Rape Of Nanjing Research Articles

Emperor Hirohito’s Post-Surrender Reflections

Abstract This essay introduces readers to the recent discovery of the personal papers of Grand Steward Tajima Michiji. These documents capture the post-surrender reflections of Hirohito, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor, and record him speaking on such issues as his war responsibility, as well as the culpability of prewar politicians such as Konoe Fumimaro and General Tōjō Hideki. In August 2019, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) (nhk) announced that it had gained privileged access to the papers. Acting on advice from scholars, it then released extracts from Tajima’s audience records. Drawing not on the Tajima papers themselves, but on what the nhk has made available, the documents demonstrate that Hirohito, after Japan’s surrender, experienced anguish and over the war and its outcome. He continued as emperor because he accepted “moral responsibility” for the war that required him to help his nation and its people endure occupation and reconstruction. This article also describes Hirohito’s postwar reflections on several issues, such as Japanese field officers and subordinates in the 1930s initiating without authorization acts of aggression, the Rape of Nanjing, and Japan’s postwar rearmament. While the Tajima papers will not resolve the ongoing debate over the emperor’s responsibility for Japan’s path of aggression before 1945, they do provide valuable insights about his role in and reaction to events before, during, and after World War ii.

Many Doors to International Criminal Justice

Responsibilities to protect and prevent elite crimes are best energized by enforcement that walks through many doors. Effective deterrence is rarely delivered by the International Criminal Court. Yet deterrence is possible when it patiently cumulates through many doors. Likewise truth, justice, and reconciliation can achieve little through one door and much through many. Opening more doors to the complexly cross-cutting character of survivor guilt with mass atrocities can better open possibilities for future prevention and reconciliation than simply doors to courtrooms that find a criminal on one side of complex sequences of atrocity. The Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Trials opened quickly after World War II. They did not prove to hold keys to truth and reconciliation for Germany until the Eichmann trial finished in Jerusalem in 1962. Why? Still today, non-confession by the U.S. to Hiroshima/Nagasaki as war crimes has meant truncated Japanese reconciliation. Different kinds of doors are needed with crimes like the Dresden and Tokyo fire bombing, the rape of Nanjing and the “comfort women” issue. These have included citizens tribunals, truth commissions, and indigenous justice in cases like Bougainville that rejected the truth commission model. When we reflect upon door diversity, transitional justice turns out not to be very focused on justice or international criminal law, and not to be at all transitional, but rather a maze of doors to justice of diverse kinds that open or close across the longue durée (as developed in the work of Susanne Karstedt).1

China's war reporters: the legacy of resistance against Japan

When Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937, many Chinese journalists greeted the news with euphoria. For years, the Chinese press had urged Chiang Kai-shek to resist Tokyo s aggressive overtures. This was the war they wanted, convinced that their countrymen would triumph.Parks Coble recaptures the experiences of China s war correspondents during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 1945. He delves into the wartime writing of reporters connected with the National Salvation Movement journalists such as Fan Changjiang, Jin Zhonghua, and Zou Taofen who believed their mission was to inspire the masses through patriotic reporting. As the Japanese army moved from one stunning victory to the next, forcing Chiang s government to retreat to the interior, newspaper reports often masked the extent of China s defeats. Atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing were played down in the press for fear of undercutting national morale.By 1941, as political cohesion in China melted away, Chiang cracked down on leftist intellectuals, including journalists, many of whom fled to the Communist-held areas of the north. When the People s Republic was established in 1949, some of these journalists were elevated to prominent positions. But in a bitter twist, all mention of their wartime writings disappeared. Mao Zedong emphasized the heroism of his own Communist Revolution, not the war effort led by his archrival Chiang. Denounced as enemies during the Cultural Revolution, once-prominent wartime journalists, including Fan, committed suicide. Only with the revival of Chinese nationalism in the reform era has their legacy been resurrected.

‘Raw Individualists’: American Soldiers on the Bataan Death March Reconsidered

The Bataan Death March has entered historical consciousness as one of the four great Japanese atrocities during WWII. Along with the Rape of Nanjing, the Burma-Siam Death Railway, and the Rape of Manila, it stands as one of the ultimate measures of twentieth-century wartime barbarity. Both primary and secondary sources share a central preoccupation with Japanese behaviour and therefore assume American prisoners were little more than a passive presence during this episode. In this essay I examine the Bataan Death March from a new vantage point, asking salient questions that lead to modified understanding: who were these Americans, and what kind of soldiers, at war’s dawn for the US, did they make? What features of their cultural make-up help explain their behaviour? What were the fault lines in the allied, Filipino-American force that faced the Japanese Army? This article explores the numerous problems the American forces in the Philippines faced: the hybrid nature of the army, the tension between career soldiers and recent draftees and poor training and leadership. These problems, American soldiers’ cultural predisposition, and military inexperience all combined to render them significantly more vulnerable to Japanese cruelty on the Death March than they otherwise would have been.

The Legacy of China’s Wartime Reporting, 1937-1945: Can the Past Serve the Present?

Japan’s invasion of China in the summer of 1937 dealt a devastating blow to Chinese journalism. Yet despite the hardships, China’s wartime reporters produced a legacy of vivid writing. In the face of a series of major defeats, the journalists attempted to shore up morale and stressed the heroic resistance of Chinese forces. They reported on Japanese atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing, but not to such an extent that might erode morale. During the Maoist era, the legacy of this war reportage largely faded from a public memory which privileged the revolution. When a “new remembering” of the war emerged in the reform era, the heroic resistance narrative from war reportage dovetailed nicely with the new nationalism of today’s China. But this literature has been less helpful in developing the theme of Chinese victimhood, a key component of the new memory of the war. Finally, memoir literature, so common in most combatant nations, has been problematic in China. Those who remember their war experiences do so through the prism of later traumas, particularly the Cultural Revolution.

The Nanjing Massacre: A Review Essay

The Nanjing Massacre:A Review Essay John A. Tucker (bio) Honda Katsuichi . The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame. Edited by Frank Gibney. Translated by Karen Sandness. Pacific Basin Institute Books. Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. xxvii, 367 pp. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-7656-03335-7. Joshua A. Fogel , editor. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. xvi, 248 pp. Hardcover $40.00, ISBN 0-520-22006-4. Paperback $15.95, ISBN 0-520-22007-2. Timothy Brook , editor. Documents on the Rape of Nanking. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. viii, 301 pp. Hardcover $39.50, ISBN 0-472-11134-5. Paperback $15.95, ISBN 0-472-08662-6. Hua-ling Hu . American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. xxx, 185. Hardcover $24.95, ISBN 0-8093-2303-6. In the historiography of Sino-Japanese relations, there is not a more sensitive, controversial, and intensely tragic subject than the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-1938. Yet even with the enormous expansion in East Asian studies in the postwar period, the Massacre has not been explored in any great detail by Western historians, at least not until relatively recently. This is not to say that it was unknown, for it certainly was known. However, textbook accounts of Japanese history in particular have regularly bypassed this event; articles and monographs addressing it at length have rarely been produced by respected figures at the major universities. Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Basic Books, 1997) changed this radically with its highly personal, impassioned, and sensational account of the atrocities that were committed. Historians of East Asia who have read Chang's book realize that she was not trained as a historian, nor is she an academic by profession. While scholars of Chinese, Japanese, and/or East Asian history should be thankful that her book has focused international attention on a crucially important topic, they can hardly be expected to rest satisfied with Chang's account. New work is now appearing with some regularity, from various corners, expanding our understanding of the Massacre and the highly politicized historiography and journalism that still surrounds it. [End Page 321] The publication of Honda Katsuichi's (1933-) The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame will surely contribute enormously to a more informed historical understanding of that brutal atrocity and the highly charged, seemingly unending, controversy surrounding it in Japan. Honda's writings are exceptionally significant because they helped to open up, in the early 1970s, what has become nearly three decades' worth of discussion of the massacre by Japanese scholars, lawyers, journalists, veterans, and private citizens. While most respectable historians and journalists addressing the subject have sought to reveal the admittedly revolting facts, outspoken ultraright wingers have invariably countered their efforts with repeatedly vehement denials. Unfortunately, the ultraright is so outspoken that occasionally their views seem to be the only ones being voiced. The publication of Iris Chang's sensational bestseller, The Rape of Nanjing: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, has given the debate new dimensions, especially due to Chang's use of John Rabe's (1882 - 1950) Diary1 corroborating the massacre. However, it was in relation to Honda's writings that the major Japanese participants in the debate over the historical character of the massacre first articulated their positions. Karen Sandness deserves praise for translating, and Frank Gibney for editing, this extremely important volume. It will be required reading for anyone attempting to understand the massacre as a historical event and the debate over it as a reflection of Japanese thinking about atrocities committed by the imperial army in the 1930 s. Honda is not a professional historian; rather he is an exceptionally influential journalist who, since 1958, has written numerous feature stories for the Asahi shinbun, Japan's second largest newspaper, with a daily circulation of over twelve million. Honda has published a prodigious number of books on topics ranging from mountaineering and exploration to studies of peoples whose cultures have put them at odds...

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

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 "intersubjective 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

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

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

The United States, Japan, and the atomic bomb

Two events associated with World War II in the Pacific virtually obliterated the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, that fragile distinction at the heart of international efforts of the last five centuries to regulate and restrict human and environmental destruction during wartime. These were:• The Japanese onslaught against the peoples of China and Southeast Asia as exemplified by the bombing of Shanghai, the rape of Nanjing, and the attacks on civilians in the “three-all policy” (burn all, kill all, destroy all) directed against rural North China.• The use of air strikes by several major powers to terrorize and destroy cities and populations, notably in the firebombing of European and Japanese cities and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States.