Nanking, Forgotten Holocaust?

I have a friend who is studying Japanese at university and I remember arguing with him about the protests in the PRC last year about Japan's failure to face up to the attrocities it commited in China during WW2. He also seems to be in denial about what Japan did in WW2!

Anyways I was over visiting him the other week and I decided to buy him the book 'The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II' by Iris Chang to show him how bad the Japanese occupation was.

However when he showed the book to his Japanese friends they claimed that it was a load of nonsense and that the gruesome photographs of japanese soldiers Perpatrating the masacre were fake, they claimed that the Japanese soldiers in the photos were in actual fact chinese!

I am of the belief that the Japanese forces did commit an attrocity in Nanking however I'm not sure how bad it actually was (how many actually died??) so I thought I try and get a Chinese perspective on the incident so please enlighten me!:coffee:

Yeah for all those people who don't believe the Rape of Nanking they might as well not know what Auschwitz is and what Hitler did!

Yeah well i was thinking that as well I mean recently the British historian David Irving was jailed for 3 years for denying the holocaust of the jews! so why isn't the same punishment applied to people that deny Japanese war crimes! (I suppose you can't lock up a whole country!).

But how many people were actually killed in Nanking i've heard estimates ranging from 750 to 300,000.

Well for one thing the reason the British historian could be jailed was because there was a law against "Holocaust Denial" in his country.

However, there is no such law regarding the Nanking Massacre in Japan.

Yeah, I also knew few Japanese that deny Nanking masacure, it has become typical behavior of many Japanese. Actually I never thought badly about Japanese until I talked to these Japanese. For me most Japanese seems to be rather polite, but now I only feel dislike about these revisionalists.

In recent years, public opinion seems to be creeping toward the right for the Japanese. While most Japanese still seem to see WWII a mistake. There is also growing movemet to find reasons to be proud of the war. A slew of movies, novels and comics have appeared extolling the bravery of Japanese soilders. Some junior high schools now use textbooks that brush over Japanese atrocities, but credit the war with ending Western colonial domination in Asia.

One reason of Japan's problems in dealing with the war has been a failure to reach a national consensus on the extent of the country responsibility. Japanese is viewed the Allied run Tokyo war crimes trials with skeptically as a case of victors' vengenance. Japanese leaders have also failed to take the role in creating a national sense of remorse as German leaders did to help guide their country's public opinion.

Many Japanese are against the comparisons of their country with Germany. They say Japan did nothing as criminal as the Holocaust. These lead to denial of Japan's atrocities like the Rape of Nanking.

Nowadays, even textbooks written by left educators tended to skip over WWII in a few pages. The silence helped feed a widespread perception that the war was beyond Japan's control. As a result many Japanese see themselves not as the war's perpetrators, but as vicitms.

Japanese visited the atomic bombing museums in Hiroshima and Nagaski get a gruesomely detailed of the horrors of nuclear war, but hear nothing about the Japanese involvement of the atrocities.

These are the reasons why your friend's friends claimed the book is load of nonsense and the gruesome pictures of Japanese are actual chinese. If you ever visit Japanese book stores, there are load of books which are trying to Whitewash the history, and justifield the Japanese involvement as liberator of Asia. They claims Rape of Nanking was never existed, and chinese were responsible for Sino-Japanese conflict.

Soyuz said:

Yeah well i was thinking that as well I mean recently the British historian David Irving was jailed for 3 years for denying the holocaust of the jews! so why isn't the same punishment applied to people that deny Japanese war crimes! (I suppose you can't lock up a whole country!).

But how many people were actually killed in Nanking i've heard estimates ranging from 750 to 300,000.

Click to expand...

Because there was no law in Japan, that stated you will get jail for denial of Rape of Nanking. The western countries never put much efforts to punish the Japanese who are responsible for massacre, whether they were much more concern in the holocaust that they went out of their way to get justice for the Jews. You could say this is a double standard. After WWII US was extremely concern about the USSR, so they left the imperial family of Japan in place. The tokyo trial of war criminals only punish very few of Japanese, and let many war criminals go free. After China become Red state, US released many war criminals from prison so US could have better control of Japan. These war criminals become active members of right wing groups, and many of their descedents became political leaders. As a consequence the main political party in Japan began to lean toward the right.


OK, since you only ask about Nanking masacure, I will be only details about it.

The Nanking Massacre is considered the most infamous event in Japanese invasion of China. In August of 1937, the Japanese army faced strong resistance and suffered heavy casualties in Battle of Shanghai. Japanese hope to conquering China in few months was destroy, and these caused huge effect for Japanese to be more brutally. Japanese march to Nanking in DEC, they capture Nanking on Dec 13,1937. After the battle of nanking, the chinese nationalist army had fled the city and Japanese entered the city virtually with no resistance. Then the massacre began, more than 300,000 chinese civilians had been killed in around six weeks. The War crimes committed during the period include looting, rape, arson, killing of civilian and prisoners of war.

Man, if the Germans can admit their wrong-doings, why can't the Japanese? And I better not find the answer in their schools.........

Japanese politics seem to be just too dam pro-Japan..... They can't face a single bad thing!!!

But of course, don't try to start a flame here!

I think no one here still can say he didn't know about japanese warcrimes....so i'm quessing these sort of noserubbing threads are pointless. I have at the moments very limited time, but i will take closer look what has been written. Thread closed sofar.

edit: Ok i've now read what you all had written and my stand hasen't fell. This thread will couse trouple, it's already on the edge to become the general japanese bashing thread so it remains closed. Remember that altough this topic has some slight reflections of military matters, it's more political and very unplesently charged