The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the PictureBob Tadashi Wakabayashi December 13, 2007 marks the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Chinese city of Nanking to the Japanese army. The Nanking Atrocity of winter 1937-8, also known as the Nanking Massacre, lies at the core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers the most recent scholarship about what actually happened in Nanking and places those findings in the context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to the event ever since; an event that is coined, on the Chinese side, as the forgotten Holocaust, after the subtitle of Iris' Chang's 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to the contributors of this volume. However, the authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that Nanking was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume presents new facts and fresh interpretations with the overriding aim to complicate the picture and to debunk myths, expose fallacies, and rectify misconceptions that obstruct a clear understanding of the issues and prevent ultimate reconciliation between China and Japan. |
Contents
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi The Messiness of Historical Reality 3 20 | 3 |
An Interpretive Overview | 29 |
Kasahara Tokushi Massacres outside Nanking City 57 1520 | 70 |
Demography | 86 |
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi The Nanking 100Man Killing Contest | 119 |
Amano Saburô Letters from a Reserve Officer Conscripted | 181 |
Timothy Brook Chinese Collaboration in Nanking | 196 |
December 1937 | 227 |
Takashi Yoshida Wartime Accounts of the Nanking Atrocity | 248 |
Joshua A Fogel The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese | 267 |
Critical Appraisal | 285 |
Other editions - View all
The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi No preview available - 2007 |
The Nanking Atrocity, 1937-38: Complicating the Picture Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi No preview available - 2013 |