Japanese Crimes in Nanjing, 1937-38 : A Reappraisal

For Chinese of all origins and opinions, the wartime events of Nanjing have become a tragedy of proportions equivalent to Hiroshima, if not Auschwitz. At the same time, there are still many Japanese who try hard, if not to completely deny their army's crimes, at least to minimise them and to find excuses for them. And yet, for whoever bears the pain of going back over the (copious) evidence, the process, responsibilities and dimensions (including the fiercely debated number of victims) are not too difficult to draw, with a reasonable degree of precision. No other single massacre in Asian history has had so many testifying witnesses. But the very centrality of Nanjing in the assessment of the whole 1937-45 war between Japan and China has unfortunately led to much ideologically motivated obscuring, on both sides.Re-establishing the facts is a historian's first duty. Thus there was no indiscriminate massacre in Nanjing, but the victimisation of different groups of Chinese in very different ways, with widely differing results in terms of death rates. The killings were neither the result of a genocidal policy, nor mere unpremeditated excesses. The role of Japan’s 1937 war strategy is here incriminated, as is the country’s drift towards fascism. The emergence of new historical approaches, such as analyses in terms of “war culture”, “brutalisation” or “violence of war”, will be also considered : in that they could influence breakthroughs to a deeper understanding of a terrible tragedy