Convergence or Divergence? Recent Historical Writings on the Rape of Nanjing

Abstract

As AN EVENT AT THE LIMITS, the Nazi Holocaust highlights one of the fundamental dilemmas for historians at the end of the twentieth century: if historical inquiry is admittedly a subjective endeavor, are historians still capable of establishing some form of stable truth and rejecting certain emplotments such as denial? Recent years have seen a proliferation of works that attempt to wrestle with such issues in historiography and memory, including their moral implications. Historian Martin Jay, among others, has called attention to the mechanism that militates against the unfettered freedoms of historians to narrate arbitrarily, arguing that history is not so much a single historian emplotting the past but rather the institution of historians, now more often credentialed than not, trying to convince each other about the plausibility of their reconstruction.1 The common, if not universal, acceptance of a historical narrative, in his view, depends on the judgment of the community rather than on any congruence with the 'truth' of what really happened.2 Advocating practical realism, Joyce Appleby and others characterize historians as seekers of a workable truth communicable within an improved society.3 In this sense, consensus or even convergence in the community of historians may take on the significance of a reasonable measure of truthfulness. Obviously, whether a strategy of intersubjective judgment can satisfactorily reconcile the contradiction in historical inquiry concerns historians in all fields. In view of its wider implication for the issue of historical truth, this essay addresses the question of whether there has been any significant convergence among historians writing on the Rape of Nanjing, or the Nanjing Massacre, which is often considered the single most notorious Japanese atrocity during the entire Asian-Pacific War.4