The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938 : Complicating the Picture

December 13, 2007 marks the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Chinese city of Nanking to the Japanese army. The Nanking Atrocity of winter 1937-8, also known as the Nanking Massacre, lies at the core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers the most recent scholarship about what actually happened in Nanking and places those findings in the context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to the event ever since; an event that is coined, on the Chinese side, as the forgotten Holocaust, after the subtitle of Iris&rsquo Chang&rsquos 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to the contributors of this volume. However, the authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that Nanking was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume presents new facts and fresh interpretations with the overriding aim to complicate the picture and to debunk myths, expose fallacies, and rectify misconceptions that obstruct a clear understanding of the issues and prevent ultimate reconciliation between China and Japan. Contents 7 Preface and Acknowledgments 9 Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Table 12 Maps 16 Introduction 21 1. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, The Messiness of Historical Reality 23 2. Fujiwara Akira, The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview 49 Section One: War Crimes and Doubts 75 3. Kasahara Tokushi, Massacres outside Nanking City 77 4. Ono Kenji, Massacres near Mufushan 90 5. David Askew, Part of the Numbers Issue: Demography and Civilian Victims 106 6. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate, 1971–75 135 7. Timothy Brook, Radhabinod Pal on the Rape of Nanking: The Tokyo Judgment and the Guilt of History 169 Section Two: Agressors and Collaborators 199 8. Amano Saburô, Letters from a Reserve Officer Conscripted to Nanking 201 9. Timothy Brook, Chinese Collaboration in Nanking 216 10. David Askew, Westerners in Occupied Nanking: December 1937 to February 1938 247 11. Takashi Yoshida, Wartime Accounts of the Nanking Atrocity 268 Section Three: Another Denied Holocaust? 285 12. Joshua A. Fogel, The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory 287 13. Masahiro Yamamoto, A Tale of Two Atrocities: Critical Appraisal of American Historiography 305 14. Kasahara Tokushi, Higashinakano Osamichi: The Last Word in Denial 324 15. Kimura Takuji, Nanking: Denial and Atonement in Contemporary Japan 350 Postscript 375 16. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Leftover Problems 377 Appendix 414 Bibliography 419 Notes on Contributors 438 Index 441 First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang's book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre. Events in Nanking during 1937-38 are the subject of a ferocious historiographical debate between Chinese & Japanese points of view. This volume seeks to debunk the myths promoted by scholars on both sides of the argument & present a revisionist view of the atrocity that complicates the picture