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Book Review
The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography. Edited by JOSHUA A. FOGEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. xvi + 248. $15.95 (paper).
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The rampage of rape, plunder, and killing committed by the Japanese Imperial Army after the fall of the Chinese Nationalist capital Nanjing in December 1937 merits inclusion in any list of atrocities from the twentieth century, often lamented to have been the bloodiest in our collective history. Like other atrocities, its remembrance has been contested by ethnic, political, and national parties as well as by professional historians. Joshua A. Fogel has brought together three essays in The Nanjing Massacre in History and Historiography that explore the particular and the universal in this discourse. Prefatory remarks by Fogel and modern European historian Charles S. Maier are followed by two essays by Mark Eykholt and Takashi Yoshida that outline respectively the general historiography within China and Japan. Daqing Yang caps the collection with an exploration of methodological issues for historians of holocaust. |
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The Japanese establishment has long been criticized by domestic and foreign critics alike for avoiding confrontation with Japan's imperial past, on notable occasions denying its past aggressions. The Nanjing events are emblematic of this discourse. There is an irony here, for as Takashi Yoshida observes, the dominant view in Japan, established during the U.S. occupation by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and later institutionalized in history textbooks, is that the Nanjing rape and massacre indeed occurred. In Japan it is the conservative deniers who are revisionist. It is true that conservative elements in the long-ruling Liberal-Democratic Party succeeded in muting textbook coverage from the mid-1950s to the 1970s, and revisionist scholars began to receive media attention from the early 1970s, but their efforts have spurred extensive and effective responses among Japanese progressives in legal and popular as well as educational arenas. Yoshida perceives a rise in educator's awareness of "victimizer consciousness," especially in the early 1980s, that remained strong in the face of those in the 1990s who wished to correct what they regarded as "masochistic" history. |
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