Nanjing Massacre

The Nanjing Massacre (Chinese: 南京大屠殺, pinyin: Nánjīng Dà Túshā; Japanese: 南京事件, Nankin Jiken), also known as the Rape of Nanking, refers to the widespread atrocities conducted against Chinese civilians in and around Nanjing after its fall to Japanese troops on December 13, 1937 in the Battle of Nanjing during the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945).

The People's Republic of China now estimates that 300,000 people were killed during the following three months (December 1937 - February 1938), though the number is still in dispute. The number cited in the popular book The Rape of Nanking was 260,000. According to some sources, there were only 200,000 people (including 50,000 soldiers) in Nanjing when it fell. The fact that Nanjing was awash with refugees at the time, and that many of the killings occurred outside of the city, complicate these estimates. Some reports stated that many thousands of the city's women were raped by Japanese soldiers, often repeatedly, before being killed.

Dramatic reports by American journalists of Japanese brutality against Chinese civilians helped turn American public opinion against Japan and, in part, led to a series of events which culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Table of contents

1 Historiography 2 External links 3 Further Reading

Historiography

Since the Second World War, some Japanese historians and politicians with nationalist or traditionalist perspectives have either denied the existence of atrocities (as, for example, Fujio Masayuki, a Minister of Education), or (more recently) sought to minimize them. The way in which the subject is taught in Japanese schools became the center of controversy in the Japanese textbook controversies of 1982 and 1986. Despite this persistent revisionism, the events following the fall of Nanking are well documented by journalists and other eyewitnesses and are not disputed by most historians, including the majority of Japanese historians.

The atrocity continues to receive attention from researchers in Japan. Those downplaying the massacre have most recently rallied around a group of historians associated with the Society for the Creation of New Textbooks. Their views also are often shared in publications associated with conservative publishers such as Bungei Shunjû and Sankei Shuppan. In response, two Japanese organizations have taken the lead in publishing material detailing the massacre and collecting related documents and accounts. The Study Group on the Nanjing Incident, founded by a group of historians in 1984 has published the most books responding directly to revisionist historians and the Center for Research and Documentation on Japan's War Responsibility, founded in 1993 has published many materials in their own journal.

See also: genocide, History of the Republic of China

External links

• An English translation of a classified Chinese document on the Nanjing Massacre
• Research Institute of Propaganda Photos (in Japanese only)
• Online documentary: The Nanking Atrocities
• Association for the Advancement of Liberalist View of History - Organization associated with the "Society for the Creation of New Textbooks" which actively publishes material denying or the existence of a massacre. Their site directly attacks the popular book by the journalist Iris Chang, pointing out its errors and making accusations of the fabrication of evidence.
• Denying the Massacre occurred

Further Reading

• Askew, David "The International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone: An Introduction" Sino-Japanese Studies Vol. 14, April 2002 (Article outlining membership and their reports of the events that transpired during the massacre)
• ______ "The Nanjing Incident: An Examination of the Civilian Population" Sino-Japanese Studies Vol. 13, March 2001 (Article analysis a wide variety of figures on the population of Nanjing before, during, and after the massacre)
• Brook, Timothy, ed. "Documents on the Rape of Nanjing" Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999. ISBN 0472111345 (Does not include the Rabe diaries)
• Chang, Iris, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II Foreword by William C. Kirby; Penguin USA (Paper), 1998. ISBN 0140277447
• Fogel, Joshua, ed. "The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography" Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ISBN 0520220072
• Honda, Katsuichi, Sandness, Karen trans. "The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame" London: M.E. Sharpe, 1999. ISBN 0765603357
• Tanaka, Masaaki, What Really Happened in Nanking ISBN 4916079078
• Yoshida, Takeshi "A Japanese Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre", ''Columbia East Asian Review, Fall 1999. (A much longer and more detailed version of this article is in above in the work edited by Joshua Fogel)