The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-1938

Complicating the Picture

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781785335976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang's book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

1
THE MESSINESS OF HISTORICAL REALITY

Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

A Sordid Squabble

Seventy years, well over two generations, have past since the Nanking Atrocity of 1937–38, better known in English as the “Rape of Nanking” or “Nanking Massacre.” Yet there is no fruitful or even civil dialogue about it between the Chinese and Japanese; indeed, venom now flows at peak levels. This was not always so. During the war, of course, the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek sought to win sympathy and aid from his U.S. ally by denouncing Japanese “barbarities” at his capital where, he claimed, “over 200,000 civilians were massacred within one week.”¹ But this need to vilify a wartime enemy ended when Japan surrendered in August 1945. Thereafter, three factors minimized Sino-Japanese hostility until the 1980s.

First, Chiang and his Kuomintang (KMT) regime or Nationalist government did not revel in victors’ justice. They were bent on getting even with Chinese collaborators, called Han-chien, or “traitors to the Han race,” and on winning a civil war against Communist rivals, against whom they mobilized some Japanese units. In 1945–47, when over a million defeated Japanese were left in China at Chiang’s mercy, his regime indicted 38,280 Chinese for treason as opposed to 883 Japanese for war crimes; it sentenced 15,391 Chinese, as opposed to 504 Japanese, to death or imprisonment on those charges; and, it refused to prosecute those Japanese responsible for massacres in northern areas of China that were sympathetic to the Communists.²

Second, some Japanese academics such as Inoue Kiyoshi in the 1950s and 1960s used the term Massive Butchery (daigyakusatsu or ta-t’u-sha in Chinese) when referring to Nanking.³ Others wrote bestsellers that cited a death toll of 200,000 to 300,000, but qualified the figure as denoting civilian massacre victims and soldiers killed in action over five months along a battlefront that advanced 300 kilometers from Shanghai to Nanking. For the city of Nanking alone, they cited 42,000 Chinese deaths with no breakdown as to civilians and belligerents.⁴

Third, the Communist People’s Republic of China (PRC), the regime that won the civil war in 1949, prioritized an anti-KMT, anti-U.S., antifeudal, antirevolutionary, agenda. It sought to discredit Chiang and the KMT, who had fled to Taiwan but threatened to retake the mainland with U.S. help during the Cold War. Thus the PRC denounced KMT incompetence and cowardice as an indirect cause of tragedies such as Nanking; that is, Chiang, who had appeased Japan from 1931, deserted his capital when its fall was imminent, as did his commander T’ang Sheng-chih, who vowed to die in its defense, only to flee at the last moment.⁵ The PRC in the 1950s also insinuated complicity by U.S. residents in Nanking who reputedly “entertained themselves with wine, song, and dance, celebrated Christmas, and ate their fill of roast beef, roast duck, sweet potatoes and other fresh food” while the invaders ran amok. The PRC also accused U.S. residents of creating a refugee area, the Nanking Safety Zone (NSZ), so that Chinese could be more easily killed.⁶ Today, a different PRC line depicts those same Americans, plus Nazi Party member and “good German” John Rabe, as heroic friends of China who rescued Nanking citizens from slaughter.⁷

The KMT in 1947, and PRC in 1960, cited “over 10 million” war deaths from 1937 to 1945. Both regimes presumed that Japanese militarism had been hateful, but voiced little overt criticism on the grounds that ordinary Japanese, like ordinary Chinese, had been its victims. Meanwhile, a few Japanese historians used the term “Massive Butchery,” and several of them cited Nanking death tolls of 200,000 to 300,000. The Chinese accepted those figures and the inclusion therein of troops killed in action over five months from Shanghai to Nanking. Thus, the Chinese tacitly admitted the key distinction between “death tolls” that included belligerents killed in action and “massacre-victim tolls” of innocent noncombatants, and they admitted that these deaths took place in a wide area over several months. Finally, the PRC faced other problems: the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Cultural Revolution. For classes branded “the black five antirevolutionaries”—capitalists, landlords, intellectuals, criminals, and KMT (right-wing) sympathizers—those other problems were certainly more recent than Japanese aggression and probably more painful too. Even females who had been raped or recruited in the war as “comfort women” suffered persecution for allegedly consorting with the enemy.⁸ Thus, for more than thirty years after the war, Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, but especially in the PRC, directed most of their wrath at “traitors to the Han race” and class enemies—at other Chinese rather than at the Japanese. Terrible though it was, as massacres go in history, Nanking had been largely forgotten.

Things changed by the 1980s. PRC leaders consolidated their regime, which displaced Taiwan as the sole recognized government of China. To the extent that Taipei accepted this fact, regional Cold War tensions eased. Though with an eye to Japanese economic aid, the PRC dropped its anti-KMT, anti-U.S., “antiblack five” line and focused blame for Nanking on Japan, where it more rightly belonged.⁹ Reflecting this changed PRC thinking, Americans and other Westerners formerly castigated as Japanese accomplices became courageous humanitarians. One writer has them “wrestling Chinese men away from execution sites, knocking Japanese soldiers off of women, even jumping in front of cannon and machine guns to prevent the Japanese from firing.”¹⁰ In Japan, nonacademics such as Suzuki Akira, Yamamoto Shichihei (a.k.a. Isaiah Ben-Dasan), and others said that the Massive Butchery was an illusion (maboroshi) because extant documents did not prove the allegation. Given their peculiarly Japanese use of “illusion,” there was some truth to the claim, since reliable sources were still scarce. In 1982, sanitized textbooks in Japan dubbed wartime continental aggression an “advance,” though it is unclear if this revision in terms took place on explicit government orders. Reacting to such Japanese “denials,” the PRC in 1983 vehemently protested that the Massive Butchery at Nanking was no “illusion”: “Over 300,000 innocent compatriots died; 190,000 corpses were cremated out of existence and 150,000 were buried by charitable societies. When the Japanese entered the city, they killed every man and raped every woman they set eyes on. After they finished raping, they killed the women.”¹¹ The tacit distinction between “death tolls” and “massacre-victim tolls” disappeared, so that “over 300,000” now stood for nonbelligerents murdered in the city and excluded troops killed in action from Shanghai to Nanking in August to December. PRC insistence on this point provoked a fierce reaction in Japan. Nonacademics such as Tanaka Masaaki cited their own figures to argue that less than 300,000 civilians were in Nanking when it fell in December 1937, and that its population was rising by March 1938. For Tanaka, the Massive Butchery of over 300,000 victims—raised to 340,000 in 1983—was no innocent “illusion.” It was a pernicious Chinese “myth” designed to slander and demonize the Japanese people.

Finally, a sea change in values and sensibility—a veritable revolution in individual-based victims’ rights—began in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War, and has spread around the globe to varying degrees. By the 1980s, Americans had come to feel that any abuse or deprivation of individual rights must end—especially toward nonmainstream racial, ethnic, religiocultural, gender, or disabled groups. In the past, members of minorities had accepted abuse and discrimination as facts of life to be left behind in their quest for assimilation. Now, such degradations became group-defining icons to be preserved and flaunted as a shared “memory” in multicultural society. Blacks, ethnics, females, native peoples, the disabled, homosexuals, and others had a “coming out” to reject conformity with dominant cultural norms. Demanding “redress now” by exalting past victimization, these groups forged activist identities to pursue empowerment through agency. North Americans of Japanese descent in 1988 won $20,000 in individual compensation for wartime internment deemed lawful at that time. Through affirmative action, persons in underrepresented target groups now obtain compensation for discrimination in hiring suffered generations ago. The Supreme Court of Canada ruled in September 2005 that tobacco companies can be sued for smoking-related deaths and illnesses going back to 1955. In sum, it is no longer good enough to express remorse for past wrongs and vow never to transgress again. Retroactive individual compensation is now demanded on humanitarian grounds, irrespective of legality at the time that those wrongs were committed. This revolution in individual-based victims’ rights has decisively changed the ground rules on redress for wartime damages by impugning the adequacy and legitimacy of conventional state-to-state reparations agreed to in peace treaties that Taiwan, South Korea, the PRC, and other governments negotiated with Japan. Now, it is maintained, those postwar governments never had the moral authority to waive their citizens’ rights to compensation for wartime injuries, losses, and injustice.

Historians identify U.S. Jews and their “memory” as pivotal to this sea change in values and sensibility.¹² Only in the 1970s did “holocaust”—which, with a small h, had generically denoted calamities involving fire—become “the Holocaust.” Now, as a proper noun, with a capital H and definite article, it denotes the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish problem.”¹³ To impugn the memory of death-camp survivors is deemed insensitive, if not disreputable; and, in Germany it is illegal. “The Holocaust” became a template for “the Ta-t’u-sha”—also upper cased with a definite article—standing for the Nanking Atrocity, and by extension, for Japanese war crimes in China that demand post hoc individual compensation.¹⁴ Thus, in 1997 the late Iris Chang subtitled her bestseller “The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” Earlier, in 1992, the editors of a scholarly book on the China war dedicated it to “the countless victims [of] an Asian Holocaust, probably on an even grander scale” than in Europe.¹⁵

Since the 1990s the PRC has implicitly likened Nanking to the Holocaust in an education system to foster patriotism, and deniers in Japan have pounced on this fact to validate their own ethnically biased view of the war. They cite the metaphor of “gray hair 3,000 ch’ang [6,750 meters] long”—derived from the T’ang poet Li Po (701–62)—as symbolizing a reputed Chinese penchant for exaggeration. Thus, deniers argue, the victim count of over 300,000 must be taken with a grain of salt.¹⁶ But statistical imprecision holds true for literary expressions the world over; Japan’s ninth-century Man’yôshû or “Collection of 10,000 Odes” has only 4,516. Do the Japanese also exaggerate? Other deniers point to similarities in Nanking massacre accounts and those found in the third-century San-kuo chih (History of the Three Kingdoms) or in the seventeenthcentury Chia-ting t’u-ch’eng chi-lüeh (Outline of the Butchery at Chia-ting). From these similarities, deniers in Japan argue that chroniclers in China embellished traditional narratives of dynastic decline with the stylized trope of a butchery or slaughter in besieged cities, especially when foreign invaders took part. This trope obtained at Chia-ting in 1645, where 20,000 Ming loyalists died at Manchu hands.¹⁷ Deniers postulate that patriotic Chinese writers applied this literary convention to Japanese invaders at Nanking; and, as a result, it now passes for a “fact” in China. Ironically, this denial argument finds fortuitous limited support in Western scholarship on late-imperial China.¹⁸

Other deniers exhume the “blame Chiang Kai-shek and T’ang Sheng-chih” line to absolve Japan of culpability for Chinese military personnel killed in action at Nanking. (They repudiate civilian massacres.) To wit, Nanking in 1937 would have fared as well as Paris in 1940 if Chiang and T’ang had not fled for their lives. Few deaths and little damage would have resulted if they had declared an open city and supervised an orderly surrender as dictated by the laws of war and the codes of military professionalism. Likewise, deniers do admit the culpability of Japanese commanders for the orgy of rape and murder at Manila in 1945.¹⁹ There is some validity on this point. The missionary Minnie Vautrin—rightly called “a goddess of mercy” at Nanking—reached this same conclusion on the scene in 1937.²⁰ And, the PRC itself adopted this view until the 1960s. That said, naked aggression is one thing; failure to surrender in good order is ...