Talking about Nanjing Massacres.
There are different views if one is interested.
A comment from ---
wais.stanford.edu
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3. Current Research
Academic research on the Nanjing Incident is mainly conducted in Chinese, English, and Japanese. Of the three language groups, Japanese has produced the most advanced research, with the debate in English lagging years if not decades behind. In both Japan and China, however, polemical writing has been driven by nationalism, and especially in China by state priorities. The discourse in Taiwan has produced research of a high quality, but the indigenisation of history that has occurred from the 1980s, together with the emergence of democracy and a new national identity, has had a negative impact on research on China, including Nanjing. The discourse in Taiwan has been further undermined by the inflow of research from mainland China.
3.1 Chinese-language Research
The most valuable Chinese language materials are the collections of various primary sources, including the recollections of many of the Chinese military personnel in Nanjing.[9] However, these collections show no evidence of any vigorous critical attempt to distinguish between valid and legitimate primary materials and other materials; photographs, for instance, which are known to be fabricated, or from different areas and different times, continue to be used to 'prove' Japanese guilt in the winter of 1937-38 in and around Nanjing.[10] Moreover, because of the limitations on free speech in mainland China, much of the secondary material merely parrots the government line of the day, and it would be difficult to describe the situation as a 'debate'. Thus, for instance, a group of researchers at Nanjing University in the 1960s condemned the members of the Western community who remained behind in Nanjing to run the humanitarian Safety Zone for turning a blind eye to the Japanese atrocities in the city, and 'misused' the primary sources to suggest that they co-operated in the Japanese slaughter of Chinese.[11] It is true that the Westerners in Nanjing did work with the Japanese, but it was a reluctant co-operation, and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it extended to helping directly the Japanese kill anyone.
As Chinese concerns about 'American Imperialism' diminished, and as Japan became the target of official vitriol (partly at least because of the highly politicised and contentious issue of Japanese textbooks), Westerners came to be depicted as resistors rather than collaborators. In another work that is frequently based on a vivid imagination rather than primary sources and which demonstrates the influence of the Chinese literature on some sections of the English literature, Iris Chang claims that members of the international community jumped 'in front of cannons and machine guns to prevent the Japanese from firing' on unarmed civilians.[12] However, although there is not a shred of evidence that this happened the only documented case of a killing witnessed by any of the Westerners who remained in Nanjing after the journalists left on 15 and 16 December is that of a single man who was executed by Japanese soldiers the work of the international community is today highly lauded in all the literature on Nanjing and is one of the few areas about which all researchers of the Nanjing Incident can agree.[13]
Despite the fact that there seems to be little sign of internal debate in China, there are indications of an emerging discourse. Several Japanese works including Hata Ikuhiko's Nankin jiken -- 'Gyakusatsu' no kozo (The Nanjing incident: The structure of a 'massacre') (1986)have been translated into Chinese, so readers have access to non-official points of view.[14] In addition, the web provides a forum in which all points of view can be discussed, and the liberal world of free debate is open to those who can read and write English.
3.2 English-language Research
Although the research in Japanese remains superior to that in English and Chinese, this was not always the case. Surprisingly, perhaps, much of the primary material on Nanjing was originally written and published in English. The two central collections of primary materials -- given the discussion of the Chinese literature, it is ironic to note that both these works were products of GMD (Guomindang) propaganda -- consist of works published in English very soon after the incident itself: H. J. Timperley ed., What War Means: The Japanese Terror in China -- A Documentary Record (1938), and Hsu Shuhsi ed., Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone (1939). This head-start has not however been maintained. The first major monograph on Nanjing to be published in English after Hsu was the problematic work by Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking ,(1997), a work that can only be described as frequently fabricated and/or fictitious. Following the publication of Chang, historians have at last started to write in English about this important event in Sino-Japanese history. Joshua A. Fogel's edited work, The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (2000), is by any standard an impressive work, albeit one that focuses on the historiography rather than the history of Nanjing. Although flawed, both Honda Katsuichi, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (1999) and Hua-ling Hu, American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin(2000), are important contributions.[15] One of the latest in the long run of recent publications in English includes Masahiro Yamamoto, Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (2000), a work that is easily the most objective historical account of Nanjing in the English-language literature to date.[16]
American Missionary Eyewitnesses to the Nanking Massacre, 1937 - 1938 (1997), Timothy Brook ed., Documents of the Rape of Nanking (1999), and Zhang Kaiyuan ed., Eyewitnesses to Massacre: American Missionaries Bear Witness to Japanese Atrocities in Nanjing (2001), are all collections of primary materials long unavailable in English. Finally, John Rabe's diary, Der gute Deutsche von Nanking (1997) -- translated into English as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe (1998) -- is a crucial piece of evidence.
3.3 Japanese Language Research
The Japanese language literature is even more impressive. Unlike the debate in English, Japanese researchers have been debating -- and truly debating -- the incident for decades rather than only the past few years, so the Japanese language materials can only be summarised here.[17] This debate has ebbed and flowed over the years, but has been steadily building up steam since the mid-1980s. If the post-war period from 1945 to 2003 is divided into three periods of 20 years each -- 1945-1964, 1965-1984, 1985-2004 -- and if we look at books published in Japanese with Nanjing in the title or sub-title, during the first period no books, during the second 17, and during the third over a hundred books were published. Moreover, the 1980s in particular saw a collapse in the perceived legitimacy of the Illusion School, with, for instance, Kaikosha, a support group of individuals from the pre-1945 Military Staff College, which had previously denied that massacres occurred in Nanjing, expressing regret for the killings on behalf of those directly involved.[18] Recent popular Japanese interest in the Nanjing Incident in particular has triggered a flood of books that could well be described as a publishing industry. I believe that this was stimulated by the publication in English of Iris Chang's book, together with the publication in Japanese of John Rabe's diary in 1997.[19] Moreover, a neo-nationalist political movement, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform,[20] together with the Association for the Advancement of a Liberal View of History,[21] has helped to foster an intellectual environment in which many Japanese reject interpretations of the colonial and wartime epochs its critics describe as the Tokyo Trial View of History. Chang's work in particular is unashamedly based on this view of history and, as is often the case with this particular historical ideology, is fatally flawed. The intellectual environment in Japan has changed to such a degree that Chang's work has found very little support there, even among the corpse maximisers, left-wing advocates of the validity of the Tokyo Trial, who argue that a 'great (or large-scale) massacre' did occur. The reception of Rabe's diary has been, in general, much more positive. Together, these two works have served to reopen the debate in Japan on the Nanjing Incident.
Although the best introductory work on Nanjing in any language probably remains Hata Ikuhiko's Nankin jiken (1986), recent work in Japan has moved far beyond what was possible in the mid-1980s, principally because so many primary sources have since been published. The debate has also moved firmly into the mainstream. Although lay authors continue to write on Nanjing, the early debate was largely between a journalist (Honda Katsuichi) and a free-lance writer (Suzuki Akira), but now is also a debate between large groups of academics.[22]
One of the blemishes of much of the research on Nanjing in English to date is that frequently it has been based on secondary materials. Indeed, one of the great differences between the research in Japan and that in the English-speaking world, and one of the great strengths of the Japanese-language literature, is that it has relied heavily on primary sources. Ironically, perhaps, a large amount of material originally written in English is in fact far more readily available today in Japanese than in English. For instance, the first volume, Amerika kankei shiryohen (American materials), of a two volume set, Nankin jiken shiryoshu (Materials on the Nanjing incident), edited by the Nankin jiken chosa kenkyukai (1992), contains 85 newspaper and magazine articles originally printed in English at the time of the Nanjing Incident but now readily available in English only to the researcher with access to a good library. In addition, this collection contains over 150 primary documents that shed much light on the events in Nanjing during the winter of 1937-38. Both Timperley and Hsu have long been available in Japanese. Rabe's diary appeared in Japanese before an English edition was published, and while a Japanese-language edition of Minnie Vautrin's diary exists, researchers are still waiting for an English-language edition.[23] Kasahara has in fact recently noted that '[n]ine different collections of historical materials on the massacre have been published [in Japan]. Rarely has so much documentation been compiled and published with regard to a single historical event'.[24]
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