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The Making of the "Rape of Nanking": History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States
On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army attacked and captured the Chinese capital city of Nanjing, planting the rising-sun flag atop the city's outer walls. What occurred in the ensuing weeks and months has been the source of a tempestuous debate ever since.
It is well known that the Japanese military committed wholesale atrocities after the fall of the city, massacring large numbers of Chinese during the both the Battle of Nanjing and in its aftermath. Yet the exact details of the war crimes--how many people were killed during the battle? How many after? How many women were raped? Were prisoners executed? How unspeakable were the acts committed?--are the source of controversy among Japanese, Chinese, and American historians to this day.
In The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" Takashi Yoshida examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing--whether to deplore it, sanitize it, rationalize it, or even ignore it--has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. Drawing on a rich analysis of Chinese, Japanese, and American history textbooks and newspapers, Yoshida traces the evolving--and often conflicting--understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. Yoshida suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China.
While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the "Rape of Nanking" is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. Takashi Yoshida analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol, and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.
It is well known that the Japanese military committed wholesale atrocities after the fall of the city, massacring large numbers of Chinese during the both the Battle of Nanjing and in its aftermath. Yet the exact details of the war crimes--how many people were killed during the battle? How many after? How many women were raped? Were prisoners executed? How unspeakable were the acts committed?--are the source of controversy among Japanese, Chinese, and American historians to this day.
In The Making of the "Rape of Nanking" Takashi Yoshida examines how views of the Nanjing Massacre have evolved in history writing and public memory in Japan, China, and the United States. For these nations, the question of how to treat the legacy of Nanjing--whether to deplore it, sanitize it, rationalize it, or even ignore it--has aroused passions revolving around ethics, nationality, and historical identity. Drawing on a rich analysis of Chinese, Japanese, and American history textbooks and newspapers, Yoshida traces the evolving--and often conflicting--understandings of the Nanjing Massacre, revealing how changing social and political environments have influenced the debate. Yoshida suggests that, from the 1970s on, the dispute over Nanjing has become more lively, more globalized, and immeasurably more intense, due in part to Japanese revisionist history and a renewed emphasis on patriotic education in China.
While today it is easy to assume that the Nanjing Massacre has always been viewed as an emblem of Japan's wartime aggression in China, the image of the "Rape of Nanking" is a much more recent icon in public consciousness. Takashi Yoshida analyzes the process by which the Nanjing Massacre has become an international symbol, and provides a fair and respectful treatment of the politically charged and controversial debate over its history.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published February 24, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 24, 2014
An excellent, though pedantic work on the historical revisionism and historiography of the Nanjing Massacre and how it has been altered for political reasons since it occurred. Not for the faint of heart. (Nothing about that horrific massacre was, for that matter).
September 14, 2021
A very levelheaded, fair appraisal of the historiography and political exploitation of the Nanjing Massacre in the US, China and Japan. It does not, contrary to the claims of people who clearly didn't read beyond the introduction (and that only to find quotes to take out of context), seek to excuse or justify or erase the massacre; all the author seemingly wanted to do was to produce an overview of how the massacre has been remembered and contested in the three countries. He repeatedly and forcefully rejects the claims of the revisionists who argue about the definition of massacre to justify their claims it never happened, etc.
Instead, Takahashi Yoshida claims to want to prevent such an event from happening again, which means repudiating nationalist and ethnocentric perspectives and understanding the shared humanity of all of us, a realization that hopefully might make the conditions that allowed the massacre and the war generally from ever recurring.
Anybody who knows me knows that my sympathies lie squarely with the Chinese, a viciously misunderstood people who are the subjects of a seemingly endless procession of books and articles by incredibly ignorant people who evince absolutely no interest in understanding the Chinese perspective, people like Peter Navarro, an economist who his colleagues in Chinese studies say avoids them and anything that would teach him about China, and yet who regularly writes books about this country about which he is willfully and fully ignorant. I would not be so favorable in my evaluation of this book had the author been anything like those people. Instead, it's his rejection of such simplistic narratives fueled by ignorance that made this such a good read.
Instead, Takahashi Yoshida claims to want to prevent such an event from happening again, which means repudiating nationalist and ethnocentric perspectives and understanding the shared humanity of all of us, a realization that hopefully might make the conditions that allowed the massacre and the war generally from ever recurring.
Anybody who knows me knows that my sympathies lie squarely with the Chinese, a viciously misunderstood people who are the subjects of a seemingly endless procession of books and articles by incredibly ignorant people who evince absolutely no interest in understanding the Chinese perspective, people like Peter Navarro, an economist who his colleagues in Chinese studies say avoids them and anything that would teach him about China, and yet who regularly writes books about this country about which he is willfully and fully ignorant. I would not be so favorable in my evaluation of this book had the author been anything like those people. Instead, it's his rejection of such simplistic narratives fueled by ignorance that made this such a good read.
January 27, 2016
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.)
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.)
September 2, 2013
"The Making of the Rape of Nanking: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States" by Takashi Yoshida
Although Takashi Yoshida's book came out of a study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University (based on Yoshida's 2001 history Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University) and was published by Oxford University Press in 2006, the book is a subtle, and not so subtle, distortion of the Nanking Massacre. Such distortion is best illustrated with several quotes from the book.
* "In truth, however, the image of Nanjing as the site of particularly brutal atrocities is a more recent construction." How can one honestly claim that the image of the brutal atrocities of the Nanking Massacre is a more recent construction when there were so many well-documented eyewitness oral, written, pictorial, and film archives recorded at that time by numerous foreign journalists, businessmen, missionaries, college professors/administrators, and diplomats. One example of such historical eyewitness accounts was the home movie made by the American missionary John Magee , who was also the chairman of the Nanking Committee of the International Red Cross Organization. Magee filmed several hundred minutes of movie, which was smuggled out of China and shown to members of the U.S. government, as well as others, including the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to institute sanctions against the Japanese government who was their war ally. These brutal atrocities were also acknowledged by many former Japanese soldiers who took part in those atrocities. There were also eyewitness accounts of thousands of Chinese survivors, including many currently residing in the U.S.
* "The massacre as it is discussed today did not exist in either national or international awareness until decades after the event." Again, the Nanking Massacre was international news at the time of its occurrence in 1937-1938, and was also part of the trial of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East that took place in Tokyo between May 1946 and November 1948.
* "Initially an event with primarily local repercussions, the Nanjing Massacre has evolved over decades into a matter of extraordinary international significance." As already discussed, this event was much more than "of local repercussions," and had extraordinary international significance from the very beginning. Although it might be true that China did not publicly focus on this event during the 1950 and 1960's when it was trying to establish itself as a unified country under a new form of government and trying to achieve diplomatic recognition from other countries, including the U.N., it definitely does not mean that it was not of international significance from the beginning.
* "No single account or interpretation of the massacre has emerged as dominant, in part because there is no agreement even as to the basic terms of the debate. Commentators have been unable to agree on the very definitions of the matters they are discussing. They differ as to the proper meaning of words like `victim', `perpetrator', `atrocity', and `civilian'." It seems that the author is trying to lead people to believe that because there might not be universally agreed upon terminology such as whether a victim should only be a civilian and should not include captured soldiers, then the massive inhumane atrocities reported by the eyewitnesses should not be believable.
Because Yoshida also criticized the revisionists in Japan who even go as far as denying the existence of the Nanjing Massacre, people may think that Yoshida presented a fair and thorough treatment of the events. Unfortunately, a fair and thorough treatment is clearly not the case when you realize that Yoshida also wrote "Had there not been intense challenges from the revisionists, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre might have remained a domestic issue rather than becoming an international symbol of Japan's wartime aggression."
Being published by the Oxford University Press under Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute may lend a lot of prestige and credibility to Yoshida's book. In reality, Yoshida's book presents a revisionist view of the Nanking Massacre under the disguise of scholarly research, and is trying to create confusion in the general public so that people may think that other accounts of the Nanking Massacre were over exaggerated. It is important to note that the Japanese influence in academic Asian studies in the U.S. is substantial through their funding to establish various professorships and research grants.
Although Takashi Yoshida's book came out of a study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University (based on Yoshida's 2001 history Ph.D. dissertation at Columbia University) and was published by Oxford University Press in 2006, the book is a subtle, and not so subtle, distortion of the Nanking Massacre. Such distortion is best illustrated with several quotes from the book.
* "In truth, however, the image of Nanjing as the site of particularly brutal atrocities is a more recent construction." How can one honestly claim that the image of the brutal atrocities of the Nanking Massacre is a more recent construction when there were so many well-documented eyewitness oral, written, pictorial, and film archives recorded at that time by numerous foreign journalists, businessmen, missionaries, college professors/administrators, and diplomats. One example of such historical eyewitness accounts was the home movie made by the American missionary John Magee , who was also the chairman of the Nanking Committee of the International Red Cross Organization. Magee filmed several hundred minutes of movie, which was smuggled out of China and shown to members of the U.S. government, as well as others, including the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade them to institute sanctions against the Japanese government who was their war ally. These brutal atrocities were also acknowledged by many former Japanese soldiers who took part in those atrocities. There were also eyewitness accounts of thousands of Chinese survivors, including many currently residing in the U.S.
* "The massacre as it is discussed today did not exist in either national or international awareness until decades after the event." Again, the Nanking Massacre was international news at the time of its occurrence in 1937-1938, and was also part of the trial of the International Military Tribunal of the Far East that took place in Tokyo between May 1946 and November 1948.
* "Initially an event with primarily local repercussions, the Nanjing Massacre has evolved over decades into a matter of extraordinary international significance." As already discussed, this event was much more than "of local repercussions," and had extraordinary international significance from the very beginning. Although it might be true that China did not publicly focus on this event during the 1950 and 1960's when it was trying to establish itself as a unified country under a new form of government and trying to achieve diplomatic recognition from other countries, including the U.N., it definitely does not mean that it was not of international significance from the beginning.
* "No single account or interpretation of the massacre has emerged as dominant, in part because there is no agreement even as to the basic terms of the debate. Commentators have been unable to agree on the very definitions of the matters they are discussing. They differ as to the proper meaning of words like `victim', `perpetrator', `atrocity', and `civilian'." It seems that the author is trying to lead people to believe that because there might not be universally agreed upon terminology such as whether a victim should only be a civilian and should not include captured soldiers, then the massive inhumane atrocities reported by the eyewitnesses should not be believable.
Because Yoshida also criticized the revisionists in Japan who even go as far as denying the existence of the Nanjing Massacre, people may think that Yoshida presented a fair and thorough treatment of the events. Unfortunately, a fair and thorough treatment is clearly not the case when you realize that Yoshida also wrote "Had there not been intense challenges from the revisionists, the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre might have remained a domestic issue rather than becoming an international symbol of Japan's wartime aggression."
Being published by the Oxford University Press under Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute may lend a lot of prestige and credibility to Yoshida's book. In reality, Yoshida's book presents a revisionist view of the Nanking Massacre under the disguise of scholarly research, and is trying to create confusion in the general public so that people may think that other accounts of the Nanking Massacre were over exaggerated. It is important to note that the Japanese influence in academic Asian studies in the U.S. is substantial through their funding to establish various professorships and research grants.
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April 28, 2023Read for HST 217
March 4, 2010
Each chapter is very short and easy to read. Alternatively, he has a nice chapter in Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu, eds., Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing that you can read.
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