The Nanjing Incident: Recent Research and Trends by David Askew Associate Professor Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University

Electronic journal of contemporary japanese studies

Quotes from the original paper will be in italics.

The Nanjing (or Nanking) Incident (also known as the Rape of Nanjing, the Nanjing Massacre and the Nanjing Atrocities) remains a highly controversial episode in Sino-Japanese relations. Indeed, as this paper will make clear, it remains so controversial, especially in Japan, that a neutral definition has yet to be agreed upon. However, most would perhaps agree on the following. The Nanjing Incident refers to the killing and raping of large numbers of Chinese over a relatively short period of time by the Japanese military after the city of Nanjing was captured on 13 December 1937.

As a result, the historian's interest in and analysis of this event can be interpreted as an attack on the contemporary Chinese identity, while a refusal to accept the "orthodox" position on Nanjing can be construed as an attempt to deny the Chinese nation a legitimate voice in international society - or, in Iris Chang's words, as a "second rape". Moreover, any demonstrated interest in Nanjing can be viewed in some circles in Japan as "Japan bashing" (in the case of foreign researchers) or "self-flagellation" (in the case of Japanese).

In this environment, the debate can become highly emotionally charged, and the historian's struggle to maintain objectivity can quickly fall victim to the demands of contemporary politics.

In other words, commenting in one way or another about what happened in Nanking is pretty much bound to upset someone. The Chinese could take offense if you say what happened was not as bad as is commonly believed. Say that what happened was as bad as is commonly believed will earn you some dangerous enemies in Japan. This makes talking about the talking difficult and researching it difficult.

One thing to keep in mind that, even if all these years, there is still major bad feeling.

It is reflected in the controversy over Japanese history textbooks. It certainly continues to poison Chinese opinion of Japan. Nanjing is also important in understanding contemporary domestic Japanese politics. The debate within Japan about Nanjing (and for that matter textbooks) is also a debate about the legitimacy of the findings of the postwar military tribunals held in Nanjing and especially Tokyo (the Tokyo Trial, or International Military Tribunal for the Far East). One side (the Great Massacre School: see below) is politically and ideologically committed to arguing for the validity of these tribunals and their findings. The Illusion School, on the other hand, is based at least to a certain extent on a rejection of these findings as "victor's justice".

One of the unfortunate things is that a lot of the argument has devolved into nitpicking exact numbers. Also, there is a question of how much territory to include; Nanking the city itself, or the city and the immediate area around the city?

Then he talks about the evidence itself.

However, these collections show no evidence of any vigorous critical attempt to distinguish between valid 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 at Nanjing. 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, the Westerners who remained behind in Nanjing to run the humanitarian Safety Zone have been vigorously criticised by the Chinese government in the past. To give just one example, a group of researchers at Nanjing University in the 1960s condemned the members of the Western community in Nanjing for turning a blind eye to the Japanese atrocities in the city, and "misused" the primary sources to suggest that they cooperated in the Japanese slaughter of Chinese

It is of course true that the Westerners in Nanjing did work with the Japanese, but it was a reluctant cooperation, and there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that it extended to deliberately helping the Japanese kill anyone.

He points out, though, that as times changed the Chinese came to regard the Westerners as valiant heroes of the Chinese. This change was caused by the changing political world more than anything else.

He also discusses the research that has been done, saying Japan has done the best research although the United States has done a lot and China it seems he's saying has done the least, but more due to the government than anything else.

He also mentions Iris Chang's book and he doesn't seem to care very much for it.

The intellectual environment in Japan has changed to such a degree that Chang's work has found very little support, even among those who argue that a "great 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.

He also says that Japan has had the most material published and that a good part of that material has not been translated into English. The way I read this part of the paper gives me a reason to believe that this paper is approaching what happened from a slightly revisionist viewpoint.

He says there are three schools of thought in Japan about what happened:

First, the Nanjing Incident as Illusion School. They hold that only a few thousand people were massacred in Nanjing. I've also seen this referred to as the revisionist school.

Second, there's the Middle of the Road school which holds that between 38,000 and 42,000 were massacred. This could also be referred to as the centrist school.

Then there is the Great Massacre School which holds that some 100,000 to 200,000 or more were killed in Nanjing. This is also referred to as the traditionalist school. Chinese sources are mainly in this school.

The schools also differ in how they define massacre, and how much area they hold that the deaths took place in. They also disagree over just how long the event happened. This makes things quite bad because when people use different definitions of the same word misunderstanding is sure to arise.

There's also disagreement on whether or not the Chinese soldiers who exchanged their clothes for civilian clothes should be considered soldiers or part of the civilian population of Nanjing.

The Illusion School mainly consists of conservative thinkers who are not professional historians, and of the three groups is easily the one with the largest number of lay members.

There would be some people who would say that this group is unacceptable since they are not 'professional' historians but I don't take that view for anything. Just because someone doesn't have a fancy degree in something doesn't mean they know very little about it.

The middle-of-the-road school he says consists of professional historians.

Ironically, perhaps, the Great Massacre School can be said to share much with the Illusion School. Both can be highly ideological and dogmatic, both can be extremely violent in the language they use, and both can be more than careless with the historical facts and sources. Of the two, however, the Great Massacre School is clearly the more sophisticated, counting among its members a large number of academics who bring a great deal of authority to their findings.

He talks about oral history and says that is not particularly reliable as a valid source of information. Another method of getting information is by examining burial records, although that would not, of course, include thousands of people killed at the same time and thrown into mass graves. He thinks 17,500 Chinese bodies were buried in and around the city. One other method is to examine Japanese army field reports.

The other primary sources that exist are the diaries, letters and other documents authored by members of the three major groups in Nanjing: the "bystanders", members of the international community in Nanjing, the Chinese "victims", and the Japanese "perpetrators".

He then talks about current research in Japan.

Rabe has clearly destroyed much of the basis for the arguments of the Great Massacre School, but also makes it absolutely clear that he was convinced that the Japanese army was responsible for looting, arson, rape and the execution of thousands of men identified as "ex-soldiers".

First, to put it mildly, Nanjing is a controversial topic. Although our understanding of the events of Nanjing do not even begin to approach our understanding of the holocaust, it is certainly possible to demonise anyone who budges from the orthodox position as being a denier on par with a David Irving. The problem is that the orthodox position is completely different in China and Japan, and within Japan itself there are three distinct orthodoxies. Although there is real debate in Japan, no one there now accepts the figure of 300,000 victims as plausible, while in China the figure is set in concrete (in both senses of the word) at the entrance of the Memorial for the Compatriot [Chinese] Victims of the Japanese Massacre in Nanjing. Unless the debate is to continue to run on parallel lines, never to come together to produce a deeper, more complete and transnational understanding of this historical event, this is not a situation to be welcomed. How to overcome it, on the other hand, poses a dilemma. As long as much of the debate is dominated by ideologues, the sensible option for historians may well be to keep their heads low and research other topics. That, however, cannot be a desirable outcome. Historians surely have an obligation to combat the trend to use Nanjing as a weapon in contemporary ideological and international contests.

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