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Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing

(Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella, David Lee, editors)

The professors take a shot at explaining the inexplicable

It's not a rape; it's a massacre

There's good stuff in here, but it tends to be obscured by the professorial outlook of writers who didn't personally experience any of the horrors of World War II, and more specifically the "Fifteen Years' War" launched by Japan in 1931. (Of course it wasn't fifteen years; it was only fourteen. Another mystery!) Now, I don't claim to be a victim of the war. In fact, I enjoyed it immensely, as kids will enjoy almost any environment they find themselves in. But I do remember the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, the Burma-Siam Death Railroad, and the atomic bombings that ended the horrors that Japan unleashed upon the world. I experienced them only in books and newspapers, and in the movies and on the radio, but I did experience them.

So I was infuriated to find that the contributors to this volume repeatedly and often offhandly equate the Rape of Nanking with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (Nagasaki, as usual, gets short shrift in the victimization department, even though a much better case can be made against the second bomb than the first.) The atomic bombs were dropped for the purpose of knocking Japan out of the war and ending the horrors the Japanese military had brought to Asia. They succeeded. As Paul Fussel famously wrote: "Thank God for the Atomic Bomb." Absent the Rape of Nanking, and all the lesser atrocities wreaked by the Japanese military, the atomic bomb might never have been developed; certainly it would never have been used upon Hiroshima.

A larger failure is that with all the to-ing and fro-ing, the contributors never seem to get to the heart of the matter: the Japanese way of making war. A good deal is made of the fact that only the general in charge of the army at Nanking was tried and executed for the Rape, but this was a direct outcome of the Japanese style of governance. Cruelty, blind obedience, and the cheapness of human life were institutionalized in the Japanese army and navy, and even in civilian life. (The slang phrase for an Army conscript can be translated as "penny postcard," meaning that he can be replaced for the price of another such card.) How do you hold an institution responsible for a crime? Hanging the emperor might have helped, but why stop there? General Tojo, who led the government through much of the war, was indeed hanged--but why stop there? The Nurnberg precedent of trying the major Nazi leaders, plus selected military men in charge of the most awful situations, just didn't apply to Japan. Either everyone was guilty or no-one was, and in the end, and for all practical purposes, the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal came down on the second proposition. What else could it have done?

I see I haven't defined the crime. Well, if I must! From December 1937 through January 1938, and perhaps later, the Imperial Japanese Army went on an orgy of murder, rape, looting, and arson in the just-conquered Chinese capital of Nanking. The numbers can't be counted. One of the Japanese contributors to this volume try to get the number down to a few thousand killed. (And just seven rapes! He argues that for a rape to be counted, it ought to have been reported to the Japanese authorities. It would have been a brave woman who did that, even if she hadn't murdered, as seems to have been the custom.) One Chinese writer, by contrast, tries to nudge the number of dead toward 400,000. The "official" Chinese figures are 300,000 dead and 20,000 rapes. The atrocities were not only permitted; they were encouraged by the officers in charge, in order to reward soldiers who'd fought a hard campaign, to punish the Chinese for their resistance, and by horrific example to encourage the Chinese elsewhere to quite more readily.

Is the book worth buying? Sure, if you want to know more about Nanking, and perhaps to put Iris Chang's book into perspective.