The new Japanese Secretary of Defense Tomomi Inadais a supporter of the position that the Nanking Massacre by Japanese Troops did not happen. I was under the impression that this occurring was taken for granted historically.
What is the Nanking Massacre denialist argument? Does it have any merit?
Bullshit, more than 300,000 people died. The Japanese press crowed about it at the time.
Well, a lot of people died. Estimates are all over the place and we’ll almost certainly never know the truth of the full extent as most records were destroyed at the end of the war.
The said I agree that whether it was tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, the fact that some sort of massacre occurred is incontrovertible. There are multiple eyewitnesses from all sides ( from foreign missionaries to Japanese soldiers ) and several Japanese officers were hanged by post-war tribunals for war crimes.
Asian version of Holocaust denial.
Exactly, and why the hell it isn’t viewed in the same light, I can’t understand.
Because the victims weren’t white. I hate to say it, but racism in Europe and the U.S. still regards East Asian (and Chinese most especially) lives as more disposable and less important than European or European-descended lives.
Also because the Nanking Massacre could be viewed as a kind of temporary short-term madness, with far fewer victims, that doesn’t say as much about the country’s leadership as the Holocaust does about Germany’s leadership at the time. This is plausible if you don’t think about it too much. First, it was the Japanese ingrained cultural disdain of other Asian countries that allowed such a thing to happen; this is the same outlook that permitted other Japanese atrocities during WWII. Second, if it really were regarded as a temporary madness, there would be no need for the Japanese of today to deny it. They could put it down to the frenzy and chaos of wartime.
Japan’s sense of itself is based on insecurity of their own worth and value in the wider world. Japanese citizens who care about such things (lots of them don’t) can’t bear the thought that their country could have been responsible for an event of that ferocity and naked evil. They have no way to atone, no way to make it better. So they have to deny it or face unbearable shame.
Not only did it happen, it happened thoroughly publicly at the time. There were dozens of photos, some of which even made it to the States and were published in contemporary newspapers ; and an American missionary even shot a *movie *of what was happening (he only released stills of it back then and refused to sell it to anybody ; but his son gave the original tape to the Nanjing museum a few years back).
The massacre was actually a major shift in public opinion among Americans - it helped shift the public’s stance from dogged isolationism towards support for China/against Japan.
But further than that, even *Imperial Japan *didn’t deny it happened at the time, nor that it was a bad thing that it happened, as the commander in charge of the troops was immediately retired and his immediate superior (a member of the Imperial family) was kicked upstairs and never ever got a single military command or direct responsibility ever again. Whether Hirohito’s clique thought it was a bad thing because it was horrible shit, or because it looked bad to the rest of the world, or simply because it reflected a thorough breakdown in troop discipline which a good commander would have adressed much earlier is neither here nor there - my point is, it’s hard for Japanese nationalists to argue that “nothing ever happened at all ! it’s all fabrications by Western imperialists and Japan bashers !” when their own idolized army sanctioned those it held responsible for it.
Italics mine.
Would that be “sanctioned” as in “approved of”, or “sanctioned” as in “punished”? Serious question.
Sanctioned as in punished. Sorry if I was ambiguous.
General Matsui had taken the city after facing very stiff resistance & frustrating partisan activity (in fact, one of the more immediate underlying causes of the massacre is often thought to have been how tough a nut Nanjing had been to crack and the stress of the campaign). Yet right after his victory, he was forced to retire.
As for Prince Asaka, he’d been in theater three whole days before the massacre happened and was called back to Japan immediately after, never to see a grunt again.
Short of the firing squad, that’s about as reprimand as it gets in the armed forces where high ranking officers are concerned.
I kinda thought that’s what you meant but wasn’t 100% sure.
But it also could have been the “kicked upstairs” sort of quasi-punishment where, like the proverbial briar patch, the folks involved are better off after the event than they were before. Which can often imply that the bigger bosses weren’t unanimous whether this was a good or a bad event overall.
From what I have read the reason for the sackings were a combo of embarrassment at the international outcry, fury at the breakdown of discipline and genuine disgust at the events;which was most important in the decision depended on the individual.
Is anything viewed in the same light as the holocaust?
Pretty much; hierarchy of death.
A Boston Marathon bombing that kills 3 gets more media coverage than a Baghdad suicide bombing that kills 100.
Is the Holocaust and general loss of life in Europe considered as important in China and other East Asian nations as events that happened there though? I do recall the (probably manufactured) controvesy surrounding a Hitler themed celebration that took place a couple of years ago in Thailand, a quick google search brings up this:
Is it really racism or is it more a matter of it having happened somewhere far away to a people Europeans/Americans didn’t have that much connection to, as is the case for the Thailand Nazi celebrations? Or are they also being racist towards Europeans?
On a side-note I remember a guest getting upset because I had ‘The Rape of Nanking’ by Iris Chang on my bookshelf, “Why do you want to read about a rape?!?”
Don’t know about the Holocaust, but with regards to “general loss of life in Europe,” my friends from China were much more concerned about the Paris terrorist attacks than similar attacks in the Middle East or Africa. Of course, some of those Chinese friends were living in the US, though.
Maybe China should cut off all trade with Japan until they fire his silly ass. LOL
psik
When I was in university, in Tokyo, there was another student (a white American) who said that he had read some diaries from Japanese soldiers who were there during the Nanking Massacre.
I make no claim to the accuracy of this information and have no cites. I am merely relaying something which is maybe true that an interested party could try investigating if he has an interest.
So the way he explained it (if my memory is correct) was that officers of the Chinese army had a standing order to shoot retreating soldiers, and were armed well enough to be able to carry this out fairly effectively.
When the Japanese army came, the Chinese soldiers in town realized that they were going to be massacred if they stayed and so they started to murder the regular citizens to steal their clothes and possessions, so that they could flee, under the guise of being a non-soldier.
As said, I don’t know that this is true. And if true, I don’t know how large a component of the massacre it was. The Japanese were certainly rather horrific in general of their treatment of the people they encountered, so it’s plausible that even if the Chinese army did commit a large number of the deaths that if they hadn’t done so, the Japanese would just have done the same damage.
On Okinawa, a few villages committed mass suicide, rather than be taken prisoner by the Americans, because they thought that their treatment as prisoners of war would be the same as the Japanese treated their POWs. As said, they were pretty evil.
But then again, I’ve also heard that half the Japanese military deaths were down to starvation. (I believe they said this in a CrashCourse video, but I haven’t been able to find a confirmation of this anywhere.) If they were dependent on stealing food from every town they took over, it would make sense that they’d kill everyone they encountered, rather than suffering them to starve. Likewise, they wouldn’t care much about POWs, since they’d be second priority to feed.
It’s also worth noting that the Chinese government, after the war, proceeded to cause the deaths of ~40 million of its own people. It’s not like we’re really comparing a good country to a bad country. The people of China were doomed either way. Even if we accept that all deaths and rapes that occurred in Nanking were solely down to the Japanese, the Chinese has far more to apologize for, to the Chinese people, than the Japanese do. And of the two, Japan has come far closer to actually doing so.
Ultimately, there’s no rule that one side has to be the good guy and one side the bad guy. In that time and place, there were definitely only bad guys. I’m pretty willing to believe that Nanking could have been a shared atrocity (though I’d lean towards the Japanese being dominant, despite anything that the Chinese soldiers may have done).
Unfortunately there are other unacknowledged genocides. That of the Armenians, for instance.
I can claim Halley’s Comet didn’t fly past Earth in 1066, since I wasn’t alive at the time. That doesn’t make it true.
Well, they ate some of the POWs.
That’s what happened to Prince Arisaka - but it was the negative aspect of kicked upstairs. They couldn’t really punish him since he was part of the imperial family, but they put him where he couldn’t do any more damage, i.e. he was part of a military committee where, doubtless (though I haven’t really studied his biography), people could nod their heads when he spoke then studiously ignore whatever he said. So he kept rank and honours, but was henceforth barred from leading in any real capacity.
[QUOTE=Sage Rat]
On Okinawa, a few villages committed mass suicide, rather than be taken prisoner by the Americans, because they thought that their treatment as prisoners of war would be the same as the Japanese treated their POWs. As said, they were pretty evil.
[/QUOTE]
That’s not quite what happened.
It is true that there were mass civilian suicides on Okinawa and elsewhere (for example, Suicide Cliff on Saipan where civilians jumped to their deaths rather than be captured), and it’s true that those suicides were motivated by fear of worse treatment on the part of American soldiers. But those fears weren’t really based on their own treatment of POWs, which even if they knew about they wouldn’t have thought particularly bad - they were treated just the same by the Army.
Rather the dynamic seems to have been that, back in 38 when the war started, officers in China spread rumours that the Chinese would horribly torture anybody they would capture. Which was pretty much true. Chinese partisans did emphatically not fuck around, even against their own. And from there there was an arms race of brutality between the two countries. But the Japanese brass noted that their troops fought more fiercely when faced with that fear, so they encouraged it some more after America joined the war, telling soldiers that they were even worse than the Chinese. As well, grizzled and psycho’d veterans of the Chinese war were transfered to the American theater where they kept on doing what they’d been doing, provoking American anger at the -to them- extreme and unprovoked brutality, which in turn led to their doing horrible shit in retaliation (this aspect of the brutalization of the war was also hastened by mutual racism), and so on.
So I do believe that, when soldiers handed civilians grenades that they could suicide bomb G.I.s ; or when soldiers encouraged civilians to jump off cliffs rather than be captured, many if not most were earnest in their belief that they’d be better off this way. I don’t think they reckoned the Americans would be harsh on account of what they themselves did ; or that there’d be an element of tit-for-tat, “you see how we treated them, they’ll do the same to us”. They genuinely believed the Americans were monsters by culture if not nature, because that’s what they’d been told and their own observations didn’t especially clash with the notion - frontline Marines really *were *horrid. I make no value judgement when I say this, because those kids were sent unprepared straight into Hell, and their own brass didn’t help them stray from a path of horridness much. Still, they often were as barbarous as their opponents, due to a number of factors.
But I don’t believe the average Japanese grunt made the complex causality connection between their own behaviours and that of the Marines. Their psychology had been thoroughly fucked with for decades, as had been their news input ; and Japanese culture was (and still is :)) pretty darn weird and at odds with Western ethics. I do believe they didn’t see themselves as particularly bad, and I think they genuinely tried to do right by their people. It’s just that they went at it from the most fucked up angles known to man.