Shayaan
Zaraq Bari
Undergraduate
Student of Law
University
of London LLB. Programme
Lahore,
Pakistan
If
nations are allowed to commit genocide with impunity, to hide their
guilt in a camouflage of lies and denials, there is a real danger that
other brutal regimes will be encouraged to attempt genocides.
There’s
no denying it: denial inevitably follows genocide. In his Eight
Stages of Genocide,
Dr. Gregory Stanton lists it as the final stage of a genocide
development.1
The perpetrators of such acts do their utmost to cover up the evidence.
They dig graves and burn bodies, destroy historical records, question
the credibility of sources, intimidate witnesses, impede investigations
and play down the number of people killed. All of these methods have
been used to some extent in rejecting the Massacre of Nanking in
1937-1938, a six-week massacre of the Chinese population by the
Imperial Japanese Army.
There
are many eye-witness accounts that describe how the Japanese military
swept into the city and not only pillaged and burnt Nanking but
methodically raped, tormented and murdered its citizens. The Nazi
businessman John Rabe, whose diaries were uncovered by Iris Chang in The
Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,
wrote in his diary entry of December 24: “I have had to look
at so many corpses over the last few weeks… but I wanted to
see these atrocities with my own eyes, so that I can speak as an
eyewitness later. A man cannot be silent about this kind of
cruelty!”2
Apart
from Rabe’s diaries, other accounts of Westerners in the city
include the letters of Robert Wilson and John Magee and the documents
of Miner Bates, a history professor at the Nanking University. But
perhaps the most damning evidence of the massacre comes from those
Japanese sources that Iris Chang documents in The
Rape of Nanking.
In an interview mentioned in her book, the former Japanese soldier
Nagatomi Hakudo recounts how a superior officer beheaded a Chinese boy
and presented him with the cleanly severed head as a
‘souvenir’. As a test of courage, Hakudo then
proceeded to kill other prisoners.3
Another
former combatant Azuma Shiro describes how military personnel took
turns raping women and killed them afterward ‘because dead
bodies don’t talk’.4
Many Japanese soldiers believed that raping virgins would magically
empower them and even wore amulets made from the victims’
pubic hair. There are even rough estimations of the number of dead from
firsthand sources, e.g. the Japanese military correspondent Imai
Masatake describes a ‘mountain made of dead bodies’
at the Hsiakwan wharves and how one Japanese officer at the scene
estimated that 20,000 people had been killed.5
Even
in these scattered accounts, there is an overwhelming impression that
the Japanese army was hard at work hiding these atrocities. So, for
instance, Masatake describes how bodies were dragged from a
‘mountain of corpses’ and tossed into the Yangtze
River. Rabe was particularly aware of the Japanese attempt to destroy
all evidence of these atrocities and in his December 21 diary entry
wrote that “there can no longer be any doubt that the
Japanese are burning the city, presumably to erase all traces of their
looting and thievery.”6
He feared that his diaries would also receive the same treatment, but
these passed safely to his granddaughter and later to the Alliance in
the Memory of Victims of the Nanking Massacre at the insistence of Iris
Chang.
The
denial of the Rape of Nanking would only strengthen with time. Certain
parts of Nanking were cleared of bodies and opened to Japanese
tourists. Every effort was made to convince the Japanese people that
nothing was amiss. Over the years, the Japanese government has tried to
rewrite history by issuing school textbooks that denied instances of
Japanese imperial aggression and the Nanking atrocities.
In
1955, the Japanese Ministry of Education banned one third of the
textbooks in use and insisted that textbooks avoid any description of
Japan invading China.7
Thus Japanese school curricula simply failed to acknowledge the
Sino-Japanese War or adequately mention the Nanking atrocities and this
continued for the next twenty years. The change in position came in the
1970s but so did the advent of the denial movement.
Refusal
to believe until proof is given is a rational position; denial of all
outside of our own limited experience is absurd.
– Annie
Besant
The
most outspoken proponent of the denial movement is the ex-soldier
Tanaka Masaaki whose book What
Really Happened in Nanking: the Refutation of a Common Myth
attempts a rebuttal of the ‘massacre proposition.’
However, his arguments are speciously reasoned and thus easily
discredited. As pointed out by Hora Tomio in The
Proof of the Nanking Massacre
his arguments centre on disputed facts and often distort historical
evidence. Sometimes Masaaki even resorts to armchair theorising which
involves making generalizations without offering even a modicum of
proof.
Masaaki
highlights the fact that he was personally asked by General Matsui to
investigate whether Nanking was still peaceful and orderly. He writes:
“I explored every inch of Nanking. The population, and the
city was safe enough for women to venture out alone at night. I
submitted a report to that effect to Gen. Matsui.”8
However, Masaaki undertook the task in July 1938, a full seven months
after the fall of Nanking. No significance can be attached to what
could only be termed as Masaaki’s ‘limited
experience’.
Perhaps
a more animated debate centres on the number of people massacred at
Nanking. Most recently, a controversial month-long study of the
massacre by the Japanese ruling party concluded from government
archives that some 20,000 people were killed instead of the generally
accepted numbers of 150,000 to 200,000 people killed.9
Understandably, Masaaki also contends that very few people were killed.
This
is singularly unfortunate because numbers from other historians reach
well into the hundreds of thousands. For example, Tomio has asserted
that there were as many as 200,000 victims while Chang has cited
numbers ranging from 260,000 to 350,000 people killed. Even the self
described ‘moderate proponent’ of the Nanking
atrocities Hata Ikuhiko lists an estimate of 38,000 to 42,000.10
Thus the Japanese government’s continued ploy of minimising
the number of victims killed signifies yet another aspect of denial.
What
is the price we ask for our friendship? Justice, and the comity usually
observed between nation and nation.
–
Thomas Jefferson
The
denial of the Nanking Massacre continues to test Sino-Japanese
relationships. China blames Japan for failing to repent for its war of
aggression and humanitarian crimes. Japanese mistrust of China also
runs deep and emanates from the country’s right wing and
nationalist groups. Ultra right-wingers assert that Japan’s
militaristic and expansionist aggression in Asia was a war
‘liberating Asia from Western colonialism.’
But
it is not only Sino-Japanese relations that are affected. The Imperial
Japanese Army committed crimes all over South Asia. There is ample
evidence to suggest that the Japanese developed and tested chemical and
biological weapons against prisoners of war and civilians in Asia. Tens
of thousands of Asian women were forced to become ‘comfort
women’ or sex slaves to the Japanese army. These incidents
not only evoke the wrath of Chinese activists but those of countries
such as South Korea and Taiwan as well.
At
the heart of each controversy lies a common thread of historical
resentment. Only by banishing such resentment can Japan ensure
permanent peace with its neighbours. The Japanese government has taken
some initiatives to heal war wounds, e.g. it announced the Asian
Women’s Fund to compensate ‘comfort
women’ at the 50th
anniversary of the end of World War II. Victims also received a letter
of apology signed by the incumbent Japanese Prime Minister. But the
fund became the subject of some debate when South Korean and Taiwanese
critics pointed out that the letter was a personal rather than an
official apology and the compensation came from charity funds instead
of state coffers.11
Moreover,
China declined such a system for Chinese comfort women. Mr. Haruki
Wada, executive director of the fund, explained that "there were lots
of different sorts of victims of the war in China, and … it
was difficult for the Chinese government just to single out comfort
women for help."12
The
Japanese government also makes a point that it has compensated China
through the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty and points out that China
agreed to forgo demands for war reparations in the 1972 joint
communiqué. But an official apology by the Japanese
government for its war crimes has not been forthcoming.
Several
Japanese Prime Ministers have offered personal regrets over
Japan’s war policies. For example, former Primer Minister
Tomiichi Murayama made a ‘heartfelt apology’ at the
50th
anniversary of the end of the Second World War.13
However, these statements are a weak substitute for an official
national apology by the Japanese government. Meanwhile Japanese history
books continue to downplay past war crimes. The visits by former Prime
Minister Junichiro Koizumi to the Yasukuni shrine, which honours 14
convicted or suspected Imperial Army war criminals, also damaged
Japan’s relations with its East Asian neighbours.
Most
recently, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe roused criticism when he told
reporters that Asian comfort women were not forced to become sex slaves
by the Imperial Army, since there was ‘no evidence to prove
there was coercion’ involved.14
It seems that conservative Japanese politicians continue to doubt the
extent of the country's wartime atrocities. These latest attempts seem
a dramatic volte-face from the Japanese government's 1993
acknowledgement that the Imperial Army ran brothels for its troops
during the war to the current denial of the
‘coercion’ of sex slaves. Immediately, the US
Congress passed a resolution calling on Abe to "formally acknowledge,
apologise and accept historical responsibility" for the comfort women.
Who
remembers now the destruction of the Armenians? –
Adolph Hitler
Hitler
is reported to have made this statement during a meeting with his
generals in August 1939, in which he justifies the Polish invasion and
the creation of a new world order. It seems that he was aware of the
Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Young Turk government. It is not
improbable that the failure of the world in remembering the destruction
of the Armenians led Hitler to believe that his own crimes against
humanity would be similarly forgotten. After all, what better immunity
for war crimes is there than global amnesia?
We
must think carefully about Hitler’s proclamation, and how it
triggered the tyrannical excesses of an authoritarian government.
Mankind has, through the ages, shown itself to be capable of
unimaginable horror. We need to be reminded of this inhumanity so that
succeeding generations need not suffer needless carnage. We must strive
to better ourselves, and it seems that a sure-fire way of doing that is
by bolstering the democratic institutions of our countries. As Iris
Chang stated in an interview:
“We
should see it [the Nanking Massacre] as a story that transcends what
the Japanese did to the Chinese and a metaphor of what a human being
can do to another human being. We have to be vigilant to understand how
these atrocities happened and make sure that power is defused among
people in a democratic system, because it seems that only democracy
prevents these kinds of things from happening.”15
It
is not a coincidence that the worst atrocities committed by the human
race usually occur in a political setup that lacks democratic
legitimacy. The very nature of dictatorships is such that a small group
of persons wield untrammeled power over a wider community. In such
states, power is concentrated in the hands of the few rather than
dispersed among the many.
Democracy,
on the other hand, promotes integration among the general public and
ensures that everyone in even the most diverse of countries is suitably
represented in state organs and engaged with political issues that
affect them all. Only democratic peoples are sensitized to the needs
and concerns of their fellow human beings. Ideologies of hate, such as
wartime persecution of innocent civilians, do not usually take root in
nations that adopt such a system of government.
What
is most distressing is that the Nanking Massacre itself was so easily
forgotten in the Western world until the issue was taken up by Iris
Chang in The
Rape of Nanking.
Throughout her childhood, Chang had thought about the Japanese
atrocities that her parents told her about but could find no
information about them in libraries. As she informs us: “I
learned about the event from my parents. Then in December 1994 I went
to a Cupertino conference on the Nanjing Massacre and learned that
there was no English-language book on the subject. I wanted to change
that situation.”16
As
responsible global citizens, we must follow in Chang’s
footsteps and bring the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities to the
fore in international political discourse. We must make others aware of
how denial of massacres such as Nanking amount to a kind of racial
abuse that negates the pain of victims and survivors and demeans it as
a solely Chinese concern. In fact, Nanking is a proper concern of all
humanity.
For
these reasons, we must designate a suitable day – perhaps the
day Nanking fell to the Japanese on the 13th
of December nearly seventy years ago – as a worldwide Memorial
Day for the Nanking Massacres.
We must commemorate the numerous sufferers of Japanese persecution to
make sure that such crimes are not repeated. In this way, we may be
able to avoid what Chang has termed the second
rape
of Nanking, that is, silence about the massacres.
Compared
to the Holocaust, the Nanking atrocities still lie in relative
obscurity. As a historian, Iris Chang sought to amend this. The utility
of the historian underlies the fact that people possess short memories.
Part of his or her work is to counteract claims that historic facts can
ever be viewed in isolation. Those that do not remember the past,
warned George Santayana, are condemned to repeat it. If we accept this
proposition, then it becomes clear that history is a cyclic phenomenon
rather than a chronologically linear timeline some would have us
believe.
Any
doctrine averse to this conception of history is not only irksome but
ignorant. Thus, the way forward must be to embrace history rather than
to deny it. To heal the wounds of war, Japan must offer an adequate
apology for the Nanking tragedy, pay compensation to survivors and
teach future Japanese generations about its dark past. Only by
confronting the ghosts of history can we finally exorcise them.