, the relative ignorance of the events that occurred at Nanjing illustrated “the postwar differences in how Germany and Japan handled their wartime crimes.” The former erected conspicuous memorials that bespeak a national reckoning; the latter has often chosen to cast its war crimes as the isolated acts of individual soldiers. “But here we are not being asked to think reflectively about the past,” Brook warned. “We are being asked to arm ourselves for a different conflict. Recycling atrocity photographs makes the ghosts of the dead return to serve other purposes. It is no longer about history.”

In recent days, Kail has fielded predictable accusations that he only posted the video to garner attention for his business. “Look, I would not wish this on anyone,” he said. “The amount of pressure I’m under and just the scrutiny . . . it’s intense.” Since he posted the TikTok, Kail wears a face mask when leaving his house; he moved the album to a “secure location.” Kail said that he eventually paid the previous owner a thousand dollars for the album, which he now plans on donating to China. “I’m hoping it goes to a museum in Shanghai,” he told me. After a man came to his shop, asking all sorts of questions and acting in an erratic way, he closed his store to the public. He has hired a lawyer and worries about how he can possibly return to posting TikToks in his favored flippant style. Still, he said, “Even if the whole book turns out to be fake, it started a productive conversation. I have accidentally educated so many people about this subject. . . . So not all is lost here.” ♦

Simon Parkin is a contributing writer to The New Yorker and the author of “Death by Video Game: Danger, Pleasure, and Obsession on the Virtual Frontline.”