Content area
Full Text
edited by Feifei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002. 304 pp. US$64.95 (Hardcover), US$23.95 (Paperback). ISBN 0-7656-0816-2 (Hardcover), 0-7656-0817-0 (Paperback)
"The Nanking Incident," "The Rape of Nanking," or "The Nanjing Massacre": we can hardly agree on what to call it, much less on its ultimate significance. This lively and diversified set of essays, with a penetrating and wide-ranging foreword by Perry Link, grew out of a conference at Princeton University in 1997; student organizers invited scholars from China (both the People's Republic of China and Taiwan), Japan, United States, and Europe to address a general audience. Many of the contributors have written elsewhere, but it is extremely useful to have summaries from their works, especially those originally in Chinese or Japanese. The range and contrast of views make this an excellent choice for a college class- room. The problem which the organizers set was not merely to present "what happened" in 1937, for the general picture is not much disputed; their further challenge was to explain first why this major atrocity was off-stage for so long, what propelled it into the spotlight, and then to relate this controversy to the recent global phenomenon of historical truth-seeking, retribution, and revisionism.
A tsunami of interest in the West was set off by Iris Chang's journalistic best seller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997). However, conference essays make clear that the crimes of 1937 were not in fact "forgotten"- the Tokyo War Crime Trials established a widely cited public legal record - nor was there a "holocaust" in the sense of an organized and sustained official policy of racial extermination. The authors point out mistakes and exaggerations in Chang's book, and do not support her insinuation that deniers in Japan represent a necessary and unchallenged Japanese position. For instance, the work of a journalist who started his investigations in the 1970s is translated in Katsuichi Honda, The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (M.E. Sharpe, 1999). The implication of the conference essays is that Chang's popularity stems partly from her timing, partly from her skilful simplification, and partly from a need among Chinese in diaspora to have a non-partisan...