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    The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture
    The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture
    The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture
    Ebook906 pages11 hours

    The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture

    By Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

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    About this ebook

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateAug 1, 2017
    ISBN9781785335976
    The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938: Complicating the Picture

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      The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938 - Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

      1

      THE MESSINESS OF HISTORICAL REALITY

      Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

      A Sordid Squabble

      Seventy years, well over two generations, have past since the Nanking Atrocity of 1937–38, better known in English as the Rape of Nanking or Nanking Massacre. Yet there is no fruitful or even civil dialogue about it between the Chinese and Japanese; indeed, venom now flows at peak levels. This was not always so. During the war, of course, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek sought to win sympathy and aid from his U.S. ally by denouncing Japanese barbarities at his capital where, he claimed, over 200,000 civilians were massacred within one week.¹ But this need to vilify a wartime enemy ended when Japan surrendered in August 1945. Thereafter, three factors minimized Sino-Japanese hostility until the 1980s.

      First, Chiang and his Kuomintang (KMT) regime or Nationalist government did not revel in victors’ justice. They were bent on getting even with Chinese collaborators, called Han-chien, or traitors to the Han race, and on winning a civil war against Communist rivals, against whom they mobilized some Japanese units. In 1945–47, when over a million defeated Japanese were left in China at Chiang’s mercy, his regime indicted 38,280 Chinese for treason as opposed to 883 Japanese for war crimes; it sentenced 15,391 Chinese, as opposed to 504 Japanese, to death or imprisonment on those charges; and, it refused to prosecute those Japanese responsible for massacres in northern areas of China that were sympathetic to the Communists.²

      Second, some Japanese academics such as Inoue Kiyoshi in the 1950s and 1960s used the term Massive Butchery (daigyakusatsu or ta-t’u-sha in Chinese) when referring to Nanking.³ Others wrote bestsellers that cited a death toll of 200,000 to 300,000, but qualified the figure as denoting civilian massacre victims and soldiers killed in action over five months along a battlefront that advanced 300 kilometers from Shanghai to Nanking. For the city of Nanking alone, they cited 42,000 Chinese deaths with no breakdown as to civilians and belligerents.⁴

      Third, the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), the regime that won the civil war in 1949, prioritized an anti-KMT, anti-U.S., antifeudal, antirevolutionary, agenda. It sought to discredit Chiang and the KMT, who had fled to Taiwan but threatened to retake the mainland with U.S. help during the Cold War. Thus the PRC denounced KMT incompetence and cowardice as an indirect cause of tragedies such as Nanking; that is, Chiang, who had appeased Japan from 1931, deserted his capital when its fall was imminent, as did his commander T’ang Sheng-chih, who vowed to die in its defense, only to flee at the last moment.⁵ The PRC in the 1950s also insinuated complicity by U.S. residents in Nanking who reputedly entertained themselves with wine, song, and dance, celebrated Christmas, and ate their fill of roast beef, roast duck, sweet potatoes and other fresh food while the invaders ran amok. The PRC also accused U.S. residents of creating a refugee area, the Nanking Safety Zone (NSZ), so that Chinese could be more easily killed.⁶ Today, a different PRC line depicts those same Americans, plus Nazi Party member and good German John Rabe, as heroic friends of China who rescued Nanking citizens from slaughter.⁷

      The KMT in 1947, and PRC in 1960, cited over 10 million war deaths from 1937 to 1945. Both regimes presumed that Japanese militarism had been hateful, but voiced little overt criticism on the grounds that ordinary Japanese, like ordinary Chinese, had been its victims. Meanwhile, a few Japanese historians used the term Massive Butchery, and several of them cited Nanking death tolls of 200,000 to 300,000. The Chinese accepted those figures and the inclusion therein of troops killed in action over five months from Shanghai to Nanking. Thus, the Chinese tacitly admitted the key distinction between death tolls that included belligerents killed in action and massacre-victim tolls of innocent noncombatants, and they admitted that these deaths took place in a wide area over several months. Finally, the PRC faced other problems: the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. For classes branded the black five antirevolutionaries—capitalists, landlords, intellectuals, criminals, and KMT (right-wing) sympathizers—those other problems were certainly more recent than Japanese aggression and probably more painful too. Even females who had been raped or recruited in the war as comfort women suffered persecution for allegedly consorting with the enemy.⁸ Thus, for more than thirty years after the war, Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but especially in the PRC, directed most of their wrath at traitors to the Han race and class enemies—at other Chinese rather than at the Japanese. Terrible though it was, as massacres go in history, Nanking had been largely

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