2 Japanese War Crimes during World War II not serve the Chinese survivors well to compare their own history with that of the Holocaust survivors. It does not matter if the lives shattered by war number in the thousands or in the millions—every single one deserves to be remembered, and human deaths should not become meaningless simply because more people had been killed elsewhere. Although Saul Friedländer argued that the Holocaust must be understood in its contemporary and geo graphical context,11 the same should be done with the atrocities against the Chinese, the Koreans, and many others in East and Southeast Asia under Japa nese rule.12 The events of Nanjing had nearly been forgotten (especially when civil war struck China), but it is now the basis of the antipathy between the People’s Republic of China and Japan, who are incapable of “fruitful or even civil dialogue” but instead possess “venom now flow[ing] at peak levels” for one another.13 While the Nanjing Mausoleum is “for the Chinese what Yad Vashem is for Israelis and Jews worldwide,” the Chinese people are particu- larly angry about the lack of the Japanese people’s courtesy to apologize for the Imperial Japanese Army’s war crimes, especially because Prince Asaka Yas- uhiko (1887–1981), an uncle of the Shōwa Emperor and commander of the Shanghai Expeditionary Force, had been directly involved in the events related to the Rape of Nanjing.14 Although Chang was partially right regarding the Japanese denial faction, which continues to doubt the legitimacy of the anti-Japanese claims,15 other Japanese journalists and scholars have done important work to uncover the crimes of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Pacific War (1941–1945).16 Yet further discussion beyond Asia was definitely stimulated by Iris Chang’s work, which is why her impact on the development of research on Japanese war crimes in general and the Rape of Nanjing in partic u lar can be considered crucial. Yamamoto Masahiro’s Nanking: Anatomy of an Atrocity (2000)17 answered questions and addressed the need for the discussion that had been initiated by Chang in 1997. Further studies in other parts of Asia added to the history of Japanese war crimes from specific national perspectives.18 New documents were also found over the years that helped reconstruct some of the atrocities and massacres committed by the Japanese Imperial Army, whose soldiers had, to name just one example, been ordered to execute thousands of unarmed Chinese soldiers during the war.19 Naturally, one would argue that such acts are war crimes. However, to quote historian Daqing Yang, “what is considered a war crime—a prosecutable war crime, in particular—is as much a political issue as a legal one.”20 For many years, the American public was not concerned about the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers between 1931 and 1945 in the Pacific theater and in parts of China. Whereas crimes against U.S. prisoners of war (POWs) were widely acknowledged in memoirs and in stories by survivors, the fate of Asian victims was of no interest to the U.S. public. When the 1990s saw a revival of interest in the crimes committed by the Japanese soldiers in the name of the early Shōwa Empire (1926–1945), it became obvious that many war criminals
Document Details My Account Print multiple pages
Print
You have printed 0 times in the last 24 hours.
Your print count will reset on at .
You may print 0 more time(s) before then.
You may print a maximum of 0 pages at a time.
Help
