Since Iris Chang, in her bestseller The Rape of Nanjing, has butchered some of the key details, and this seems to have transferred directly over to the consciousness of journalists and readers, there are some things that need to be set straight, or at least, nitpicked a bit.
1. The Nanjing Massacre as a "forgotten holocaust"
First, on the notion of "forgotten":
Contrary to the impression that her book may give off, the Nanjing Massacre is very much debated and remembered in Japan. In fact, I'm not advocating the right wing movement at all, but one of the adverse effects of their whole denial/revisionist campaign is that it brings the massacre into the spotlight. By trying to deny it ever happened, you must talk about it. And if it really never happened, then a) there would be no need to deny its happening, and b) there wouldn't be all of this flurry of conversation back and forth between the two camps.
It is true that the textbooks don't do a good enough job of covering these atrocities. I did a survey of textbooks back in college and the amount of space these textbooks allot for subjects like the comfort women or the Nanjing massacre is dismal. This part of the story is broadcast all over the international media. The other part of the story that is often omitted is the fact that most history teachers (and many K-12 teachers in Japan) are so left-leaning, that they will have their own curriculum to teach sections that are omitted or glossed over in textbooks. They make it a point to cover this material.
I don't know how representative my "sample" was, but several people I spoke to over the years spanning several generations (high school and college-aged, 20s, 30s, middle-aged) all mentioned the fact that these lessons were in fact hammered into them. I won't get into my parents' generation, b/c that's a different story. They have a slight problem with the 200,000-300,000 person death count. But even they know/acknowledge that the massacre did happen.
Perhaps I need to befriend more ultranationalists, b/c if Japan is full of these massacre-forgetters, I don't know where the hell they all are.
Now, on to "holocaust":
Holocaust, loosely defined, is mass-killing. In this sense of the word, the rape of Nanjing was very much a holocaust. However, when historians employ this word, they usually refer to the notion of a state-sanctioned mass-killing on a much larger scale.
While I'm not trying to downplay the level of atrocities, the problem with referring to the rape of Nanjing as a "holocaust" is that it gets compared to the holocaust of Jews in WWII. There is nothing wrong with comparisons so long as you don't lump them into the same categories out of ignorance.
Again, I'm not trying to downplay the scale of the Nanjing massacre, but the scope of these two things were quite different.
| Nanjing Massacre | Jewish Holocaust |
|---|---|
| 200,000-300,000 killed | 7 million killed |
| not sanctioned by the state; massacres were the result of troop leaders going out of control | sanctioned by the state; every level of bureaucracy involved |
2. The idea of Japan (the nation) or Imperial Japan embarking on a killing mission. All of Japan did not participate in the Rape of Nanjing. For one, due to strict censoring by the military, the general population did not find out about the atrocities until much later. As for the emperor's role, there are different interpretations. Herbert Bix, for example, argues that the emperor was actively involved in all logistical aspects of the war. However, his book (like Chang's book) got a lot of scathing criticism from the academic community. It seems like the most commonly accepted view (which is also the view that my thesis adviser holds) is that the military (not even the entire military, but a subsection of a few troops) pretty much ran their own show and that the emperor was probably left in the dark about the rapes and atrocities going on at the time. None of the Japanese newspapers at the time, mentioned anything about the Japanese armies raping and slaughtering innocent civilians.
2/8 update: Having just read an article in Japan Focus that refutes my point about a "subsection" being involved in the massacre, I feel compelled to bring it up, as any responsible historian would (even if it contradicts what he/she just said):
In this article, Fujiwara Akira, professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University, (and those of you who think that Japan is in denial and refuses to come to terms with this atrocity, stop one moment and take a note of the nationality of the author whose work I'm about to paraphrase.), argues that the massacre was not the doing of a "small" subsection of the army, but that it was well-planned and orchestrated by Matsui and the troops under his control.
-The central army leaders in Tokyo initially had no plan to attack Nanking when they sent more troops to China; Matsui made up his mind to invade Nanking long before actual orders were given.
-Under Matsui, the Central China Area Army (CCAA) formed. Its primary function was originally to stay in Shanghai and destroy enemy forces.
(Fujiwara offers several reasons why discipline was hard to maintain among the CCAA--The haphazard way the army was put together; older ages of soldiers and their disgruntlement, etc.)
-Despite being chastised by central army leaders in Japan for disobeying orders, Matsui made plans to attack Nanjing and moved his troops towards Nanking.
-Frontline units vied for the "honor" of being the first to enter Nanking; b/c of this, the attack of Nanking was out of control from the outset.
Fujiwara states that "many personal diaries and reminiscences testifying that summary executions took place on command. There is no doubt that these reflected orders from above and took place systematically-- not just haphazardly."
He also debunks several myths propagated by conservatives and revisionists. It is long, but definitely worth a read.
3. Iris Chang's Rape of Nanjing as the first and only English book written about the Nanjing massacre. Just because this is the only book that made it on the NYT bestsellers' list doesn't mean that it was the first or only book written on this topic. Granted, it might be the first contemporary non-translated work that focuses solely on this topic. But Ienaga Saburo has written about this topic in his epic work on WWII back in the 60s. His work was translated into English in 1978--almost 20 years before Chang's book was published.
Honda Katsuichi has also been writing and researching on this topic since the 70s. However, his book on the Nanjing Massacre-- a work that is not without problems, but is solidly researched and far superior to Chang's work--didn't get published in English until two years after Chang's book came out.
The earliest English source on the Nanjing Massacre was actually published in 1938 by H.J. Timperley. After his book, there is a long gap. There are other academic works in English, mostly written in the past 20 years, but perhaps not as widely known as Chang's book.
4. The Japanese "still" in denial over the rape of Nanjing and other atrocities they committed during WWII. All 128 million of them. First of all, I hate when publications--especially reputable publications like the NYT that ought to know better and adhere to better journalistic standards--make ridiculous generalizations about Japan or the Japanese, as if we were all one group. Contrary to popular belief, Japan is neither homogeneous nor monolithic. As I mentioned before, the people who deny that the rape of Nanjing happened are a small subset of ultra right wing conservatives and politicians. Unfortunately, they happen to be the most vocal (but not necessarily the strongest or most influential) voices, and thus are probably most noticed and mentioned by the media etc. Please don't mistake a fringe subset for the entire Japanese population. This would be like saying that all Americans are pro-Iraq war.
5. As a related point to points 3. and 4., let me point out that the best scholarship on the rape of Nanjing is in Japanese. The oldest research (aside from the Timperley book I mentioned earlier) on this topic is in Japanese. While the bulk of English language scholarship on the Rape of Nanjing is relatively new, Japanese scholars have been researching, writing and debating about Nanjing for decades. In fact, this scholar says that research in English lags decades behind the Japanese discourse. This is hardly the description of a nation that refuses to look at its ugly past.
6. U.S. as the great moralizer-it seems that most Americans conveniently forget the United States government's role in Japan's wartime amnesia. First, it absolved Japan from any wartime reparations to its Asian neighbors. Second, in the case of the Unit 731 experiments, the United States government actually colluded with the Japanese government on the silence and paid--let me repeat that lest you missed it--paid Japan to keep quiet about these biological experiments in exchange for data.
The occupation run by MacArthur also played a big role in this wartime amnesia. When the citizens in Japan first learned of the massacre, many were outraged. Poems and haiku that were written by writers on this subject, for example, were censored by the occupation.
7. The historiography of the rape of Nanjing in China-As a subpoint, the historiography of the telling of the rape of Nanjing is quite interesting. During the Cultural Revolution, the Japanese were the biggest aid donors to China. For this reason, and for its own political reasons, the Chinese government attempted to minimize mention of Japan's wartime atrocities during the 60s and 70s. It wasn't until the 80s that the Chinese government started to criticize Japan for its wartime deeds and (I think) started introducing this into school history curricula. Given how fervent the nationalism and concomitant anti-Japanese sentiment seems to be in China, one would never guess that this is a fairly recent phenomenon.
Nowadays, it's almost as though the younger generations in China use the Rape of Nanjing as the sine qua non of their nationalism.
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Flawed though it is, I have mixed feelings about the publication of Chang's book. On the one hand, it's a book I love to hate. However, leaving aside my personal strong objections to the book, one cannot ignore some of the positive that has come out of all of this. The key contributions that Chang's book made to the field of modern Japanese history are: a) due to its notoriety and mass appeal, it did bring the atrocities committed in Nanjing into wider public awareness and b) even among academic circles that do not take her book seriously, her book has spawned great debates and subsequent further research on this topic.
Even though I find myself constantly annoyed by misperceptions that Chang's book, along with the oversweeping generalizations that the NYT has a penchant for writing (when it comes to the topic of Japan and wartime guilt, that is) have helped perpetuate, it is perhaps better than no discourse at all.
Finally, I leave you with two excerpts from 1937 editions of the New York Times that I found re: Nanjing Massacre. Out of curiosity, I looked for U.S. media coverage during the end of 1937 on what was going on in Nanjing at the time. First, around the time of the Nanjing massacre, there was another incident going on-- the shooting by the Japanese of the USS Panay--that seemed to occupy more of the attention of journalists and received far more coverage. Second, since Matsui Iwane's role is hotly debated, I can't attest to the veracity of these accounts (2/8 update: I didn't want to leave out the NYT articles, but having read Fujiwara's article in Japan Focus, it's hard to believe these NYT articles.) so take it for what it's worth, but here they are:
Excerpt from the 9 January 1938 NYT:
"It should be said that certain Japanese units exercised restraint and certain Japanese officers tempered power with generosity and compassion. But the conduct of the Japanese Army as a whole in Nanking was a blot on the reputation of their country. Responsible high Japanese officers and diplomats who visited Nanking some days after the occupation admit all the excesses reported by foreigners who saw them. These Japanese explain the Nanking barbarities by saying that a section of the Japanese Army got out of hand and that the atrocities were being committed unknown to high command in Shanghai."19 December 1937 NYT: "Japanese Curbing Nanking Exesses" (retrieved from ProQuest) :
"The Japanese Army of high command has belatedly begun stern disciplinary measures intended speedily to end the chaos of looting, raping and killing that has made the Japanese entry into Nanking a national disgrace. It is understood that frantic efforts are being made to prevent General Iwane Matsui, the Japanese commander in central China, from learning all the facts concerning the shocking misconduct of his soldiers, who ran amok, wantonly slaying hundreds of disarmed prisoners of war, civilian men, women and children, but that wily old warrior already suspects that some officers of lower rank are engaged in a conspiracy of silence and secrecy."
". . .when, on arriving at the capital, they learned what had occurred there after the siege had ended, their dismay over the Panay deepened into horror and shame."
"Responsible and fine-minded Japanese officials in all branches of the government service are not making attempts to minimize what had occurred. Instead, they admit with dismay that conditions in many respects have been worse than the world yet realizes."
"Every effort at present is bent upon getting these units from the vicinity of Nanking and isolating them in order to restore discipline. . .."
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