Author Iris Chang is dead

Rape of Nanking is an amazing (and amazingly horrifying) book.

RIP.

It's been slightly eating away at me today, her death. It's a sense of loss at somebody who was dedicated to trying to recapture something that was lost, or at least in danger of being ignored. This book she was working on about US soldiers in the Philippines strikes me as something that would have been very important in its own way too, and now we may never know, depending on where she was with it.

Some right-wing groups called it 'misleading' or other such things. There was a competing book written by a Japanese historian that acknowledged, but downplayed the events. There was also a series of historical manga that attacked the book for having inaccuracies.

But I think it sparked some soul-searching and a lot of questioning.

It's part of a review written by Robert Entenmann. I found it through a google search.

I think it sums up the objections many Japanese have to the book.

Iris Chang attributes this neglect [in Japan] to a politically-motivated conspiracy of silence and an alleged atmosphere of intimidation that prevents Japanese from facing their history. Research on this subject can be "life-threatening," she claims, and ". . . the Japanese as a nation are still trying to bury the victims of Nanking - not under the soil, as in 1937, but into historical oblivion" (p. 220). The present generation, she writes, "can continue to delude themselves that the war of Japanese aggression was a holy and just war that Japan happened to lose solely because of American economic power . . ." (pp. 224-25). The flyleaf of the cloth-bound edition states that "the story of this atrocity . . . continues to be denied by the Japanese government," although that assertion, which is false, does not appear anywhere in the paperbound version.

Chang seems unable to differentiate between some members of the ultranationalist fringe and other Japanese. A Japanese translation of the diairy of John Rabe, a German businessman who helped protect civilians in the Nanking Safety Zone, is a best-seller in Japan. Moreover, despite what Iris Chang maintains, current Japanese textbooks discuss the massacre, giving figures of between 150,000 to 300,000 killed. A 1994 opinion poll found that eighty percent of respondents in Japan believed that their government had not adequately compensated victimized peoples in countries Japan colonized or invaded. "This is hardly the response of a people suffering from acute historical amnesia," as John Dower notes.[3] Chang generalizes from extremists who deny that the incident took place, fanatics motivated by ultranationalism and ethnic prejudice, who have as little credibility and moral authority as Holocaust deniers have in the West. Moreover, although Chang explicitly rejects explanations of national character, her own ethnic prejudice implicitly pervades her book. Her explanations are, to a large extent, based on unexamined ethnic stereotypes.

Many in Japan would certainly prefer that the incident be forgotten, feeling that unpleasant and shameful things should not be talked about. But that is not the same as denying it occurred. In any case, many Japanese have dealt with the Nanking massacre, and have done so for many years. As early as 1940 Yanaihara Tadao, an economist and specialist in colonial policy, courageously criticized his fellow Japanese Christians for honoring General Matsui Iwame, commander of Japanese troops in Nanking.[4] Immediately after the war Maruyama Masao dealt with the incident in his attempt to understand Japan's wartime behavior.[5] My first reading about the Nanking massacre was in Ienaga Saburo's The Pacific War, originally published in Japanese thirty years ago. In recent years other Japanese, including Hora Tomio, Honda Katsuichi, and Tanaka Yuki, have published significant studies of the Rape of Nanking.

The Japanese historical background Chang presents is cliched, simplistic, stereotyped, and often inaccurate. She writes that ". . . as far back as anyone could remember, the islands' powerful feudal lords employed private armies to wage incessant battle with each other . . . " (pp. 19-20) - a description appropriate to the Warring States period of the sixteenth century but not to any other period. She places the Tokugawa unification of Japan in the wrong century (p. 21). She asserts that the conditions of Japan's unconditional surrender "exonerated all members of the imperial family . . ." (p. 176). Her use of sources is uncritical and credulous, treating hearsay as the equivalent of more reliable evidence. She engages in implausible speculations, for example about "Emperor Hirohito's role in the Rape of Nanking" (p. 177). "We will probably never know exactly what news Hirohito received about Nanking as the massacre was happening," she writes, " but the record suggests that he was exceptionally pleased by it" (p. 179). Chang confuses Japanese leaders' delight in the fall of the Chinese capital with exulting in the massacre that occurred afterward.

So why has this book become so widely acclaimed? Probably because of her account of the massacre itself, a vivid and gut-wrenching narration. Moreover, she brings out of oblivion the neutral foreigners who established the Nanking Safety Zone to protect non-combatants, particularly the enigmatic Nazi party member John Rabe. Yet her description of the massacre itself, the strongest part of the book, is also open to criticism. The Japanese historian Hata Ikuhito makes some telling criticisms, although Hata himself minimizes the extent of the massacre.[6] He questions Chang's estimate of the number of victims, a ghoulish exercise perhaps, but an important one. He argues that Chang's figure of 300,000 is impossibly high, but his own figure of 40,000 killed, although similar to the estimates of some Western witnesses, is implausibly low. Hata claims that eleven photographs in Chang's book are "fakes, forgeries, and composites," although he succeeds in demonstrating that with only two. One, a photograph of a row of severed heads, depicts bandits executed by Chinese police in 1930 rather than victims of the Nanking massacre. Another photo, which appeared in the November 10, 1937 issue of Asahi Gurafu, is a propaganda picture of Chinese villagers returning from fields "under the protection of Japanese soldiers."

"But I think it sparked some soul-searching and a lot of questioning."

Not nearly enough. The poll that is referred to in which " eighty percent of respondents in Japan believed that their government had not adequately compensated victimized peoples in countries Japan colonized or invaded" sounds like a load of crap to me. There is nowhere near that level of awareness in Japan.

Japanese amnesia is not a cliche or a myth. It's an unfortunate reality which makes the discussion of Japan's wartime aggression frustrating to impossible, especially for foreign residents who are often frowned upon for bringing up such sensitive matters.

"Chang generalizes from extremists who deny that the incident took place, fanatics motivated by ultranationalism and ethnic prejudice, who have as little credibility and moral authority as Holocaust deniers have in the West."

Wrong. These deniers and ultranationalists hold important positions in the ruling LDP government and Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara can't seem to go more than two weeks without making some kind of incredibly racist or offensive remark. < a href="http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/opinion/200311/kt2003110417310311330.htm"> Here is an article about him and some of his more "enlightened" statements.

Please don't get me wrong. I love Japan and the Japanese people, but when it comes to confronting the difficult aspects of their past, they fail miserably. Unfortunately, this failure continues to poison relations with their Asian neighbours.

What makes you doubt the validity of that poll?

I don't want to say that he's denied it, although I wouldn't put it past him, so I'll do a bit of checking and get back to you on that point.