Book Review

Asia

Joshua A. Fogel. The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. (Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes, number 2.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xvi, 248. Cloth $40.00, paper $15.95.

Few issues in the history of twentieth-century East Asia have generated as much passionate debate as the atrocities committed by Japanese troops against Chinese prisoners of war and civilians during the capture of Nanjing in 1937–1938. The publication of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (1997) has brought both the historical event and the historiographic debate to the attention of a broad audience. Two recent studies contribute much-needed scholarly perspectives to English-language treatments of this subject and help to explain the persistence of conflicting historical narratives of the Nanjing massacre.

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Masahiro Yamamoto presents an analysis of Japanese atrocities from the standpoint of a self-described "centrist-revisionist" who affirms that Japanese troops did, in fact, engage in large-scale atrocities during the capture and occupation of the city but questions the magnitude and scope of killing alleged in most Western or Chinese accounts. Using Japanese army documents and the diaries of soldiers involved, in addition to more frequently used Chinese and Western sources, he estimates that as many as 50,000 Chinese were "killed in unlawful ways" (p. 115). He finds that all but 7,000 of the victims were prisoners of war, soldiers out of uniform, and conscription-age civilian men suspected of being former soldiers, who were rounded up and systematically executed by army units on verbal orders from the staff of the Shanghai Expeditionary Army. At the same time, he argues that credible evidence for larger numbers of victims cited in the verdicts of the Tokyo War Crimes trials and in postwar Chinese and Western accounts is lacking. He attributes the steady inflation of numbers in the aftermath of the event to wartime propaganda and to postwar politics and diplomacy. Yamamoto's affirmation of large-scale mass killings pits him against the hardline "revisionists" like Masaaki Tanaka, who deny that any significant atrocities occurred. At the same time, his analysis places him at odds with "traditionalist" Japanese scholars, as well as a majority of Chinese and Western writers, who argue for a far larger scale of slaughter that took the lives of between 100,000 and 400,000 defenseless victims.

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