The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography (review)

The rampage of rape, plunder, and killing committed by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of the Chinese Nationalist capital Nanjing in December 1937 merits inclusion in any list of atrocities from the twentieth century, often lamented to have been the bloodiest in our collective history. Like other atrocities, its remembrance has been contested by ethnic, political, and national parties as well as by professional historians. Joshua A. Fogel has brought together three essays in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography that explore the particular and the universal in this discourse. Prefatory remarks by Fogel and modern European historian Charles S. Maier are followed by two essays by Mark Eykholt and Takashi Yoshida that outline respectively the general historiography within China and Japan. Daqing Yang caps the collection with an exploration of methodological issues for historians of holocaust.

The Japanese establishment has long been criticized by domestic and foreign critics alike for avoiding confrontation with Japan's imperial past, on notable occasions denying its past aggressions. The Nanjing events are emblematic of this discourse. There is an irony here, for as Takashi Yoshida observes, the dominant view in Japan, established during the U.S. occupation by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and later institutionalized in history textbooks, is that the Nanjing rape and massacre indeed occurred. In Japan it is the conservative deniers who are revisionist. It is true that conservative elements in the long-ruling Liberal-Democratic Party succeeded in muting textbook coverage from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, and revisionist scholars began to receive media attention from the early 1970s, but their efforts have spurred extensive and effective responses among Japanese progressives in legal and popular as well as educational arenas. Yoshida perceives a rise in educator's awareness of "victimizer consciousness," especially in the early 1980s, that remained strong in the face of those in the 1990s who wished to correct what they regarded as "masochistic" history. In China too, as Mark Eykholt shows, the nonspecialist will be surprised to learn that the communist Chinese government has more often been at pains to suppress memory of national humiliation than confront Japan. Eykholt attributes such reticence to an early desire to promote national pride, especially in the period before the upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, and to a more recent need for Japanese economic assistance and trade in the years since the opening of diplomatic relations in the 1970s. Political and diplomatic necessity have on occasion overruled such convenience. During the Korean War, for example,American citizens' efforts to establish a safety zone for Chinese refugees in late 1937 Nanjing was presented as duplicitous collaboration to protect private property. Such efforts, it was asserted, presaged postwar American remilitarization of Japan. In the early 1960s, too, NationalistChinesegenerals' memoirs revealing negligencein Nanjing's defense were used to undercut the Republic of China's claims to national leadership. More consequential has been the emergence of popular nationalist sentiment and the involvement of diaspora Chinese in promoting remembrance of the Nanjing atrocities and Chinese victimhood as a foundation for ethnic national identity. Eykholt illustrates how nationalist identity politics has complicated the government's policy prerogatives. Nanjing as holocaust has become so sacrosanct that it is difficult for young Chinese scholars to escape the confines of what editor Fogel calls the numbers game. On the Chinese side, the emotional and ideological imperative to claim exceptional victimhood has pushed the victim tabulation well above 300,000, a figure given literal shape in the layout of the Memorial for Compatriot Victims of the Japanese Military's Nanjing Massacre, a museum opened in Nanjing on 15 August 1985.

Where Eykholt and Yoshida show how the memory of Nanjing has been appropriated for sundry agendas in China and Japan, Daqing Yang broadens the discussion to a wide range of methodological, political...