Customer Reviews

The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (Asia: Local Studies / Global Themes)

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This is a lesser known source among published Nanjing Massacre literature, but is well worth acquiring due to the variety of perspectives it offers in one book. I would say that any criticisms lodged here against this interesting work, from the typical Japanese Nationalists trolls whose primary ambition is to share their confusion with others, should be completely ignored.

Every legitimate WWII historian, including not a few brave scholars in present-day Japan, understand and accept the basic facts and figures surrounding the Nanjing Massacre and the trail of brutality that led from Shanghai in 1937-38. The documentation is extensive, from numerous Western eyewitness accounts to intercepted Japanese diplomatic cables. Magazine accounts of these events can easily be found in Western libraries and even on eBay. Yet Japanese nationalists want us to believe that a massive "conspiracy" has led to an "untrue version" of the Massacre. But the conspiracy rests solely with JAPAN, not the Allied Nations. Nationalists will point you to absurd Japanese press coverage of post-massacre Nanjing, which is nothing more than skewed occupation propaganda. Likewise, published revisionist accounts by Imperial Army officers in Nanjing, offered in defense of the nationalist position, are usually no more than denials or excusals for their own indifference during the Massacre.

The fact that a member of the Imperial House is accused of being a primary instigator of the Massacre is of utmost concern to Japanese nationalists. But the Nanjing Massacre should not be considered as unusual conduct for a Japanese military that also brutalized Manchuria, Hong Kong, and Singapore citizens, killed over 200,000 laborers on the Death Railway from Thailand to Burma, and ravaged innumerable Philippine villages, culminating in the Rape of Manila. The Imperial Army's abandonment of their own conscripted settlers in Manchuria and mass slaughter of Okinawans in 1945 also speaks of the evil that pervaded Japan's military before and during WWII. You can go to any of these places, talk to the survivors and still see physical evidence of Japanese military atrocities. Yet Japanese nationalists, often motivated by insecure needs to believe in a delusional glory of the past, deny anything that would place Japan's military actions in a bad light. The question is why citizens of the world should trust such revisionists who essentially possess the same arrogance and racism of the former militant regime which they extoll and worship? We should not.

While I have great fondness for Japanese culture and people, I am dismayed by the distorted histories that are still found today in their own schools. Many Japanese I talk to say they learn of Japan's real WWII past only in college. Japan today should not be judged by the ridiculous extremists who comment here and those old men in high places who try to suppress their national shame. The good news is that with more internationalization, young Japan is slowly coming to grips with their past. Recent TV doramas such as "Song of the Canefields" (reciting Imperial Army atrocities in Okinawa), have educated many young Japanese better than the heavily-edited history textbooks in ther schools. The recent actions of fanatical extremists in Hiroshima and anti-Japanese sentiments during football matches in China also have placed Japan on notice as to their obligations to resolve past offenses.

I am a Chinese and I have read some books and watched some videos about the Nanjing Massacre. I can't hold my angry towards the Janpenese who wrote some nonsense below.

I'd like to ask some questions to him/her. Frist, how could he/she explain why there are plenty of survivers of the Nanjing Masscare who still live in China and can show uncountable injuries throught their bodies? Don't forget that it happened only 60 years ago and the survivers hasn't died out. If you want to lie, please wait to those people pass away.

Secondly, what is the casue of the war? Did China invaded Japan? Tell me which one happened frist, Pearl Harbor or bombing of Tokoy? Why there are 3 million Japanese troops stayed in China during 1937-1945? What did they do? Were they in vacations?

Third, why there are millions of Japanese "residents" lived in Machuran, or the northeast part of China? And Why they could occupy most of the land, forcing Chinese people to leave? Why the Japanese "residents" did not pay tax to local Chinese government but pay tax to the Japense troops? (The truth was the Japanese occupied the whole area, which is 5-6 times larger than Japan itself, and wanted to change the land as a "new Japan.")

Could you answer these questions?

Yes, the Nuke bombs killed thousands of hundreds Japanese, but Japanese killed at least 25 million Chinese during WWII. 25 million! Who was "brainwashed"? Why don't you say that it is a lie of Pearl Harbor, the truth is Americans attacked Japnese?

We never refused to admit that the Japnese suffered by the nuclear weapon. But we can's understand why there always be some Japnese who refuse to grant the history? History is history. There is no need and to lie. If Japan wants to become a normal country and get respect from other nations, it should stop to "modify" the history. Please watch what the German did and compare to yourself!

The nonsense written by Hiromi is ridiculous.

There are for a fact several surviving non chinese people who even recorded videos of the horror japanese troops inflicted against the people in Nanjing, and there are several photos also which can easily be verified as original non edited photographs by any photo lab today.

And to say no foreigner actually witnessed the massacre is so naive, if you where going to execute 30.000 civilians and your the invading force, would you just allow some foreigner to sit by and watch? of course not even bringing such a point up is nothing less but stupid.

And for the authors Higashinakano Shudo and Tanaka Masaaki, they are both know pro right wing LPD so of course they will deny that the nanjing massacre ever took place.

And i wouldn't call it a brain washing program either, more true information program, since during the wartime the japanese government had total media control and most japanese had no knowledge what really happened overseas.

It's just stupid to not take responsibility for past actions and try to deny such an obvious truth. It would be like if my country (sweden) tried to deny its invasion of norway, russia, and the majority northern europe. Or trying to deny the crusades made by christian knights to spread the christian faith using armed forces against those who did not convert.

Face it, it did happen and i welcome any book that can help the truth thats why i give it 4/5.

We need books like this to show the past to those brainwashed people, such as one of the viewers---Hiromi (a Japanese woman) (To Hiromi: Stop being so naive!)

Learn from history. Don't let this kind of terrible things happen again! World peace!

Nanjing Massacre upsets and stuns me every time when I think of it. Moreover, the fact of the Japanese government which distorted history and referred to the 1937-38 Nanjing massacre (an estimated 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed) by the innocuous title of "incident" is absolutely outrageous!!!!!!

In 1997, historian Iris Chang resurrected American memories of what was once a sensational scandal. In "The Rape of Nanking," she gathered stories and pictures of the Imperial Japanese Army's conquest of that city in 1937, when it was the capital of China.

Her book was a best-seller, and other Chinese-Americans also were documenting and publicizing these events, though with less impact than Chang's.

But if Americans had almost forgotten the Rape of Nanking, neither the Chinese nor the Japanese had. "The Nanjing Massacre" brings together essays by three young historians exploring the historical interpretations of the event in China (by Mark Eyholt), in Japan (by Takashi Yoshida) and in the academy (by Daqing Yang).

Chang's book was attacked by Japanese militarists. "The Nanjing Massacre" is a good place to start evaluating these criticisms, which were mostly unfounded.

What Yoshida calls "Japanese conservatives" have denied the massacre, or, if admitting some small atrocities occurred, claim they were no worse than things done to the Japanese.

None of the essayists doubts the Japanese slaughtered, raped, looted and burned their way across Nanking (or Nanjing) city and province. But they do doubt the honesty, clarity and reliability of the writing of the event's history on all sides.

Eyholt reports that Chinese governments, both Nationalist and Communist, have generally found reasons to play down the massacre. The Communists have preferred to ignore it, and declined to seek compensation, because the regime has wanted economic cooperation with Japan.

The level of cynicism displayed by the People's Republic government and the Chinese Communist Party is hardly surprising but nonetheless breathtaking: In the early '50s, the Communists blamed westerners in Nanking for aiding the Japanese. The truth was, any Chinese who survived did so because the Japanese were afraid of Western public opinion.

In the '80s, Chinese students began investigating the massacre and publicizing it. Throughout the 20th century, from the May 5 movement in 1919 to the pressure on Chiang Kai-shek to resist the Japanese invasion of 1937, Chinese public opinion has been uniformly anti-Japanese and far more nationalist than the governments have been.

The situation in Japan, as reported by Yoshida, is as would be expected. Japanese public opinion is overwhelmingly against admitting or apologizing for the massacre.

The governments, the courts and what Yoshida calls "progressives" (a jumble of democrats, old socialists and decent people) hold the formal control of organs of "public opinion." Government ministers who say the massacre never happened are forced to resign.

But books exonerating Japanese war criminals outsell books telling honestly of the war in China by a hundred to one.

Americans have invested a thousand times as much effort in understanding the Holocaust as they have in understanding Japanese war crimes. But editor Joshua Fogel warns against easy comparisons between the two forms of genocide. They are, the essayists agree, not directly comparable crimes.

A great deal of the controversy has surrounded the exact total of rapes and murders. China has settled on a figure of 300,000 slain.

Japanese revisionists have attacked this statistic. They argue that if they can show that the numbers were inflated, that would prove the massacre never happened at all.

Anyhow, the relevant answer is not a number. The answer to "How many Chinese were killed at Nanking?" is "all of them."

All three essayists miss this point, which is, after all, the main one. Yang, in particular, surrenders to the fascists on the question of responsibility.

Now that the story is falling out of the hands of the participants and into the hands of the professional historians, the fundamental problems not only do not receive better answers, they are being wrongly answered.

The most egregious example concerns the extent to which higher levels of the Japanese army and government were aware of and tolerated or ordered the rampage.

Historian Yang looks for a piece of paper either implicating or exonerating some group or other, though the answer is obvious to anyone. The fact -- and it is a fact -- that the Japanese exterminated almost a whole province, except about 200,000 Chinese who managed to crowd under the shelter of American and European flags, proves as much as anyone could want that the Rape of Nanking was calculated, deliberate policy of the army and the government.

This book gives an extraordinary account of the atrocities that took place in China. Throughout history, the Japanese have always waged war and rationed hurt to humanity. Perhaps this aggression stems from a Napoleonic Complex due to the men's generally effeminate physiques. The Japanese have one allegiance, and that's to their Emperor(Hirohito). By the emperor's own account, Japan ".. a beautiful country built from the geniuses of other nations," But let's be fair...Japan has made contributions for mankind; For example, hundreds of lives(some argue thousands, but it's been proven to be a gross exaggeration) were sacrificed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki to prove to the world that nuclear weaponry is much more devastating if you're hit with not one, but TWO A-Bombs. It's no wonder that many so-called "American" Japanese were put into internment camps. Indeed, it is not hard to surmise that the U.S.atomic bombings on Japan were not only a means to end the war, but more so to discipline a nation that harbored murderous intentions of killing innocent people and spreading their growth-stinted genes to women of different races, thus cursing the rest of humanity . War is always terrible, always great, but during the span of one week in 1945, angels took the forms of B-29s, ensuring that a hateful generation would never threaten peace-loving, civilized societies.

if it's true, they will be a tokyo massacre

too sad and brutal

In China, a dynasty's history is written by its conqueror so that the conquest is totally justified.
At Tokyo Trial, a.k.a. International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Allied powers, especially the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union and China, did the same thing to Japan.
To justify their own atrocities against the Japanese civilians, such as the U.S.A.'s atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and other carpet bombimgs with napalm on over 60 cities of Japan, Soviet Union's unlawful attack on the Japanese residents in Manchuria, lots of, lots of "more barbaric crimes" were needed to be fabricated at the trial.
Furthermore, most importantly, the fabricated history should be regarded as "legally" validated truths.
In the following 7 year occupation of Japan, the Supreme Comander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) and the General Head Quarter (GHQ) ran a "brain washing" programme called " War Guilt Information Programme" in order to "disarm" Japanese fighting spirit that concerned the U.S. authority a lot. It completed with the meticulous censorship that covered over the whole madia, publications and education. Even the very existence of the censorship was completely concealed.

I have to admit that the "brain washing" have been very successful as regards the whole world still believe the judgments of the trial are all true, with the exception of some patriotic Japanese scholars and researchers who are trying to refute the unjust accusations Japan had to accept.

By the way, I rated this book with 3 stars just because it has good, extensive bibliography including the books that demonstrate how the Tokyo Trial proceeded one-sidedly, that how the "Nanking Massacre" story have been fabricated for the propaganda purposes and that debunk most of those alleged atrocities of the Japanese Imperial Army.
Not to mention the contemporary documents that, in fact, admit no massacre was actually witnessed by those "objective" foreigners other than the Chinese Army propagandists.

In fact, according to a document written by the Chinese prosecutor of Nanking Justice Court, when the Court sent people to interview citizens of Nanking after the war ended, almost nobody accused the Japanese Army. Furthermore, some even claimed that the atrocities occurred in Nanking were, actually, done by the Chinese Army.

Those are the facts that every scholarly work should include at least for verification. And if you read those books, written by so-called "Massacre Denial Fuction" authors like Higashinakano Shudo and Tanaka Masaaki etc..., you should get much more broader picture of what really happened in Nanking, December 1937.

Unfortunately, however, the authors of this book simply dismissed the denial theses without examining them while ignoring their own misreading and misconception towards whole issue. Consequently, they grossly failed to make good counter-arguments to the denial theses. That means, I hate to say this but, this book is just another representative of "Nanking Massacre" theses that are unsubstantiated and sloppy, and yet emotional enough to make a forced analogy as if denying the "Nanking Massacre" is the same horrible act as the denial of the Nazi Holocaust.

Precisely because of that belief, it appears, they would never come to think that the denial theses of the massacre may contain some truths, like Inquisitors never recognised the heliocentric theory.

Maybe, it is these people who must face some painful truths, not the Japanese they are accusing.