War Again Is Raging Over Japan’s Role in ‘Nanking’

Once again, Japan is at war over history.

This time, the flash point is California author Iris Chang. The Japanese edition of her best-selling “The Rape of Nanking” was scrapped late last month after a long-running dispute between Chang and her Japanese publisher, and the controversy has cast a spotlight on this country’s ambivalence about its wartime past.

In a bizarre twist, Chang has come under attack not only from Japanese ultranationalists--who assert that the 1937 massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops never took place--but also from Japanese liberals, who insist it happened but allege that Chang’s flawed scholarship damages their cause.

Chang accuses the publisher of caving in to right-wing threats. But Hiromu Haga, editor in chief of publishing firm Kashiwa Shobo, said it wasn’t the threats but Chang’s unwillingness to correct what he alleges were significant errors that led to the cancellation of publication. Chang in turn charges that many of the “errors” were not mistakes at all but differences of opinion, and she accuses Haga of trying to censor her book.

Meanwhile, some Japanese and U.S. scholars are concerned that the increasingly bitter flap will leave Westerners with the misimpression that little has been written in Japan about Japanese atrocities in Asia, including those in Nanking, now known as Nanjing.

In fact, the National Diet Library holds at least 42 books about the Nanjing massacre and Japan’s wartime misdeeds, of which 23 have been published since 1992, 21 of them by liberals investigating Japan’s wartime atrocities.

In addition, geriatric Japanese soldiers have begun publishing their memoirs and giving speeches and interviews in increasing numbers, recounting the atrocities they committed or witnessed. And after years of government-enforced denial, Japanese middle school textbooks now carry accounts of the Nanjing massacre as accepted truth.

“Dozens of Japanese scholars are now actively engaged in research on every aspect of the war,” historian Joshua A. Fogel of UC Santa Barbara wrote in a review of Chang’s book. “Indeed, we know many details of the Nanjing massacre, Japanese sexual exploitation of ‘comfort women,’ and biological and chemical warfare used in China because of the trailblazing research” of Japanese scholars.

Revisionist View Still Top Seller

But while the liberal view of history has triumphed in the Japanese academic world, the revisionists are scoring bigger in the mass market, according to historians and publishers here.

For example, a well-respected 1997 study of the Nanjing massacre by historian Tokushi Kasahara recently sold 55,000 copies--a huge hit for a Japanese academic book, but nowhere near the 1.2 million sales for the tomes of revisionist Tokyo University education professor Nobukatsu Fujioka.

To showcase the accomplishments of liberal Japanese scholars, Akira Fujiwara, the dean of Japanese World War II historians, said he plans to publish--through Kashiwa--an edited volume summarizing Japanese research about the Nanjing massacre, in order to make some of the most important historical work here available in English for the first time.

“If people [in the West] assume that all Japanese think like the right-wingers, then we have a big problem,” said Fujiwara, professor emeritus of history at Hitotsubashi University.

But a vocal movement headed by Fujioka is trying to stop what it sees as a “masochistic” and erroneous view of Japanese as war criminals, typified by Chang’s “Rape of Nanking.”

The rightists are crowing over the cancellation of Chang’s book, which they have been vilifying as “anti-Japanese” and a “forgery of history.”

The conservative Sankei newspaper, Japan’s fifth-largest daily, said in an editorial that publication of Chang’s book would “damage the pride of Japanese.”

“It is fortunate that many Japanese will not be misled by its erroneous historical description,” the newspaper concluded.

Fujiwara and other liberals, who have struggled for three decades to document Japan’s World War II atrocities and to pressure their government to apologize and atone, want Chang’s book to appear in Japan.

In interviews, Chang’s erstwhile publisher and several leading historians said they believe that Chang’s indictment of Japan’s wartime atrocities and the country’s postwar attempts to cover up and distort history will help raise public awareness of the incident--and of how Japan’s behavior is perceived abroad.

‘Impossible to Deny’ That It Happened

But at the same time, they fear that errors in the book have given ammunition and succor to the Japanese right wing’s attempts to minimize the carnage at Nanjing and portray the massacre as a “big lie.”

“A campaign to deny the Nanking massacre itself by presenting the weaknesses of Iris Chang’s book is being developed,” Fujiwara warned. “The massacre denial groups have been using these kinds of tactics to maintain there was no massacre by presenting the contradictions in testimony quoted or by the use of inappropriate photos.

“Yet it is impossible to deny the occurrence of the incident itself because of these few mistakes,” Fujiwara said. “It is an illogical jump in reasoning to deny that the Nanking massacre ever happened by attacking her book.”

Chang defends the integrity of her research. In a series of e-mails, the author said that she did correct about 10 errors, including misspelled names and erroneous dates for Japan’s Tokugawa shogunate. But Chang said she rejected attempts by the publisher to annotate about 65 items in the book.

In an e-mail to Chang, Haga said he was putting himself in “a life-threatening situation” by publishing her book but was determined to proceed anyway if Chang would correct the problems.

But Chang asserted that the suggested changes were merely additional details or interpretations or simply assertions by right-wing critics for which no evidence was provided.

“I can assure you that virtually none of these errors had anything to do with the historical description of the Nanking massacre itself,” Chang wrote. “To insist that they could give any ammunition to any Japanese revisionist who denies the massacre is ludicrous.”

Ludicrous or not, the publications and Internet Web pages of the Japanese right are filled with gloating attacks on Chang. “Even after this, can you still say there was a Nanjing massacre?” asserts one such site. The rightists say that very few, if any, Chinese civilians died at Nanjing. Chang accepts the Chinese estimate of 350,000, while other scholars estimate 200,000.

Another Critical Book on the Way

Next month, editor Haga will have a chance to defend his liberal reputation when he brings out a Japanese translation of “Factories of Death: Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932-45, and the American Cover-Up,” by Sheldon H. Harris, professor emeritus of history at Cal State Northridge.

In a telephone interview, Harris said he has had “no heartache at all” over the Japanese edition of his book, which details the notorious Unit 731’s experiments on live Chinese and Korean prisoners. But he said his book is already under attack on a right-wing Web site run by Fujioka’s allies--and he is ready for battle.

Meanwhile, Chang and her U.S. publisher, Basic Books, said they hope to find another publisher for her book in Japan.