The Nanking atrocity, 1937-38: complicating the picture

Abstract

December 13, 2007 marks 70th anniversary of fall of Chinese city of to Japanese army. The Nanking Atrocity of winter 1937-8, also known as Nanking Massacre, lies at core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers most recent scholarship about what actually happened in and places those findings in context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to event ever since; an event that is coined, on Chinese side, as the forgotten Holocaust, after subtitle of Iris' Chang's 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to contributors of this volume. However, authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume presents new facts and fresh interpretations with overriding aim to complicate picture and to debunk myths, expose fallacies, and rectify misconceptions that obstruct a clear understanding of issues and prevent ultimate reconciliation between China and Japan. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi is Professor of History at York University, Toronto, specializing in Japanese political thought and World War Two in East Asia. His publications include Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1986), Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued (University of Hawaii Press, 1995), and Modern Japanese Thought (Ed.,Cambridge University Press, 1999).