Session 90: Beyond the Hype: New Perspectives on the Nanjing Atrocity, 1937–1938

Organizer and Chair: Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara

Discussant: Mark Selden, Cornell University

Since the publication in 1997 of Iris Chang’s extremely successful The Rape of Nanking, the Nanjing Atrocity (or Nanjing Massacre) has become an extremely hot topic. Numerous conferences and workshops, campus-wide projects, essay collections, and translations have ensued. On the whole, we would all agree, this has been much for the good. As is often the case, however, hyperbole has frequently trumped more reasoned analysis, and emotion has outplayed dispassionate scholarship. On the one hand, ethnonationalist Chinese writers following Chang’s lead have used their arguments in an effort not only to bring the Nanjing Atrocity to center stage, but to bash Japan for what they take to be inadequate contrition and reparations. On the other, right-wing Japanese have used the errors of Chang’s work to "prove" further that the events in Nanjing either never happened or have been far overblown. Frequently drowned out in all this cacophony is genuine scholarship.

The aim of this panel is wade right into this mine field and present three new perspectives on the Nanjing Atrocity. David Askew, an Australian but trained and teaching in Japan, will look at several little known Japanese literary pieces from the wartime and early postwar years. Far from forgotten, the three novelists he discusses all treated the events in Nanjing with the utmost respect. The most contentious issue in the Nanjing debate has been the numbers of those murdered, and Bob Wakabayashi will offer a new perspective on how to count those civilians as well as Chinese soldiers and POWs illegally killed by the Japanese military. Finally, Joshua Fogel examines how and why ethnonationalist Chinese, especially in the United States, have reconstructed the Nanjing Atrocity as a "forgotten holocaust" in the manner laid out by Iris Chang.

Mark Selden, editor of the widely read online forum, Focus Japan, will serve as discussant. We opt for a more stripped down panel model—three papers and one discussant—so as to offer others in the audience the opportunity to join the discussion on this contentious issue.

Nanjing in Fiction: Literature and Historical Memory

David Askew, Ritsumeikan University

Although right-wing apologists for Japanese actions in China during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 frequently claim that the Japanese populace was not made aware of the Nanjing Atrocity of 1937–38 until the postwar Tokyo war crimes trial, and therefore that a contemporaneous memory of the events in Nanjing did not exist, there was in fact a wartime Japanese-language narrative about Nanjing.

The Nanjing Atrocity featured in a number of wartime works of literature, namely Ishikawa Tatsuzō’s Ikite iru heitai (Living Soldiers). It was also depicted in works such as the early postwar novel, Jikan (Time) by Hotta Yoshie and the short story by Mishima Yukio, "Botan" (Tree peony).

Drawing on the recent debate in Japan on wartime memory—and especially the debate between post-modernists such as Sun Ge and their school’s "history of memory" as opposed to the modernist historian’s "history of facts"—this paper presentation will attempt to shed light on the Japanese memory of the Nanjing Atrocity. It will demonstrate that a Japanese narrative concerning Nanjing did exist in Japan before the Tokyo Trials, but that this memory disappeared under the 1955 system, not to reemerge until the 1970s.

The Victim Count: Figures Don’t Lie?

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, York University

According to the "official" Chinese interpretation of the Nanjing Atrocity, Japanese troops committed a centrally ordered, systematic massacre of "more than 300,000" non-combatants inside the walled city over a six-week period beginning on December 13, 1937. The documentary record does not support these assertions—least of all a victim count of "more than 300,000"—but there is no one "correct" figure. Japanese military documents, left by the victimizers, reveal that roughly 109,475 Chinese military personnel died within the above spatial and temporal parameters posited by the Chinese side. Up to 64,175 of those 109,475 persons may have been belligerents killed in combat; and, if so, this presentation would argue that they should not enter the victims count. However, the absolute minimum number of illegally killed massacre victims stands at 45,300—again within the spatial and temporal limits posited by the Chinese side.

However, an empirically verifiable and hence legitimately arguable victim toll for the Nanjing Atrocity ranges from a minimum of "over 40,000" to a maximum of "under 200,000." The number depends on one’s spatial, temporal, and conceptual definitions of that event—which may be broad or narrow—plus one’s understanding of who qualifies as a bona fide "massacre victim"—which may be strict or loose. Thus, vastly different, yet more or less equally valid, statistical conclusions can be reached, which in turn rest on each historian’s political and ideological beliefs. These have a rightful place amid this scholarly controversy and should be explicitly identified.

A Neurosis of Disproportionate Action? The Nanjing Massacre and Chinese Historical Memory

Joshua A. Fogel, University of California, Santa Barbara

Sigmund Freud diagnosed the following as the "disproportionate actions of a neurotic": a Londoner who stands before a monument to the Great Fire of 1666 and, instead of being joyous at the city’s resilience in the face of such a long past disaster, mourns aloud the destruction of three centuries earlier. This presentation raises this "diagnosis" as a possible label for some of the "disproportionate" ways in which Chinese, largely those in the diaspora and largely within North America, have come recently to "remember" and "represent" the events surrounding the great massacre that transpired over sixty years ago in the Chinese wartime capital. It will try to assess why such views—exemplified in the best-selling The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II by Iris Chang—have caught on, why over the past few years, why especially in the diaspora, and why particularly in North America.

This paper presentation will also examine why the image of the Holocaust has been so forcefully utilized by those who wish to portray the events of the Nanjing Atrocity in the light that they have. Finally, it will try to explain why they have been so successful in convincing most of the Western media, irrespective of political stripe.