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The 'Massacre' of Nanjing: a Japanese view

By ERIC JOHNSTON, Staff writer, Japan Times

OSAKA -- The Nanjing Massacre took place more than 60 years ago, but the battle over what exactly happened continues to rage.

For the past few years, since the publication of The Rape of Nanking, by American author Iris Chang, international pressure on Japan to apologize and offer compensation for the Nanking atrocities has grown. In the U.S., several states, including California and Nebraska, have discussed or approved resolutions condemning Japanese actions during the war.

There have always been those in Japan who deny the massacre occurred. But since the publication of Chang's book, an unusually large number of works have appeared supporting these denials.

The basic facts of events prior to the incident are not in dispute. On Dec. 12, 1937, after fierce fighting around Nanjing between the Imperial Japanese forces and Chinese soldiers and weeks after Shanghai fell, Japan defeated the last of Chang Kai-shek's Nationalist soldiers and entered the walled city.

What happened next, though, is where the disagreements begin. How many were killed and by whom? Were those who died innocent civilians or soldiers in hiding? How such questions are approached and answered divides those who deny that the massacre occurred from those who stress it is history.

The main reason such questions can be raised is that evidence and eyewitness accounts, although numerous, are scant compared with the voluminous death-camp records kept by the Nazis.

The Holocaust was ruthlessly planned at the highest levels, took place over a period of years and involved the whole of Europe. In contrast, the Nanking Massacre was conducted by troops running amok over a period of several months and in just one city.

Much of the debate focuses on proving or disproving evidence and accounts. At a symposium held here in January that denied the massacre occurred, Osamichi Higashinakano, a professor at Asia University who has written several books on the issue, presented video testimony by former Imperial Japanese military officers who were in Nanjing at the time and said they saw no evidence of large-scale murder.

A polished public speaker, Higashinakano's argument rests on four premises. First, because some Japanese soldiers claimed they saw no one in the city when they entered, mass slaughter could not have occurred. Second, although killings occurred, the victims were Chinese soldiers who had stripped off their uniforms, not civilians.

Third, the records of foreigners in the Nanking International Safety Zone do not support claims of large-scale rape or murder, only isolated incidents. And fourth, much of the photographic evidence that later appeared was faked.

"All the evidence indicates that although some killings did occur, nothing like 300,000 people were killed," he said.

The problem with these presumptions is that they take isolated facts to support conclusions, or they are based on highly selective evidence.

For example, Higashinakano is correct when he says German businessman John Rabe, who headed the International Safety Zone, does not record seeing 300,000 people raped and murdered. But Rabe did see many Chinese killed. He estimated in June 1938, after returning to Germany, that between 50,000 and 60,000 had died.

The professor also interviewed former soldiers who denied participating in the mayhem. He does not attempt to address testimony, compiled by journalist Katsuichi Honda, among others, of Japanese soldiers who admitted they took part in the rape.

But Higashinakano has proved persuasive. So much so that a group of Japanese scholars and activists, alarmed at his growing popularity, published a book last year criticizing him and others denying the rape and for telling 13 specific lies.

"Higashinakano uses rhetorical tricks to argue that the Rape of Nanking was first brought up at the Tokyo Trials as a plot to punish Japan, that no one knew about it at the time and that the testimony from the Chinese was unreliable," said Hitotsubashi University professor Yutaka Yoshida, one of the book's authors, who spoke at a separate symposium countering the revisionists' claims earlier this month.

"These claims are proved false by those in Nanking at the time and records of the Foreign Ministry," he said.

Yoshida is referring to a cable sent by then-Foreign Minister Koki Hirota to the Japanese Embassy in Washington on Jan. 17, 1938, about a month after Japanese troops entered the city.

"Hirota tells the Japanese ambassador that reports out of Nanking say 300,000 Chinese have been killed," Yoshida said.

Many Western historians agree that 300,000 people were killed and 20,000 women were raped. As further evidence, they cite the November 1948 verdict of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. The court concluded that at least 200,000 were killed in Nanjing proper. Historians say that when the number of those killed in outlying areas is added, the figure becomes 300,000.

But Yoshida and other Japanese who firmly believe mass rape and murder were committed have their doubts about this figure.

"The official Japanese view is that somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 people were killed," Yoshida said. "It is not clear how, exactly, the 300,000 figure was reached."

The number of deaths recorded in scholarly works has ranged from 40,000 to 1 million. For many years after the war, historians, including Barbara Tuchman, whose book "Stillwell and the American Experience in China," won the Pulitzer Prize, used the figure of about 42,000 deaths. In general, source material from 1937 and 1938, including diaries and journalistic dispatches, contains estimates ranging between 40,000 and 300,000 dead.

After the war, the numbers increased to between 100,000 and 200,000 in China and the West. Japanese sources were silent until the textbook controversies of the early 1980s, where figures ranging from only a few to 200,000 were put forth by retired military officers and some academics.

The disagreements stem from the suspicious nature of some of the original testimony. For example, during the Tokyo Trials, the court accepted evidence from Lu Su, a Chinese victim. On Dec. 18, 1937, Lu claimed, the Imperial Japanese Army rounded up 57,418 Chinese and executed them. The court did not ask how Lu, hiding in a cave at the time, could arrive at such a precise figure.

Those who deny the massacre have held up such testimony as proof that Chinese claims are exaggerated. But the very debate over the numbers shows a shift in their position.

"Higashinakano has been forced to admit that killings did occur. This is different from many years ago, when those who deny the rape said there were no murders," Yoshida said.

"What happened at Nanking cannot be denied because it is known around the world. But poor scholars like Higashinakano must be exposed for their lies and half-truths," he added.

But as the past few months have demonstrated, the fight over how the history books will be written is unlikely to end anytime soon.

The Japan Times: Apr. 15, 2000 (C) All rights reserved .

The Nanjing number game

By GREGORY CLARK .

So the book titled The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, by ?-year-old Chinese-American writer Iris Chang has the Japanese critics stirred up. Everyone from the former Japanese ambassador in Washington and Japan's powerful conservative commentators down to the rightwing academics and ultranationalist fanatics has denounced it for emotional errors and distortions.

Some photos in the book are faked, they say. The numbers killed in the 1937/38 Nanjing incident were far less than the claimed 300,000. And according to some finicky U.S. academics, it is an insult to Jewish memories to use the word Holocaust. The incident needs to be seen in perspective, they say.

Perspective? In that case, what the Japanese military did in Nanjing looks like a sideshow compared with what they did in the rest of China.

In much of northern China, the military had a deliberate policy of destroying all villages and killing all who might possibly be of help to the other side. A much-documented horror was the practice of "blooding" new recruits by having them bayonet to death any captured Chinese males that might be at hand.

Japan's brutal and ceaseless wartime bombing of undefended civilian targets in Shanghai and Chungking would have to rank fairly high in the list of atrocities perpetrated by allegedly civilized nations, even if today we have some competition from Chechnya and Yugoslavia.

The sum total of Chinese killed during Japan's decade of aggression is well ahead of the Holocaust. It approaches the level of Nazi killings against the Slav peoples, for some reason excluded from Holocaust memories.

Many of the Japanese killings were just as deliberate as Nazi killings in Europe: the massacres of entire Chinese villages in Malaya, the 40,000 people coldbloodedly selected for execution in Singapore and the untold thousands of leftwing Chinese rounded up for torture and execution or dispatch to the germ-chambers of Unit 731 in Manchuria.

And the assumptions of racial superiority were probably just as ugly. Japanese conservatives still complain bitterly about how up to 10 percent of Japanese soldiers held postwar in Siberia died from cold and overwork over some five to six years of imprisonment. Soviet apologies and compensation have been angrily demanded. Meanwhile, the 40 percent death rate in two years of Chinese civilians press-ganged to work as forced labor in Japan was first denied and then shrugged off as just one of those things.

Clearly a Chinese life was, and still is, valued at far less than a Japanese life.

Some Japanese rightwingers justify this brutality by claiming Chinese civilization had degenerated to the point where the Chinese themselves saw life as cheap. Yet while the Japanese side was killing Chinese prisoners out of hand, the Chinese side was carefully looking after and repatriating Japanese prisoners. Just whose civilization was degenerate?

Where the Japanese can claim just a glimmer of morality was that they only killed those Asians suspected of being anti-Japan. They tried to be nice to those considered to be pro-Japan. Nazi killings of the Jews showed few such mercies.

But while Germany today apologizes, Japan prevaricates. Especially ugly is the way rightwingers and conservatives here airily dismiss the need to dredge up details of the past, but then pounce with minute detail on minor discrepancies in otherwise undeniable accounts of past atrocities.

A doubtful statistic on page 176 or one misplaced photo on page 274 is enough to slam the author and argue that maybe was no atrocity to begin with.

Equally ugly is the official habit of denying wrongdoings by claiming there are no official records. One reason for the absence of those records, of course, was the official policy of destroying all incriminating records as soon as the war ended.

The only reason we now know in detail about the Chinese forced laborers is because the only one of the many meticulous wartime reports on the subject not to suffer destruction at war's end accidentally fell into the hands of the Taiwan authorities and could not be denied.

In Europe today any attempt to deny Nazi atrocities is a one-way ticket to denigration and possibly jail. In Japan today atrocity denial can easily be the path to fame and adulation in the conservative factions that control this nation.

On top of all this is the curious rightwing logic that says continued Chinese unhappiness over past and current wrongs is evidence that deep down the Chinese have always hated Japan, and therefore never needed to be apologized to in the first place.

Whether or not Nanjing suffered the amount of violence claimed by Chang is irrelevant. Whatever account we look at, it is clear that Japanese soldiers there killed and raped in large numbers. Indeed, ever since the first Japanese aggression against China in 1895, the Chinese nation has been raped repeatedly by Japan.

The Chinese are a proud people. Today they are asked not just to live with the rapist and accept his halfhearted apologies, but also to put up with backhanded claims that maybe the rape was deserved, or never happened at all. They also see a postwar Japan that has prospered through joining the United States in an alliance aimed to keep the former China victim backward and contained, and a Japanese rightwing trying hard to help detach some of the booty from the first 1895 "rape," namely Taiwan.

If I were a Chinese I would be very angry. Probably even angrier than Iris Chang.

Gregory Clark is president of Tama University.

The Japan Times: Feb. 7, 2000
(C) All rights reserved