The Rape of Nanjing: Is an Unbiased Representation Possible? by Heather M. Downing Thesis submitted to the Honors Program, Saint Peter's College May 17, 2011 Heather M. Downing Downing 1 Abstract In the years leading up to and including World War II, the Japanese invaded China, committing war crimes and atrocities that some say rivaled those committed by the German National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Europe. However, due to a number of factors following the end of World War II, many conflicting points of view about Nanjing have arisen, including views from Japanese ultranationalists, Chinese victims and their descendants, and from other outside parties, including Americans and Europeans. In the present day, the evidence and the different testimonies of what may have happened in Nanjing have become so convoluted that it would be impossible to come up with a purely factual, unbiased historical account of the events in Nanjing during the Japanese invasion on December 13, 1937 and the weeks leading up to and following that invasion. By looking at some of the most popular sources and references pertaining to the Nanjing Massacre, one can assess just how disputed the topic has become and how truly impossible it is for historians to arrive at a single, agreed upon history of the event. Downing 2 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 3 Foreword 4 Chapter 1 Historical Factors Which Contributed to the Formation of Conflicting Accounts 6 Chapter 2 An Analysis of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II 12 Chapter 3 An Analysis of Rhawn Joseph’s Documentary on the Rape of Nanjing 20 Chapter 4 An Analysis of Masahiro Yamamoto’s Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity 26 Conclusion 32 Works Consulted 35 Downing 3 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my advisor, Father Mark DeStephano, S.J., for all of his guidance, support, and seemingly endless patience during the writing of this thesis. I certainly couldn’t have done it without him and his keen observations. I would also like to thank my mother for encouraging me, as always, to press forward and finish what I’ve started, even when it seems like more trouble than it’s worth. I also offer a special thanks to Michael Doody for his kind helpfulness in the final stages of my thesis. Last but not least of all, I’d like to thank all of the friends who listened when I just needed to talk out all of my ideas or to organize my thoughts. Even more thanks to those friends who had more faith in me than I had in myself. Downing 4 Foreword When I first began my research on the Rape of Nanjing, I had no idea where it would eventually lead me. My initial plan was to explore the way that different media have covered the topic over the years. I wanted to observe the differences between Chinese and Japanese media, as well as the outsider perspective found in American and European media. I hoped to prove that the conflicting media representations in each culture had had an impact on the relationship between Japan and China, including the way the two nations perceive each other, the way they interact on a political level, and how the peoples perceive each other on a more one-on-one level. As I continued my research and began the writing process, it became apparent to me that proving this thesis would be difficult—or impossible. After all, how does one prove cause and effect? Is it possible to demonstrate that these media discrepancies had an actual, provable effect on the relationship between the two nations? While the relationship and the apparent causes may be visible to the naked eye, proving that correlation is far more difficult than simply observing it and hypothesizing about it. What I discovered instead of proof was a convoluted history and historiography of the alleged “Nanjing Massacre” or “Rape of Nanjing,” as it has come to be known. I found discrepancies in numbers, which placed the death toll in Nanjing somewhere between 5,000 and 300,000. I found accounts of the “massacre” that painted the Japanese soldiers involved as pure evil, nothing but devils sent to destroy the Chinese race in a systematic genocide. At the same time, I found other accounts claiming that the entire “massacre” had been blown wildly out of proportion; some even claimed that it had been fabricated entirely, a mere story told by the Chinese to garner sympathy from the Western world. With all of this conflicting information, I began to wonder how anyone could possibly hope to prove anything at all about the Rape of Downing 5 Nanjing. After spending countless hours of writing, trying to stick to my original thesis, I was told by my advisor that I had not actually proven anything. All I had done was neatly compiled all of my research into a regurgitation of the historiography of the Nanjing Massacre. I needed a new thesis—I needed to figure out what all of my research actually amounted to, what it all actually meant. Finally, Father DeStephano recommended that I look into the works of Hayden White, a historian who explores history as a narrative. White’s theory is that all of history is in fact a narrative—a story told from the specific point of view of the writer. In this way, it is impossible to achieve purely objective history. Even if the writer has all of the necessary facts and statistics, all of the evidence, and all of the photographs and films, the narrative that writer creates will still be the result of his or her own personal opinions and beliefs. That was exactly what my research was telling me all along—there is no objective history of the Nanjing Massacre. Downing 6 Chapter 1 Historical Factors Which Contributed to the Formation of Conflicting Accounts Many scholarly texts on the Rape of Nanjing highlight the fact that there is no standard, unanimously agreed upon history of this event. To explain this, scholars point to the historiography—the body of works that comprise the history and the way the history was composed over time—of the Nanjing Massacre. So many conflicting points of view have been promoted and published that it has become difficult to determine what is hard fact, what has been exaggerated, and what is simply false. No account regarding the massacre can be complete without a careful consideration of the many different people and publications that have influenced the way people around the world view this part of history. The origins of this convoluted history of Nanjing are closely tied to the postwar period. During the war, Japanese newspapers and media outlets carefully chose to publish only material that cast the Japanese as righteous victors. Anything that could be considered critical of the Japanese military or of the war itself would have been censored as unpatriotic, including accounts of Nanjing war crimes. One witness of the massacre, an American physician named Robert Wilson, wrote this on December 21, 1937: We heard yesterday that the Japanese news agency Domei reported the population [of Nanjing] returning to their homes, business going on as usual and the population welcoming their Japanese visitors, or words to that effect. If that is all the news that is going out of the city, it is due for a big shake up when the real news breaks. (Gamble 261) Under Allied occupation, atrocities such as the Nanjing Massacre and the infamous Bataan Death March were openly publicized and criticized in Japanese newspapers for the first time (Yoshida 48). Especially after the start of the tribunal in Tokyo, public awareness of such events and of Japanese war crimes rose greatly (Yoshida 45). Downing 7 The Allies prohibited any publications that promoted militarism, arms and defense, extreme patriotism, or criticism of the Allied occupation. Both before and during the war, Japanese schools had been heavily steeped in building a strong sense of patriotism in their students, but the occupying forces changed that and required amendments to textbooks. Under the rule of the Allied forces, “the same teachers who once demanded that their students become loyal patriots [of Japan] now made their students either black out sentences or tear out pages based on the ministry's new guidelines” (Yoshida 47). Thus, under Allied supervision, World War II was added to history textbooks, including a brief mention of the Nanjing Massacre (Yoshida 47). One of the most important aspects of media representations of the war during the occupation was the shift of blame, both in Japan and the United States, from Japan itself to the Japanese military. As the American occupiers quickly tried to form a friendly relationship with the Japanese, it was important that the Japanese not feel resentful or that they were being blamed; it was equally important for the United States to ease the animosity of the average American toward the Japanese. After years of being fed propaganda that demonized the other side, both countries needed to learn to see each other not as enemies, but as people (Yoshida 71). The mass media would be responsible for this. According to the Allies, Emperor Hirohito and the ordinary citizens of Japan were not responsible for the war, but were victims of the Japanese military. Military leaders, particularly Hideki Tōjō, “were solely responsible for the abuses of power, the deprivations of the people's freedom, the inhumane treatments of civilians and prisoners of war, and other violence that had occurred during the war” (Yoshida 48).