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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 5
by Jennifer Butt
While they push for a replacement of current textbooks with a version that lacks atonement and an acknowledgement of Japanese war crimes, revisionists are discrediting their Japanese and non-Japanese opponents by attacking both their integrity and work, without any regard, interest, or attention to the accumulating evidence against revisionist beliefs. Prior to the 1997 publication of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II , the academic community lacked any fully comprehensive and detailed account of the Rape. It is not surprising, then, that Chang's book became the target of criticism by Japanese revisionists, especially by Japanese academics, who convened on June 12, 1998 to hold a "special conference organized for the sole purpose of denouncing [Chang] as a fraud," claiming her book was "'the most outrageous, world-class lie'" (Chang, "History" 19). The six academics who held this conference were affiliated with different major Japanese universities, and their statements and beliefs are representative of the common and often recycled yet unsubstantiated revisionist remarks. Professor Kazunobu Oyama from Kanagawa University wrote that "Iris Chang has got something up her sleeve," and "using a tactic reminiscent of Holocaust deniers, Tokyo University education professor and right-wing activist Nobukatsu Fujioka presented a series of massacre photos-with new, historically unsupportable captions" (Chang, "History" 19). Referring to Japanese soldiers' common practice of bayoneting infants, Dokkyo University's Akira Nakamura "offered his theory that bayoneting infants is 'one of China's traditional methods of killing children,' and could never have been the work of Japanese soldiers." Such an outright and blatant denial of a war crime that has been well documented in a wealth of sources including, but not limited to, American missionary diaries, U.S. Naval Intelligence reports, Japanese military diaries, letters and reports produced by the German Embassy, declassified American intercepts of Japanese communications, war-crimes transcripts, 1,700 testimonials from Chinese survivors, and news reports, including front-page coverage of the massacre in The New York Times (Chang, "History" 19). Criticism of Chang, however, has not been restricted to Japanese people residing in Japan, as "even in the United States, Japanese reaction has been defensive [with] Ambassador Kunihiko Saito publicly criticiz[ing] [Chang's] book as 'one-sided,' 'erroneous,' and filled with historical inaccuracies, [yet] when grilled by journalists and human-rights groups, he failed to produce a single concrete example to support his charges" (Chang, "History" 19). Japanese publishers have also opposed Chang's book; one cancelled plans for a translation of Chang's text in 1999 after Chang refused the publisher's demands to "make changes in the book that [the publisher] found unacceptable" and "proposed releasing the volume simultaneously with a Japanese study criticizing her work" (Chang, "History" 19).
The general hostility and scramble to discredit opponents or perceived threats to the revisionist mission is not reserved solely for foreigners, but is also implemented to curb any Japanese person who might be perceived as critical of the government, as in the case of Japanese historian Ienaga Saburo. In 1965, Ienaga sued the Japanese government, whose Ministry of Education deleted excerpts that were deemed as critical of the government and demanded that he rewrite passages concerning the Rape of Nanking in his textbook. After changing such passages, the examiner from the Ministry "demanded that Ienaga delete his description of the Rape itself, claiming that 'the violation of women is something that has happened in every era of human history [and] this is not an issue that needs to be taken up with respect to the Japanese Army in particular'" (Chang, Rape 206-7). Although Ienaga won his lawsuit after the Tokyo district court ruled in his favor, he, along with the judge and defense attorneys, received numerous death threats. It is also interesting to note that, with the exception of an award that he received in 1948, before his lawsuit, Ienaga "has been constantly ignored by the official committees that dole out national prizes in history" (Chang, Rape 207), which sends a clear discouragement from the government to academics, or to anyone for that matter, who wish to educate the public about historical events that may be unpopular with the government.