Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing (review)

The book under review is a product of the "Nanking 1937 Conference" held in November 1997 at Princeton University, to which Chinese, Japanese, European, and American scholars were invited in order to examine the Nanking Massacre. The editors, Fei Fei Li and David Liu, were Princeton undergraduates, and Robert Sabella is a high-school teacher of mathematics. In the introduction they outline how the Nanking Massacre has attracted public attention in the United States in recent years. One of the contributors, Vera Schwarcz, tells how the conference was organized by these Chinese undergraduate students of science at Princeton, who had grown up in mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore, all hoping for a deeper understanding of the issue. The book consists of eleven essays by Chinese, Japanese, and Western scholars. Compared with other recent works on the Nanking Massacre, it examines the issue from a variety of often conflicting points of view, and according to the disciplines of international law and literature as well as history.

In his foreword, Perry Link identifies several major issues discussed in the book: how memory is related to the reconstruction of history, the question of war responsibility, the roles of the respective governments, and how history should be passed down. In part 1, on the Nanking debate in the global context, Ian Buruma addresses the issue of how the politicization of the Nanking Massacre by Japan and China hinders the search for truth, while Richard Falk argues that the international climate dominated by the West, and the United States in particular, has created obstacles to the healing process, and he discusses how international developments in the post-Cold War era, global civic activism, the emergence of human rights as an issue in world politics, and the many efforts to redress past grievances provide a context for the present debate on the Nanking Massacre.

In the following three parts, "Revisiting Nanking," "Remembering Nanking," and "Healing the Wounds," five essays concentrate on Japanese perspectives. A Japanese historian, Higashinakano Shudo, in a detached, highly controlled style, explains his position that no massacre took place, on the grounds that many of the reports of the Massacre have not been proved; that numbers of those allegedly killed cannot be verified; and that Chinese soldiers who took refuge in the International Safety Zone did not behave according to the rules of International Law Relating to War Conduct (the Hague Regulations of 1907) and that therefore they were not qualified to be treated as POWs, so that their execution by the Japanese did not violate the Hague Regulations.

It is wrong, however, to assume that the denialist view prevails in Japan. Contrary to what is popularly believed outside Japan, the denialist view is just one among many different voices. Takashi Yoshida, a historian teaching in the United States, demonstrates convincingly that in postwar Japan the progressives who view Japan as the aggressor and victimizer in the war have had a dominant influence, but since the early 1907s Japanese conservatives and nationalists have been attempting to overturn this established view, and thus their own view should be termed "revisionist." Unfortunately, he holds, the mass media outside Japan have disregarded the Japanese progressive views reflected in the many works and activities of scholars, journalists, teachers, war veterans, local governments, and civic groups, while paying biased attention to the revisionists. According to Yoshida, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust is also guilty of this disregard. In fact, different voices have long existed in Japan, even during wartime. In her discussion of Living Soldiers by Ishikawa Tatsuzo, a novel about a Japanese army platoon at the time of the capture of Nanking published shortly after the Massacre, Haruko Taya Cook, who teaches in the United States, shows how this novel is an important source for many suppressed truths about the war that government censorship and the self-imposed...