The Making of the "Rape of Nanking"

General Review

This is not about how a particular movie of the Rape of Nanking was made; rather, it's a very thorough examination of how the Japanese attack on Nanking was carried out, and how people reacted to that over time. It's a book filled with facts and extremely good analyses of how views of what happened differed, and why they differed. It also examines how the Rape of Nanking was basically ignored for a long time, how it became more important as political conditions in China, Japan and the United States changed, how it affected educational textbooks in China and Japan, and what types of evidence are used to explain what happened.

The book also includes a significant section of footnotes, and a bibliography. Unfortunately, most of the books seem to be ones that you can only get in Japan and only in Japanese, though.

It's a unique book on the subject and, in many ways, the best of all of them that have been done so far.

Specifics from the Book

"...the image of Nanjing as the site of particularly brutal atrocities is a more recent construction. The massacre as it is discussed today did not exist in either national or international awareness until decades after the event." The book explains how this was due to various political things going on in the three main countries involved -China, Japan and the U.S.

Revisionists: those in Japan who are trying to downplay the event in Nanking, arguing that the number of people actually killed was much, much smaller than the 300,000 currently claimed. They challenge the authenticity of photographs and documents from the time, and they question the truthfulness of the people taking the photos and writing the diaries and other documents.

Progressives: those in Japan who believe the event in Nanking was truly a massacre, and Japan should remember it happened and be sorry for its happening.

Terms such as "victim," "atrocity," and event "civilian" are debated by the two sides in the argument.

The Japanese did not know about what happened in Nanking for years, as all forms of mass media were strictly under the control of the militarist regime. The media of the time was busy painting the Chinese as aggressors, killing innocent Japanese.

One of the really good things the book goes into detail on is how the event in Nanking and the war itself was presented in school textbooks, and how that kept changing over time, and the reactions of China to those changes.

There was some acknowledgment of what happened in banned, "illegal" writings that were done by small numbers of Japanese. Living Soldiers (1938) was one such work. Another work was What War Means: Japanese Terror in China (1938). The only problem with doing such works, of course, was that they were illegal, and their publication could result in arrest, imprisonment, or death.

A very interesting thing the book points out is that China did not emphasize what happened in Nanking for a long time; it rather dwelt on the use of chemical warfare by the Japanese. As in Japan, there were a few trying to publish materials about Nanking, but they couldn't get the attention of the government or the people.

The U.S. received news of the event in its much-more-open media situation, and the kinds of things that happened played right into the anti-Japanese feeling in the country, reinforcing racial stereotypes that many in the U.S., particularly those on the West Coast, had. The U.S. already had considerable hatred for Japan and Japanese, especially due to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

It wasn't until after the war that the Japanese people found out about Nanking and other atrocities, largely due to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. However, by 1952 books were already appearing in Japan saying that Japan was innocent, that the atrocities were much overstated, and attacking the "white people" of the U.S. who disliked the "colored people" of Asia.

As more conservatives rose to positions of power in Japan, less and less emphasis was given to exploring the truth about what happened during the war as far as Japan's military goes.

Among things "distracting" people of the various countries from examining the events in depth were the Communist/Nationalist difficulties in China and the establishment of a Communist government; the Korean War, and the anti-Communist "purge" that was held in Japan, and the anti-Communist hysteria that was going on in the U.S. Thus, the issue sort of left people's minds until at least the 1970's in Japan.

The Chinese began using the Nanking massacre as a political tool to help stir nationalism in their country. (Another thing that helped spread information about what happened was the massive advancement in communications between countries, especially the Internet, as information became much more easily available to people in the three countries. For example, I watched a program from Japan that was a panel discussion of revisionists. Prior to the Internet, I probably never would have even known such a program existed much less had access to it. )

The growth of revisionist groups in the nineties in Japan is noted. (This whole thing also became tied in to the Yasukuni shrine, and the visits of Japanese politicians to the shrine.)

People in the U.S. took more interest in Japanese wartime atrocities somewhat due to the growing anger at Japan over their economic success and their threat to get ahead of the U.S. economically.

One really interesting thing in the footnotes is a Gallup poll conducted in December of 1944 in the U.S. 13% of the respondents said that they wanted all the Japanese killed. All. Period. A third favored “the destruction of Japan as a political entity.” A survey a year later in Fortune found that the American people believed that the proportion of Japanese who were “cruel and brutal” (at that time) was 56%; only 39% replied that way about the Germans. (It is possible, of course, that racial prejudice plays a role here.)

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