The Nanjing Massacre (南京大屠殺)(一)

Scholarly historical writings on the Nanjing Massacre are many, and some are involved in a debate that has come to light since the last decade. The subject was written from different, if not opposite perspectives: the perspective of the Chinese, the Japanese, the victims, or the perpetrators. Some focus on the calculation of the death toll of the Massacre, some on the implication of the Massacre. In 1990 there were several books in Japan that alleged the Nanking Massacre was factitious, for example the book The Japan That Can Say No. In response, a Chinese scholar Xu Zhigeng wrote the book Lest We Forget: Nanjing Massacre, 1937. One of the many official titles of Xu was the deputy director of the Department of Creative Writing of the Nanjing Military Zone of the People's Liberation Army. Xu refuted the statement made by Shigeto Nagao, the Japanese Minister of Justice who in 1994 claimed that the Massacre was a fabrication. Xu put the number of death in the Massacre at over 300,000 as mentioned in the verdict handed down in 1947 by the China's Military Tribunal of the Ministry of National Defense for the Trial of War Criminals. In 1996, another Chinese scholar James Yin published The Rape of Nanking: an Undeniable History in Photographs. In this photo book Yin says that the denial of the Nanjing Massacre first came to light in the early 1980s when Japan's Education Ministry tried to whitewash aggression and atrocity committed in China by altering history textbooks. Yin pointed out that one person who denied the Rape of Nanking was Masaaki Tanaka, a lecturer at Takushoku University. The latter wrote the book Fiction of the Nanking Massacre to claim that the death toll could not exceed 200,000 because the population in Nanking at that time was less than 200,000. James Yin, quoting statistics, points out that the popuation was in the region of 500,000 to 600,000. (to be continued)