I’ve just read some of the infamous Nankin Massacre and the incredible inhuman treatment that the japanese army gave Nankings citicents in 1937-38
The japenese government seams to deny that it happend and school children in Japan dosn’t even learn about it.
Will Nanking be a ghost to haunt Japan in the future?
At an official level there is still a lot of animosity to Japan in China. Simple but there you have it. That is where the flashpoint of the future looks like developing. My impression of current East Asia is that the China / Japan rivalry is palpable.
Although, there is a lot of Japanese investment inside the PRC. That seems to matter a lot these days.
Most outside the region, though, are unaware of these events. The US, for example, is likely to lean towards the side of “much ado about nothing.”
her are some of the japanese atrocities:
From New York Times
Well, every country is going to teach a less than objective version of history to its children. Korean students learn in gruesome detail what Japanese forces did to our people during their occupation in the first half of the 20th century, but what happened in Europe becomes an, “Oh yeah, and the Nazis did some bad stuff, too.” And we certainly don’t learn anything about the atrocities commited by Korean soldiers during the Vietnam War.
I think the NY Times ran on its front page something about Japan denying the truth about comfort women during WWII; I remember being surprised that it made the front page, because the US does seem to try and refrain from directly criticizing Japan about its selective memory loss concerning those years.
I should note, just for completeness’ sake, that Chang’s book has been harshly criticized at times by various historians ( which she was not ) as having a number of factual errors and as being more sensationalistic than scholarly.
Which absolutely shouldn’t be taken as a denial of the basic fact that a horrific massacre did occur. She just may not be the best primary reference for it.
I think it also helps that practically everybody who could remember the event is dead.
I remember a couple of sensationalist movies purporting to cover the Rape of Nanking in the early 1950s; one of the seedier Dallas movie houses presented them and I and a few of my buddies saw them. IIRC, the movies did include some actual footage of captured Japanese film but I might be mistaken about that; there were some still photographs, though. Pretty horrible, as I recall. I remember adults refusing to discuss the matter because I was “too young.” I think it was pretty common knowledge during and immediately after the war years. But, according to the propaganda of the times, barbaric behavior was expected of the Japanese so people were shocked but not terribly surprised.
How much do American children learn about how American troops used to massacre women and children in the plains wars against the Indians, or slaughtered Filipinos en masse during the rebellion there?
I suspect most countries teach their kids a very glossy, optimistic versiono their own history.
Both of these topics were well covered when I attended American public schools 30 years ago.
Re: Iris Chang, you might be interested to know that a friend of hers has published a book about Chang’s suicide.
I guess you were lucky. I took an Asian American history class at UChicago and not a single student there remembered learning about the US colonization of the Phillippines in middle/high school. I’m not doubting your story, just speculating that your experience might not be the average one. (Or maybe they used to teach it and they don’t anymore?)
The Wounded Knee massacre and the Trail of Tears forced march are covered pretty well as examples of the atrocities Americans committed against Native Americans, but I don’t remember being taught about American atrocities in the Phillippines. Nobody is “denying” they happened, or trying to downplay it or anything. They just don’t care enough to teach it, I think, which could be better or worse than an embarassing denial like the Japanese are doing now.
To put up a bit of defense for Japan, the entire Japanese government isn’t in denial about it, although the segment that is unfortunately is very influential. Former PM Abe was one. Tokyo governor Ishihara is another.
At least when one of them does decide to shoot his mouth off, or the Education Ministry decides to promote a censored history book for public schools, it raises a pretty sizable protest from the general population among those who think Japan should be honest about the past. And that voice of protest has been getting louder and taking hold within the press. When Abe publicly stated that he didn’t think there was any evidence of WWII sex slavery, he got hit with major criticism for it from Japanese citizens as well as from overseas. And while it wasn’t the whole reason his government collapsed so quickly, it ended the honeymoon in a hurry.
The more likely explanation is that I have an inconveniently retentive memory and remember things that other people were taught and forgot. I distinctly remember watching a movie in high school history class and being squicked out by the vivid description of “water torture” employed against the Filipino guerrillas. When I first heard of “waterboarding” in connection with Iraq, I thought we were resurrecting 100-year-old torture techniques, although I later learned waterboarding was different.
Now obviously, we didn’t spend a lot of time on this. We just happened to see a movie that I remembered. The colonization of the Philippines, objectively, is far more peripheral to American history than the aggression of the WWII era is to Japanese history. But the important point is,
Well, I think in some ways it’s a more effective way of covering up a shameful past (not mentioning it at all, that is). Koreans do the same with the atrocities they commited in Vietnam - our involvement in the war is not mentioned in most of our history textbooks. I think if Japan stopped publishing outright lies in textbooks about the whole thing they’d stop calling so much attention to the issue.
I suppose this is somewhat irrelevant to the discussion, but you’d think that out of a class of 20 grad students at a decent university at least one or two would have some kind of vague recollection of hearing SOMETHING about such an incident in a high school history class. (I know, anecdote is not data, etc.)
The US may never have outright denied what they did (which is again more than what anyone can say about Japan) but they have denied benefits to Fillippino soldiers who fought in WWII under the American flag (as citizens of an American colony). I don’t know if the government ever formally apologized or not.
But every country has its skeletons. I suppose the problem with Japan is that it keeps trying to convince everyone that they only have a couple bone fragments when they’re actually up to their necks in human remains.
If you’re looking for a decent critical reaction to Chang’s book, I would recommend Nanking: Setting the Record Straight an article that Hata Ikuhiko published in Japan Echo, Vol. 25, Number 4 (August 1998). The paper is focused on the textbook controversy, and Ikuhiko himself is pretty well known for using faulty methods and poor statistics to spice up his research, but he does a pretty good job of highlighting Chang’s more eccentric claims.
I haven’t read Chang’s book, but some of her arguments are apparently really, really out there. Ikuhiko actually found a few cases where she actually doctored old photos to give herself more evidence.
(On a less factual note, I know a historian who attended one of her talks when she was going around promoting her book, and he told me that she was kind of eccentric; apparently she gave her entire speech flanked by- no joke- two armed bodyguards who she claimed were there to protect her from assassins who didn’t want her book to be published.)
The majority of Chinese people I’ve talked to here in Yunnan about the issue still have an unfavorable or worse opinion about the Japanese. The Chinese government is quite eager to keep fanning these flames, as an external target is much better than internal one. Of course one of the key talking points is the refusal to fully recognize the atrocities of the Rape of Nanjing. There are also a (growing) chunk of people who are into Japan because of anime, video games, hi-tech stuff in general, or just admiration for their economic prosperity, but they’re still in the minority. The animosity is no longer “hot”, however, just an abstract thought in people’s minds. I’ve known a few people here, upon meeting a Japanese person for the time, get quite a shock that they’re basically like normal people.
Random anecdote. I was teaching the names of some countries to a low-level English class of Chinese teenagers. We went through India, Russia, China, Korea… When I got to Japan, one of the students stood up and shouted proudly, “I HATE JAPAN!” About half the students clapped.