The Rape of Nanking

The author goes into greater detail regarding the extent to which the emergence of the Cold War sparked a dramatic reversal of justice for the survivors of the Nanking massacre. The United States’s and even China’s courtship of Japan as an ally in the earliest years of the Cold War reflects the shocking ways that geopolitical pressures that had little to do with the ground-level experiences of average Nanking residents had an enormous impact on their lives. The author writes, “The United States suddenly viewed Japan as a country of strategic importance. Washington decided to maintain a stable government in Japan in order to better challenge communism in Asia” (182).

The consequences of this realignment extend beyond abstract notions of justice and awareness. Suddenly, the leadership and people of Japan possessed significant incentives to ignore and obscure their role in the Nanking massacre and other wartime atrocities. As a result, a miniscule amount of financial reparations were made to Chinese war crime victims, none of which found itself in the hands of Nanking survivors. In pointing out the crushing poverty in which many Nanking survivors live, the author writes, “Even $100 in reparations from the Japanese to buy an air conditioner could have made a world of difference for many of them” (183).

Yet this isn’t to dismiss the more abstract psychological ramifications of the historical erasure that took place almost immediately after Mao and his Communist Party rose to power in China. Without demanding reparations, the Chinese government publicly pledged its forgiveness of the Japanese. For the Nanking victims, the author writes, “Hearing such news was like being raped a second time” (183). This theme of how erasure compounds the trauma of war crime victims hangs over much of the book, as when the author quotes Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, who writes, “To forget a holocaust is to kill twice” (16). And while the bulk of the victims’ anger was understandably directed at the Japanese, Nanking survivors felt a unique form of pain caused by their own country’s betrayal—first when Chiang abandoned the city, and later with Mao’s friendly overtures toward Japan.

It is instructive to examine the sharp divide between Germany’s reckoning with wartime atrocities and Japan’s lack thereof through the context of incentives. Japan’s failure to pay reparations or acknowledge the pain and suffering its countrymen caused has little to do with the character of the Japanese people relative to Germans. Rather, while the United States was eager to appease the Japanese to support a bulwark against communism in Asia, postwar Germany was of little strategic value in the West. As a result, Western powers were free to impose massive cultural, economic, and military upheavals in Germany, which had the effect of eradicating Nazis and Nazi influences from German society. Moreover, much needed international aid money allocated through the 1947 Marshall Plan was contingent on Germany’s compliance with American demands. As such, Germans were constantly reminded of their crushing defeat in World War II and their atrocities and aggression that facilitated the conflict in the first place.

These erasures and denials have long-term effects on society that extend beyond the specific victims and perpetrators of war crimes. It is only over the past 10 years that Nazi influences have reemerged in Germany, and that may be mostly attributable to a rise in fascist movements across Europe. By contrast, the author points out that throughout the 20th century, historians and politicians who made an honest reckoning of the Nanking massacre were subject to death threats from Japanese ultranationalists. After the publication of her book, the author herself received enormous amounts of hate mail from right-wing extremists in Japan, much of which contained death threats. Tragically, in 2004, the author suffered a nervous breakdown and months later took her own life. While her surviving husband credits a number of factors with contributing to her suicide, he admits that the psychological strain associated with Japanese death threats was one of them.

In closing, the author revisits some of the major questions of her book. Perhaps of most concern is the issue of how the Japanese soldiers could be reduced to such barbarity. Her “transfer of oppression” (217) theory is perhaps most compelling, given the brutal treatment of soldiers by their superiors. This also relates to the author’s broader theme surrounding the relationship between power and genocide. She writes, “It has often been suggested that those with the least power are often the most sadistic if given the power of life and death over people even lower on the pecking order” (217). For this reason, the internalized rage Japanese soldiers felt was the result of direct mistreatment by superiors and of their low position within the rigid power structure and hierarchy of Japanese society. Suddenly faced with a people even lower than themselves, that rage spilled out. Therefore, in the author’s telling, “it is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred, and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking” (217).

In the end, the author is cautiously hopeful that the next generation of Japanese youths will make a more complete and accurate accounting of their country’s war crimes during World War II. In support of this optimism, the author cites a small but vocal and growing movement within Japan to hold officials accountable for spreading denialist propaganda surrounding the Nanking massacre and other wartime atrocities. At the same time, more recent efforts to force Japan to address its past have taken on a troubling cast. For example, in 2005 millions participated in anti-Japanese demonstrations in China and across Asia in response to the recertification of a Japanese state textbook that minimized Japan’s role as an aggressor and war crime participant during World War II. The textbook included only three short sentences about the Nanking massacre, which read:

Many Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed or wounded by Japanese troops (the Nanking Incident). Documentary evidence has raised doubts about the actual number of victims claimed by the incident. The debate continues even today. (New History Textbook. Tokyo: Fusosha. 2005.)

During the protests, demonstrators attacked and caused property damage to Japanese embassies, consulates, and restaurants, injuring several Japanese nationals in the process. From this incident and others, it is clear that Sino-Japanese relations are still very strained more than 80 years after the Nanking massacre.