Nanjing Massacre denial

While the Japanese government has acknowledged and apologized for its perpetration of the Nanking Massacre, some Japanese nationalists have argued that the death toll was military in nature and that no such civilian atrocities ever occurred. Negationism, denial of the massacre, and a divergent array of revisionist accounts of the killings, has become a staple of Japanese nationalist discourse. In Japan, public opinion of the massacres varies, and only a minority deny the atrocity. Nonetheless, negationist accounts have often created controversy that has reverberated in the global media, particularly in China and other East Asian nations. The 1937 massacre and the extent of its coverage in Japanese school textbooks continues to trouble Sino-Japanese relations.

Japanese historiography of the Nanking Massacre

The major waves of Japanese treatment of the Nanking Massacre have ranged from total cover-up during the war, confessions and documentation by the Japanese soldiers during the 1950's and 60's, minimization of the extent of the Nanjing Massacre during the 70's and 80's, official distortion and rewriting of history during the 80's, and total denial of the occurrence of the Nanjing Massacre by some government officials in 1990.

During the Sino-Japanese War

The Japanese Government kept a tight control over the news media during the War. As a result, the Japanese public was not aware of the Nanking Massacre or war other crimes committed by the Japanese military. In fact, the Japanese military were always portrayed as heroes.

International Trials

It was not until the Tokyo Trial (tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and the Nanjing Trial that the truth of the Nanking Massacre was first revealed to the Japanese civilians. The atrocities revealed during the trials shocked Japanese society at the time.

1970s

Interest in the Nanking Massacre waned into near obscurity until 1972, the year China and Japan normalized diplomatic relationships.

The debate concerning the killings and rapes took place mainly in the 1970s. During this time, the Chinese government's statements about the event were attacked by the Japanese because they were said to rely too heavily on personal testimonies and anecdotal evidence. Also coming under attack were the burial records and photographs presented in the Tokyo War Crime Court, which were said to be fabrications by the Chinese government, artificially manipulated or incorrectly attributed to the Nanking Massacre.

During the 1970s, Katsuichi Honda wrote a series of articles for the Asahi Shimbun on the atrocities (such as the Nanjing Massacre) committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II called "Chūgoku no Tabi" (中国の旅, "Travels in China"). The publication of these articles triggered a vehement response from Japanese right-wingers regarding the Japanese treatment of the war crimes.

The denial movement began with two controversial yet influential articles: an article by Shichihei Yamamoto, "Reply to Katsuichi Honda"; (2) an article by Akira Suzuki, "The Phantom of The Nanjing Massacre".

Japanese history textbooks

See also: Japanese history textbook controversies

On June 12, 1965, an author of the school textbook, Professor Saburō Ienaga, sued the Ministry of Education. He claimed that he suffered through his experience that the government's allegedly unconstitutional system of textbook authorization made him change the contents of his draft textbook against his will and violated his right to freedom of expression. This case was ultimately decided in Ienaga's favor in 1997.

The Nanking Massacre "was still absent from elementary school textbooks [but] junior high school textbooks such as those published by Nihon shoseki and Kyōiku Shuppan in 1975, for instance, mentioned that forty-two thousand Chinese residents, including women and children, were killed during the Massacre." Two other textbooks mentioned the massacre but the four other textbooks in use in Japan did not mention it all. By 1978 the Ministry of Education was able to remove the numbers killed out of all text books in use.

In 1982, the Ministry of Education embarked on a campaign to reframe the presentation of the history of World War II in history textbooks. History textbooks were reworded to substitute "advancing in and out of China" instead of "aggression" during the Sino-Japanese War. The Nanjing Massacre was characterized as a minor incident which was sparked by the frustration of Japanese soldiers by strong resistance from the Chinese Army. This move sparked strong protests from other Asian countries.

Besides total denial, another line of Japanese thought insisted that the scale of the Nanjing Massacre had been exaggerated by the Chinese. This view was expounded by Ikuhiko Hata in his book "Nanjing Incident" . Hata asserted that the number of victims in the Massacre was between 38,000-42,000. He also argued that the killing of surrendered or captured soldiers should not be considered as "Massacre". This book is now considered as the official authoritative history text on the issue by the Japan Ministry of Education.

1980s

Massaki Tanaka's book "Fabrication of Nanjing Massacre" not only denied the Nanjing Massacre denied but laid the blame for the Sino-Japanese war on the Chinese Government.

The Japanese distributor of The Last Emperor (1987) edited out the stock footage of the Rape of Nanking from the film.

Denial by Japanese government officials in the 1990s

A number of Japanese cabinet ministers, as well as some high-ranking politicians, have made comments denying the atrocities committed by the Japanese Army in World War II. Among these were Shigeto Nagano, the Minister of Justice and a former chief of staff of the Japan Ground Self-Defense Force.

Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara said, "People say that the Japanese made a holocaust but that is not true. It is a story made up by the Chinese. It has tarnished the image of Japan, but it is a lie." Some subsequently resigned after protests from China and South Korea.

On November 10, 1990, during a protest by Chinese Americans against the Japanese actions on the island of Diao-Yu-Tai, the Deputy Japanese Consul in Houston asserted that, "the Nanjing Massacre never occurred."

In response to these and similar incidents, a number of Japanese journalists and historians formed the Nankin Jiken Chōsa Kenkyūkai (Nanjing Incident Research Group). The research group has collected large quantities of archival materials as well as testimonies from both Chinese and Japanese sources.

Apology and condolences by the prime minister and emperor of Japan

On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first clear and formal apology for Japanese actions during the war. He apologized for Japan's wrongful aggression and the great suffering that it inflicted in Asia. He offered his "heartfelt" apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. The emperor offered his condolences and expressed the hope that similar atrocities would never be repeated.

Contemporary denialists in the Japanese government

In 2007, a group of around 100 Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lawmakers again denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication, arguing that there was no evidence to prove the allegations of mass killings by Japanese soldiers. They accused Beijing of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement".

Japanese debate over the Nanking Massacre

Takashi Hoshiyama presents an analysis of the arguments put forth by what he characterizes as the "massacre affirmation school" and the "massacre denial school". Hoshiyama identifies five central points at issue:

1. The killing of captured soldiers,
2. The killing of non-uniformed soldiers mingled in with civilians,
3. Whether the killing of civilians was perpetrated under a systematic policy,
4. The killing of civilians, and
5. The total number of military and civilian victims.

Killing of captured soldiers

During the battle for Nanking, there are instances where the Japanese army killed Chinese soldiers whom they had captured. In some cases, these executions took place some time after the soldiers had been captured, sometimes as much as several days afterward.

Massacre denialists argue that, in order for the Chinese soldiers to be recognized as "belligerents" and thus eligible for treatment as prisoners of war, there had to be a commander present. However, since the senior commanders had fled Nanking, the denialists argue that the soldiers did not qualify as "prisoners of war". The denialists further argue that, despite the fall of Nanking on December 13, the Chinese army did not formally surrender, resistance from the Chinese army did not cease and heavy fighting continued. There were some instances where Chinese troops rose up against the Japanese after having surrendered. As a result, denialists argue that the killing of Chinese troops should not be characterized as "execution of POWs" but as "mopping-up operations".

There was a doctrine that interpreted international law to sanction the killing of POWs if there was no way to provide for their physical needs or to release them without endangering the Japanese army.

In response, the massacre affirmation school asserts that, even when no commanders are present, the international law on prisoners of war remains in effect. They further reject the doctrine that military exigencies take precedence over the laws and precedents of war. The massacre affirmation school asserts that killing of POWs can only be justified to protect the safety of the capturing army's soldiers and that this situation did not exist during or after the battle of Nanking.

Killing of non-uniformed soldiers

Some of the testimonies referred to executions of the Chinese soldiers who had killed citizens to take their civilian clothes to enter the Nanking Safety Zone pretending to be citizens. The soldiers did this because if they had tried to escape from the battlefield, they would have been killed by the Chinese "fight-demand" unit waiting behind them. The Chinese soldiers of the unit killed their fellow soldiers who tried to run away from the battlefield. So, the Chinese soldiers who wanted to run away killed citizens to take their clothes and they pretended to be citizens.

Japanese denialists argue that such soldiers were dangerous and the international law says they are not to be treated as prisoners of war (POW) and could be executed. When such Chinese soldiers were found, there were cases that they got executed, but this was not a massacre of civilians. In fact, Lewis Smythe, who investigated about the Japanese occupation of Nanking, wrote in his report about the Nanking Safety Zone: "We have no right to protest about legitimate executions by the Japanese army." Thus, they recognized that such executions were "legitimate." And no Europeans and Americans who were living in Nanking in those days reported any case that the Japanese army had executed prisoners of war. Recently, all the records written in the time of the Nanking occupation was put into a database, and it made things clear that most of the "murders in Nanking" had been hearsay, and the executions reported by eyewitnesses had been legitimate ones.

Killing of civilians

Massacre denialists argue that there are no historical documents that substantiate the Japanese army slaughtered the civilian populace. Investigation of the Japanese, U.S., British, and German records have not found any eye-witness accounts of such killings.

Total number of military and civilian victims

John Rabe testified that three months after the Nanking occupation there were still about 30,000 dead bodies lying on the shore of Yangtze River, but he did not mention that those had been the result of massacre. The bodies were of those who died in battle. And Rabe mentioned it not as his own eyewitness, but as hearsay. According to Mt. Susumu Maruyama, leader of the burial of the war dead in Nanking, the burial was completed around March 15, 1938, three months after the occupation, so in those days such dead bodies must have not seen already. And the number of the buried bodies were around 14,000-15,000 in total, which were far different from 300,000.

Sources

• Hata, Ikuhiko (1986). Nanjing Incident (Nankin Jiken Gyakusatsu no kozo 南京事件―「虐殺」の構造). Chuo Koron Shinsho. ISBN ISBN 4121007956, ISBN 4121907957. {{cite book}}: Check |isbn= value: invalid character (help)
• "Reply to Katsuichi Honda". Every Gentlemen. March 1972. {{cite journal}}: |first= missing |last= (help); Missing pipe in: |first= (help)
• Higashinakano, Syudo. The Truth of the Nanking Operation in 1937. Shogakukan.
• Higashinakano, S., Susumu, Kobayashi and Fukunaga, S. Analyzing the "Photographic Evidence" of the Nanking Massacre. Shogakukan.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Suzuki, Akira (April 1972). "The Phantom of The Nanjing Massacre". Every Gentlemen.
• Tanaka, Massaki (1984). Fabrication of Nanjing Massacre. Nihon Kyobun Sha.
• The Truth about Nanjing (2007) a Japanese-produced documentary denying that any such massacre took place.

See also

• Holocaust denial
• Denial of the Armenian Genocide
• Bosnian Genocide