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Dialogues@RU is published
annually
by the
Writing Program at
Rutgers, The State
University of New Jersey
Volume Two
Spring 2003
Rape of Nanking -
Page 2
by Jennifer Butt
To give some historical context, the Rape of Nanking refers to the seven weeks following the Japanese seizure of Nanking, the former capital of China, on December 13, 1937. During this time an estimated 200,000 to 350,000 noncombatants were slaughtered and between 20,000 and 80,000 girls and women as young as ten and as old as eighty were raped. Putting these numbers into perspective, the death toll of the Rape exceeds the number of people killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Such horrific acts took place despite the presence of foreigners in the city, some of whose pleadings with the Japanese embassy to end the massacre landed on deaf ears. These foreigners, including John Rabe, a member of the Nazi Party who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives by repeatedly risking his own life, and who was dubbed by author Iris Chang as the "Oskar Schindler of China," proved to be invaluable, not only for attempting to save as many lives as possible but for their accounts, experiences, and observations which have cemented the events of the Rape into history through their letters, diaries, pictures, and oral affirmations of the Rape. Despite these original documents and photos, confessions by former Japanese soldiers, the stories of Nanking survivors, and the indictment of certain members of the Japanese army at the 1946 International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), Japan as a country has failed to acknowledge its war crimes and properly educate younger generations of Japanese about the Rape and World War II. While Germany has already "incorporated into their postwar political identity the concession that the wartime government itself, not just individual Nazis, was guilty of war crimes, the Japanese government . . . has never forced itself or Japanese society to do the same" (Seabury and Codevilla 232-33). Japan's failure to admit and address its wartime crimes sets a dangerous precedent because it allows such atrocities to be repeated without consequences, ultimately creating a world void of ethics, integrity, or order. History textbooks used in Japanese middle and high schools mention, at the most, one or two sentences about the Rape, but use, according to Christopher Barnard, a "consistent pattern of language that has the effect of isolating knowledge of the Rape of Nanking from Japan and Japanese people" (519). Even these minimal references withstand pressure from Japanese revisionists, who seek the rewriting of all Japanese textbooks and the removal of such references because they believe the Rape to be a fabrication. Revisionists have come to include novelists, professors from top Japanese universities, cartoonists, and political leaders, which suggests that the danger of revisionist ideas reaching all aspects and members of Japanese society is very much real and present. Many revisionists, having initially denied that the Rape ever occurred, felt a need to modify their position due to the mounting international interest in the Rape and an increasing number of confessions from war veterans during the 1980s. By the late 1980s, revisionists had admitted, for the first time, that killing had occurred at Nanking; but they continue to argue that "the Nanjing Massacre was a historical fabrication, claiming that relatively few people were killed" and that "[such an] incident was no more horrifying than many other atrocities committed by various nations in the twentieth century" (Fogel 94). It is both the unwillingness of the Japanese to face and accept the unethical nature of and extent of their role in a historically documented massacre, and the pressing need to maintain a version of national history that preserves the ideal image of wartime Japan which younger Japanese generations can be proud of, that have prompted ignorance among Japanese youth regarding the Rape. As stated above, references to the Rape in middle and high school texts are rather minuscule and abstract. School textbooks, furthermore, are subject to censorship by the Japanese Ministry of Education, which has requested many authors who address certain sensitive topics in Japanese history, such as the Rape of Nanking and the comfort women stations of World War II, to modify any overdescriptive passages regarding the Rape or passages that might be interpreted as denunciations of the Japanese government for their war crimes. Such actions suggest that the reluctance even to refer to the Rape is perhaps not an epidemic limited to the revisionists, but rather pervades much of Japanese society.