The Rape of Nanking

of geography and history when she asked me, “Nanking? What was that, a dynasty?”

An event that sixty years ago made front-page news in American newspapers appears to have vanished, almost without a trace. Hollywood has not produced a mainstream movie about the massacre—even though the story contains dramatic elements similar to those of Schindler’s List. And until recently most American novelists and historians have also chosen not to write about it.

After hearing such remarks, I became terrified that the history of three hundred thousand murdered Chinese might disappear just as they themselves had disappeared under Japanese occupation and that the world might actually one day believe the Japanese politicians who have insisted that the Rape of Nanking was a hoax and a fabrication—that the massacre never happened at all. By writing this book, I forced myself to delve into not only history but historiography—to examine the forces of history and the process by which history is made. What keeps certain events in history and assigns the rest to oblivion? Exactly how does an event like the Rape of Nanking vanish from Japan’s (and even the world’s) collective memory?

One reason information about the Rape of Nanking has not been widely disseminated clearly lies in the postwar differences in how Germany and Japan handled their wartime crimes. Perhaps more than any other nation in history, the Germans have incorporated into their postwar political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, was guilty of war crimes. The Japanese government, however, has never forced itself or Japanese society to do the same. As a result, although some bravely fight to force Japanese society to face the painful truth, many in Japan continue to treat the war crimes as the isolated acts of individual soldiers or even as events that simply did not occur.

In Japan competing stories of what happened during World War II continue to appear. According to a currently popular revisionist view, the country bears no responsibility for the wholesale murder of civilians anywhere during the war. The Japanese fought the war to ensure its own survival and to free Asia from the grip of Western imperialism. Indeed, in return for its noble efforts, Japan itself ended up as the ultimate victim at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

This soothing perception of history still finds its way into Japanese history textbooks, which have either ignored the massacre at Nanking altogether or put a decidedly Japanese spin on the actions of the military. At the far end of the political spectrum, Japanese ultranationalists have threatened everything from lawsuits to death, even assassination, to silence opponents who suggest that these textbooks are not telling the next generation the real story.

But it is not just fanatical fringe groups that are trying to rewrite history. In 1990 Ishihara Shintaro, a leading member of Japan’s conservative Liberal Democratic Party and the author of best-selling books such as The Japan That Can Say No, told a Playboy interviewer: “People say that the Japanese made a holocaust there [in Nanking], 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.”

Naturally, this statement enraged scholars and journalists around the world. One proclaimed that “Japan’s denial of the rape of Nanjing would be politically the same as German denial of the Holocaust.” But the denunciations failed to silence Ishihara, who responded with a furious stream of counterattacks. In his rebuttals, Ishihara, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, asserted that the world never learned about the Nanking massacre until the International Military Tribunal of the Far East put people on trial for their role in it; that neither Japanese war correspondents nor Western reporters wrote about the massacre as it was occurring; that the New York Times correspondent Frank Tillman Durdin failed to witness any massacre; and that the Episcopalian minister John Magee saw only one person killed.

By the 1990s John Magee was, of course, no longer alive to defend himself, but his son, David Magee, made an effort to disprove Ishihara’s statements. He gave interviews to the media and attended conferences on the Nanking massacre at which he read from his father’s papers and displayed the actual camera his father used to film Japanese atrocities. Frank Tillman Durdin was alive, and he took direct action. Stepping out of retirement in San Diego to hold a press conference to refute Ishihara’s remarks, Durdin explained to reporters that he had indeed written an article in 1937 that described the countryside from Shanghai to Nanking as peaceful, but that this article was written two months before the Japanese started their advance on Nanking.

Ishihara’s other statements are readily refutable. Contemporaneous reports of the Rape appeared in dozens of Western newspapers, and even Japanese newspapers ran detailed stories about the massacre. As for Durdin, his articles were not only contemporaneous but published on the front pages of the New York Times. John Magee’s letters contained descriptions like, “The raping of the women has been beyond description or imagination,” and, “There were dead bodies in every street and alley in the city, so far as I could tell, and I went around quite extensively including Hsiakwan.”

Not to be stopped, however, Ishihara went on to suggest that the Chinese claims of a massacre at Nanking helped influence the U.S. decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As each refutation of his earlier claims made it impossible for Ishihara to repeat them, he shifted his position slightly, but on one point he remained inflexible: even if the Germans had apologized for killing the Jews, that did not mean that the Japanese should do the same; under no circumstances should the Japanese ever admit they were guilty of any wrongdoing.

Ishihara’s career remained intact despite the Playboy interview, but eventually others were not so lucky.

—One man who was sucked into the vortex of controversy was General Nagano Shigeto. In the spring of 1994, within days of his appointment to the cabinet-level position of justice minister, he gave an interview to the Mainichi Shimbun newspaper that turned out to be political suicide. “I think the Nanking Massacre and the rest was a fabrication,” he told the newspaper. “I was in Nanking immediately afterwards.” He went on to call the Korean comfort women “licensed prostitutes,” not sex slaves, and to argue that Japan had no choice but to go to war because it was “in danger of being crushed.” The violent reaction to his statements across Asia forced Nagano to resign in disgrace.

—In September 1986, Fujio Masayuki, the Japanese minister of education, sabotaged his career when he declared that the Rape of Nanking was “just a part of war.” In an interview with Bungei Shunju magazine, Fujio defended the actions of the Japanese during the Nanking massacre and claimed that the number of dead had been exaggerated. He also said that Korea was partly to blame for its annexation by Japan in 1910, that Korea willingly accepted colonization, and that the Tokyo War Crimes Trial was “racial revenge” meant to “rob Japan of her power.” Though Fujio made these comments only “to restore the Japanese spirit through history and tradition,” they cost him his job. That month Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone Yasuhiro dismissed him from his post.

—Okuno Seisuki, who had been the prefectural director of the notorious Kempeitai (the secret Japanese military police) during the war, rose after the war to become the Japanese minister of justice and even the minister of education. By 1988 Okuno had become the Japanese land agency chief and the third most senior member of the cabinet. But Okuno’s undoing came that spring when he visited the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (where Japanese class A war criminals are enshrined and worshipped) and revealed his true attitudes about World War II. “There was no intention of aggression,” Okuno told reporters. “The white race made Asia into a colony, but only Japan has been blamed. Who was the aggressor country? It was the white race. I don’t see why Japanese are called militarists and aggressors.” His statements provoked an uproar across Asia, prompting Okuno to adjust his wording: “I didn’t say Japan wasn’t an aggressor. I said it wasn’t the only aggressor.” By May, Okuno had been forced to resign, but he remained unrepentant to the end. He had stepped down, Okuno said, only under pressure from the government, not because he wished to retract his statements.

—In August 1994, Sakurai Shin, the director general of the Japanese environmental agency, remarked that Japan did not go to war with the intent to commit aggression. In response to China’s angry protests (a PRC Foreign Ministry spokesman announced that “the Chinese government regrets that, once again, a Japanese cabinet minister has brazenly made remarks which distort historical facts”), Murayama Tomiichi ended up apologizing for Sakurai’s remarks. He also rebuked Sakurai by calling the remarks “inappropriate” and forced the director general to hold a midnight press conference to retract his statement.

—In 1995 Hashimoto Ryutaro, the minister for international trade and industry and a powerful man in the Liberal Democratic Party (he would later become the prime minister of Japan), announced that it was Japan’s intention only to fight the United States, Britain, and “others” during World War II. While Japan was aggressive toward China, he said, it really had no intention of invading other Asian countries.

The official denials continued even as this book was going to press. Kajiyama Seiroku, the Japanese chief