"The third impulse, to rape, is the hardest to interpret. Is it possible for men simultaneously to despise people as vermin and yet to feel lust towards them? Were Japanese troops giving in to a primitive urge to impregnate the womenfolk of their enemy? Or was rape just bayoneting by other means? Perhaps the best answer is that all of these impulses were at work, reinforced by some element of peer-group pressure, since many of the assaults reported were gang rapes. As Hino Ashihei put it in his book War and Soldiers, "We would be friendly with Chinese individuals and indeed came to love them. But how could we help despising them as a nation? . . . To us soldiers, they were pitiful, spineless people." After the war, General Matsui told the International Military Tribunal, which would sentence him to hang for his role at Nanking: "The struggle between Japan and China was always a fight between brothers within the 'Asian family' . . . It has been my belief during all these years that we must regard this struggle as a method of making the Chinese undergo self-reflection. We do not do this because we hate them, but on the contrary because we love them too much." This seemed then and still seems preposterous. Yet it captures the vile ambivalence that lay behind the phenomenon of mass rape."