Whitewashing of the Nanjing Massacre Protested
A controversial textbook, written by nationalist scholars for junior high schools, is displayed during a news conference held by civic groups opposed to the approval of the new version of the textbook in Tokyo.
Japan's Ministry of Education approved a revised version of the textbook that critics say whitewashes Japan's militaristic past, further fraying already tense ties with China and South Korea.
About the Japanese Textbook
Risking new rows with its neighbors, Japan authorized for school use a nationalist-written history textbook which China and South Korea accuse of glossing over Japan's wartime atrocities.
The education ministry said Tuesday it approved the controversial book as one of eight that can be used to instruct students aged 13 to 15 from April 2006.
The book is an updated version of the textbook which triggered formal protests from Beijing and Seoul upon its release in 2001.
Japan's relations with South Korea have deteriorated recently, with Seoul alleging that Tokyo is acting like a colonialist for renewing its claim to a chain of uninhabited rock islands in the Sea of Japan.
South Korea told Japan last month that it disapproved of the textbook.
The building housing the skeletons excavated in Jiangdongmen.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said Tuesday that Japan was ready to discuss the issue with South Korea. The two countries' foreign ministers are to meet on Thursday in Pakistan on the sidelines of an Asian regional meeting.
In approving the revised textbook, the education ministry demanded 124 changes to tone down some of the right-wing assertions, but other deeply controversial points remain.
The book avoids the word "invasion" when it refers to Japan's military occupation of other Asian countries in the first half of the 20th century.
It also refers to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre -- in which some historians say at least 300,000 civilians were slaughtered by Japanese troops -- as an "incident" in which "many" Chinese were killed.
The book teaches students that "no single country steered completely clear of killing or abusing unarmed people," while admitting the Japanese military was among those that committed "unfair murder and abuse" of people of enemy countries.
Skeletons of the victims excavated in the Jiangdongmen.
The book published by Fuso Publishing was penned by the Society for History Textbook Reform, a group made up of avowedly nationalist historians who assert Japan has become "masochistic" in assessing its past.
The history textbook was adopted in 2002 by less than 0.1 percent of schools, all of them for children with disabilities, although it became an instant bestseller when it went on sale at general bookstores in mid-2001.
On the Korean Peninsula, the Fuso book had originally said: "The US and European military powers approved Japan's annexation of Korea in return for Japan's approval of their colonial rule (elsewhere)."
But under ministry orders, the wording was altered to: "The US and European military powers did not oppose Japan's putting Korea under its influence."
Four other approved textbooks also refer to the Nanjing Massacre as the "Nanjing Incident" while their accounts of the number of Chinese victims vary.
Only one of the eight approved texts mentions the euphemistically called "comfort women", the sex slaves taken from other Asian countries, particularly Korea, to serve in frontline brothels for Japanese soldiers.
A separate civics textbook by Fuso refers to the islets at the center of the dispute with Seoul as "under illegal occupation by South Korea".
Another chain of islands in the East China Sea disputed with China are described as Japan's "sovereign territory but China claims it".
About Nanjing Massacre
In December 1937, Nanjing fell to the Japanese Imperial Army. The Japanese army launched a massacre for six weeks. According to the records of several welfare organizations which buried the dead bodies after the Massacre, around three hundred thousand people, mostly civilians and POWs, were brutally slaughtered.
A closer look at the skeletons of the victims excavated in the Jiangdongmen.
Over twenty thousand cases of rape were reported. Many of the victims were gang raped and then killed. The figure did not include those captives who were sent to army brothels (the so-called "comfort stations").
The actual Memorial Hall is built to commemorate the victims.
The actual Hall is located in Jiangdongmen (The Gate on the Eastern Bank of the River), one of the sites where countless human bones of the victims of the Massacre were excavated. It is just one of those "wan ren keng" (pit of ten thousand corpses) which can be found in many Japanese occupied areas in China during the war.
The Hall is built in the eighties when a number of Japanese politicians and writers claimed that the Massacre had never ocurred and history textbooks were rewritten by the authority describing the Massacre as a minor incident.
It must be reminded that contrary to Germany the Japanese government has never made any formal or official apology to the Chinese people for their crimes committed during the war.
Instead, a number of Japanese politicians and writers denied not just the Massacre but any of their wrong doings in the World War II. They claimed that they had "liberated" Asian peoples from Western colonialism. The Nanjing Massacre is one of their so-called "liberations".
This WWW Memorial Hall is created to expose their lies and to preserve the historical truth.
Source: www.arts.cuhk.edu.hk
A Japanese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre
Japanese conception of the Nanjing Massacre has evolved throughout the last sixty years. To this date, there have been five phases in its progression. The first phase was the history of the Massacre during the Asia-Pacific War (1931-1945). In this period, there was no Nanjing Massacre in the public Japanese awareness. In spite of commemorations of Chinese deaths after the fall of Nanjing, lantern parades took place throughout Japan to celebrate the capture of Nanjing. Newspapers praised the Japanese military for fighting bravely in China. Japanese read literature that portrayed humane and courageous Japanese soldiers fighting for the "liberation of Asia from the Western invasion." Although Timperley's Japanese Terror in China fully discussed Japanese atrocities in Nanjing and was translated into Japanese, it was not widely read.
Japanese soldiers used live victims for bayonet practice.
With the Japanese defeat in 1945, the second phase of the Massacre in Japanese historiography began. At the Tokyo War Crimes Trial (1946-48), the Japanese public learned of various atrocities committed by the Japanese army in China, including the Nanjing Massacre. Newspapers reported the trial in detail. For instance, the day following the testimony of Robert Wilson, a doctor who witnessed Japanese brutalities in Nanjing, the newspaper Asahi reported that "...horrible acts of the Japanese Army were first revealed to the people." Headlines such as "Insatiate Atrocities for Three Months" (Mainichi) and "Children, Too, Were Massacred; Revealed Massacre at Nanjing" (Asahi) were sensational enough to attract the attention of the people in Japan. Although the trial taught the Japanese public about the Massacre at Nanjing, the Massacre did not become a symbol of Japanese war crimes against the Chinese. Rather, it was a reminder of an atrocious Japanese military that dragged Japan into a reckless war with the United States leading to tremendous Japanese sacrifices.
Although the Massacre failed to become a public memory commemorating the Chinese deaths in Nanjing in 1937-38, the history of the Massacre, as well as other wartime Japanese atrocities in Asia, became a standard in Japanese history. Accounts of events in Nanjing appeared in elementary and junior high school textbooks that were edited by the Ministry of Education. In the historical academy, historians reflected upon a national education during wartime that had facilitated people's support for the war. They rejected historical education that was used to teach unscientific imperial myths and morals justifying national sacrifice for the emperor and Japanese overseas aggression.
These historians, most of whom were Marxists, began to publish studies that they had not been able to publish during the war.
10,000 Corpse Ditch.
They were not only active and influential in writing but also participated in democratic and peace movements, such as an anti-nuclear weapon petition campaign. In postwar Japanese historical discourse, it has been these progressives who have been most influential. Conservatives and nationalists have been challenging the progressive version of imperial history, which, in their eyes of many conservatives, "demonized" wartime Japanese history. Therefore, in Japan, the term "revisionist" is associated with conservatism and is at odds with the progressive view of history, whereas in the United States, the term often refers to liberals who are fighting against conservatives.
The Cold War helped Japanese revisionists gain influence. American policy makers did not want Japan to become a communist country, but a country that could buffer against the spread of communism in Asia. In the early 1950s, both Japanese and American policy makers agreed that the Japanese government should foster a spirit of patriotism that would bring the Japanese closer together should self-defense be necessary. This was the time when the representation of Japanese aggression in Asia was toned down in school textbooks. The word "aggression" was replaced with "advance" in many textbooks in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Eventually, the description of the Massacre disappeared from textbooks altogether.
With the reopening of China to the world in the early 1970s, the third phase of the history of the Massacre within Japan began. In 1971, Asahi journalist Katsuichi Honda published an article series called "Chûgoku no tabi" in Asahi. Honda, who had been a correspondent in Vietnam and saw many American atrocities there, wanted to examine Japanese atrocities during the Asia-Pacific War, including the Massacre. In his 40-day trip to China, he visited war memorials and interviewed survivors.
His articles, which included vivid photographs of remains of human bodies and of faces of his interviewees with tears and sorrows, were sensational and touched on something that many people wanted to forget. Although Honda received support from many of his readers, he also received criticism, and even threats from others.
A soldier is proudly showing off his kill.
Revisionists such as Shichihei Yamamoto and Akira Suzuki challenged Honda's account of an alleged killing competition between the two second lieutenants who competed to behead 100 Chinese. Yamamoto and Suzuki published articles in Shokun and Bungeishunjû claiming that the competition was something like an urban myth. Suzuki's efforts won him acclaim within the publishing world, and he received the Ôya Sôichi Nonfiction Award in 1973.
For those historians sympathetic to the experience of Chinese civilians and soldiers massacred by the Japanese invaders, these repeated denials of the truth of the Massacre and claims of Japanese innocence were outrageous. They responded immediately, pointing out inaccuracies in the challenges to long-standing accounts of the Massacre. In school textbooks, the Massacre appeared again in the 1970s partly because of the decisions made by the Tokyo District Court and the Tokyo High Court which favored Saburô Ienaga, who edited a textbook that had previously been disqualified for use by the Ministry of Education.
The textbook controversy in 1982 opened another phase of the Massacre's history within Japan. The campaign of the Ministry of Education to tone down the representation of wartime Japanese aggression caused intense international protests. Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese governments officially submitted protests to the Japanese government. As a result, the Japanese government promised that it would take steps to correct the textbooks. Such government actions that yielded to "foreign intervention" offended revisionists and motivated them to once again challenge wartime Japanese history, including that of the Massacre, which they considered to have been "written by the left" in the postwar period.
In 1984, Masaaki Tanaka wrote “Fabrication of Nanjing Massacre," which claimed that the Massacre was merely a myth created by the Tokyo trial and by the Chinese government. His work relieved those who were troubled by the postwar portrayal of wartime Japan. Even distinguished scholars, such as Shôichi Watanabe and Keiichirô Kobori, both college professors, admired Tanaka's work.
Beheading.
The progressives, again infuriated, set up The Study Group on the Nanjing Incident in 1984. It had some twenty members, including historians, journalists, lawyers, company employees, and others, and it met at least once a month. The members of the group actively published their studies on the Nanjing Massacre, such as Nankin Daigyakusatsu [The Nanjing Massacre] (1985), Nankin jiken chôsa kenkyûkai, Nankin jiken genchi chôsa hôkokusho [The report of a field trip to Nanjing] (1985).
Since 1984, the members of this study group have published twelve books exclusively discussing the Nanjing Massacre.
Ultimately, revisionists realized that it was impossible to deny the truth completely. Even an organization of war veterans now officially acknowledges that at least 10,000 illegal killings took place, that is, at least 10,000 Chinese were massacred in Nanjing [Nankin senshi (1989)]. The revisionists have altered their strategy. They began by claiming that the indiscriminate killing of 200,000 people insisted on by the Tokyo Trial or the 300,000 deaths insisted on by the Chinese government never took place. They now argue that the Nanjing Massacre was a fabrication because relatively few people were killed, and that of the deaths that did occur, only a small number were illegal under the laws of war. In addition, they argue that the incident was no more terrible than many other atrocities committed by various nations in 20th-century history.
In their opinion, the event in Nanjing does not deserve the special attention it has received.
With the death of Hirohito and the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the fifth phase of the history of the Massacre within Japan has begun. Although revisionist claims have not changed since the 1980s, they have gained new supporters. Since many of them have been successful in their own careers and have had ready access to the media, the revisionists have been able to make louder noises than ever. For instance, Nobukatsu Fujioka, professor of Education at the University of Tokyo, a new face in the debate, has repeatedly claimed, both in books and newspapers, that more than 200,000 civilians could not possibly have been "massacred unless ghosts were killed." His claim is only based on what his predecessors argued in the 1980s.
Revisionist claims are based not on historical materials, which confirm mass atrocities in Nanjing in 1937-38, but on their own wish to describe how "just" Japan stood up to an "unjust" Western invasion for the sake of Asian people. In other words, "Japan" and "Japaneseness" are the issues behind their claims. In their minds, "the Japanese" should be proud of "Japan" regardless. Japan must have a national history that can be respected by its people. Revisionists regard progressive accounts of imperial Japanese history, especially as they appear in the textbooks, as full of masochism, darkness, and apologies. To revisionists like Fujioka, progressive views deeply discredit Japan and destroy national pride. Fujioka and his allies even claim that progressive views are a Communist version of Japanese history. They cannot believe that their fellow Japanese, the progressives, are focusing on such shameful parts of the Japanese past such as the Nanjing Massacre, military sex slaves, and chemical and biological warfare. To revisionists, progressives are a psychological aberration that they will never understand.
Murdered Chinese women and children are strewn across the steps of a Nanjing building.
Today all Japanese school textbooks mention the Massacre. Of seven junior high school textbooks that have been used since spring 1997, every one mentions the Massacre. In six out of the seven textbooks, the estimate of Chinese who were killed is at least 200,000; four of them also introduce the Chinese official figure of 300,000. Only the textbook by Teikokushoin, whose share is 2% of the total market, does not mention any numbers, although it says that "the Japanese killed very many Chinese including women and children."
Moreover, today revisionists have enemies not only in Japan, but also in China and in the United States. Continuous revisionist challenges actually increased the number of published historical accounts of the Massacre published around the world. Iris Chang and James Yin, for instance, might not have studied the Massacre as much detail as they did, if revisionists had never claimed preposterously that the Massacre was mere fabrication.
Members of Japanese civic groups march in Tokyo. Amid a torrent of criticism from its neighbors over a history book that set off violent anti-Japanese protests in China, Japan insisted that its textbooks reflected its pacifist ideals.
It is unfortunate to say, however, that revisionists will continue to claim that the Massacre was fabricated by the Tokyo trial and the Chinese government and has been facilitated by "unJapanese" Japanese progressives. To these people, war is like a game played by states; killing is regrettable, but justifiable in war. Fujioka and his contemporaries even praise Truman's decision to drop atomic bombs that killed Allied POWs, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese because the bombs prevented Japan from being divided by the United States and the Soviet Union. They are much too preoccupied with "nation-state" oriented thought.
However, the bright side of the long historiographic conflict over the Massacre is that the history and memory of the Massacre have clearly been internationalized, and peoples, whatever ethnic or national origin, have been working together to remember the Massacre in order to prevent from another massacre in world history. Histories used to be, and in a sense still are, "nation-state" oriented. They privilege the role of a certain nation's "subjects," and they at best undervalue, and at worst ignore, the horrible experience of others. People, however, should realize that grief over the death of loved ones is the same regardless of nationality or ethnicity; they should try to create a history that can be shared by not just a nation, but others all around the world.
Source: Takeshi Yoshida