Graduate Student

Urbana,  Illinois, USA

 

It all started on the morning of a late summer day in year 1942. People in my hometown had barely gotten used to the shriek of air alarms and the routine of dropping everything and seeking safety at the earliest alert [逃飛機] , or "escaping the flying machine," was a new word in the Yunhe dialect of southwest Zhejiang Province, China, to mean running towards air raid shelters. The bombings on August 26th and the next day were strange. Bombs whooshed down from the sky, punching holes through roofs and into the ground, but they did not explode. Though townsfolk suspected it, they would take decades of time to fully understand the secret connection between the "dummy" bombs released by the Japanese army and the darkest days that befell the place: soon afterwards, the bubonic plague swept the tiny town and surrounding villages, just as it did in many other cities in China during the Pacific War, cutting lives short and tearing families apart.

 

After losing his wife and two youngest sons to the deadly disease, my grandfather, then a man in his thirties, married again and found a stepmother for his remaining four children. A baby daughter was born into the new family. Many years later, she would have her own daughter, who was named Minjie and who is telling you this story. Yes, I was brought into the world via a carefully planned genocide. The bacteria of the plague were first cultivated through medical experiments conducted on live human beings, then mass produced, and, finally, deliberately spread to murder Chinese civilians. Unit 731, a Japanese detachment disguised as a water purification unit in northeastern China, was the most notorious killer behind the biological warfare (Harris, 2002).

 

Until I finished a family history project with my mother as part of my doctoral coursework at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, however, I was unburdened by any knowledge of the biggest irony about my life. Even after I learnt about the disaster from which dwindling, and elderly, survivors in my hometown were still suffering physically and mentally with absolutely no compensation from the Japanese government, I did not stop to ask why the murder had become a secret in the very place it was committed. Growing up in this mountainous town in the 1980s and 1990s, except for some brief mentions of the plague by my parents, I had never read about it in history textbooks, nor heard about it when local history and information was taught in school. I never encountered the topic in children's books that I read as a child. There was no, and still is no, memorial museum or monument to remind residents and visitors of the pain and horror that once haunted here, not that our poor rural town has established a museum of any sort. It was not surprising that daughters of my cousins', both Chinese teenagers at high school, admitted never having heard of the plague in Yunhe and never having expected that Japanese wartime atrocities struck so close to home, although they were well aware of the Nanking Massacre, "comfort women," and medical experiments by Unit 731—currently the three best publicized Japanese war crimes by Chinese media.

 

I did not feel the urge to break the silence and secrecy until a year ago. I was reading Hiroshima No Pika, a picture book assigned in my doctoral seminar on youth literature. Toshi Maruki, the Japanese author and illustrator1, used powerful images to tell the traumatic experience of a little girl and her family during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Maruki's bold rendering of a horrific topic for a young audience awakened me from nonchalance. I asked myself: I have read many children's books about China and Chinese published in the U.S. How come that not one of them told Chinese experience during World War II? A search in the online catalog of the University of Illinois Library, which held the second largest collection of children's and young adult literature in the United State, found not a single juvenile title focused on Japanese war crimes committed in China. Iris Chang's groundbreaking work, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, is not for the faint heart and hardly an age-appropriate reading for youth under fourteen. Not that atrocities and genocide are taboo topics for young readers. Our library has collected about two hundred titles, dozens of which award-winning books, written on the Jewish Holocaust for youth. In fact, according to a comprehensive bibliography compiled by Sullivan, 495 titles of English-language Holocaust literature intended for young people from kindergarten to high school had been published through 1999, forming a rich and mature body of literature encompassing diversified age level, genre, perspective, and subject matter. American authors do not shun other grim and ugly topics such as apartheid system in South Africa, genocides in Armenia and Cambodia, the enslavement of Africans, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese-American internment, and the Native American experience in the Americas, and have published more than a hundred titles for youth (Sullivan, 1999).

 

I left the library feeling disappointed and outraged. The American publishing industry of youth literature boasts an output of 5,000 titles each year, yet it could afford little room for stories about what happened during Japan's invasion and colonization of China, a country where one fifth of the world population dwells. Young people may come across this history from other sources—newspaper, television documentaries (one of my friends cited the Historical Channel as the source from which she learnt about Japan's biological warfare in China), movies, the Internet, and, for older teens, even a handful of books targeting adult readers, but the dearth of information about Chinese experience during World War II in youth literature must be changed. I was by far not the first person to notice the issue. After hearing about the Rape of Nanking from her parents, a young Iris Chang searched the local public libraries but nothing about the massacre turned up (Chang, 1997, p. 8). American school textbooks are an equally poor source for information about Japan's wartime atrocities in Asia. Chang did a thorough examination of secondary-school history textbooks in the United Sates and found that “only a few even mention the Rape of Nanking” (1997, p. 6). There has not been substantial improvement for the past ten years. In a recent study, Zhao examined eight American and world history textbooks commonly used in middle and high school social studies classrooms, and found no mention of the major war crimes committed by Japanese troops: the Nanking Massacre, “comfort women,” and the Japanese biological warfare. Zhao’s informal survey of 55 social studies teachers indicated that none of them had ever taught about these war crimes in their history classrooms. Only seven of them knew about the Nanking Massacre, either learnt through Chang’s book or heard from friends who had read the book (Zhao and Hoge, 2006).

 

I shared with my class the story of my family's experience during the plague, a story which was told from my grandfather to my mother and from her to me. I hoped the small audience of ten classmates, who were future faculty in the teaching and research of literature and library services for young people, to pass my story on and to gain a new critical perspective in American youth literature.

 

With my advisor's encouragement and under her guidance, I shifted the focus of my dissertation research to information sources about the Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) for American and Chinese young people. Too many questions puzzled me since I became aware of the uneven treatment of World War II atrocities in books written for American young readers. Why is there only scanty information in US publications about World War II history in China? What has contributed to this historical amnesia? What is the relationship between a changing political climate—particularly the development of Cold War and international relationships among U.S., China, and Japan—and the memory curve in this country? My initial research in novels found thirty titles, considered suitable reading for young people, set during Imperial Japan's invasion of China from 1931 to the end of World War II. Exactly half of them were published from 1940 through 1946. Often written by authors who were familiar with Chinese culture and life, these stories showed the suffering and bravery of Chinese people, particularly children, during war years. Interest in Chinese experience under Japan's occupation, as is shown in such an intensity of publications when American "Flying Tigers" were helping China to fight Japan, seems to die down rapidly after the U.S. and Communist China became enemies. Until Iris Chang revived the memory of the Rape of Nanking in the Western world, publications of juvenile novels on the Sino-Japanese War were far and sparse. Out of the thirty titles only nine remain in print today, and quite a few of the in-print tend to be books written for adults though readable for high school students.

 

Quality issues in Chinese publications about the Sino-Japanese War, too, caught my attention. The seemingly ample Chinese-language information about the combat history of the Sino-Japanese War is overwhelmingly about Chinese guerillas fighting against Japan and resistance led by the Chinese Communist Party. Thanks to the Chinese civil war (1946-1949) and Cold War, achievements and sacrifices made by the Chinese Nationalist army and American aid were conspicuously missing in the children's books and school textbooks that I examined in a preliminary survey. Despite increasing publications which disclose Japan's wartime atrocities in China, little has been offered to help Chinese youth understand racism and prejudice—the real danger that can turn men and women into murderers and torturers.

 

Some other research questions apply to youth literature in both Chinese and English. Is it possible to tell young people about Japanese wartime atrocities when popular writers and historians, whose opinions range from total denials to indignant condemnations, are still contending over many issues and facts? Is it possible to portray the violence and horror of Imperial Japan's atrocities honestly and sensitively for young children? Writers of Holocaust youth literature have tried multiple strategies to present the unspeakable horror without overwhelming young readers (Jordan, 2004), though it is still debated whether some of the writings risked watering down the inhumanities of the Nazis.

 

Why ask these questions, and do they matter? These questions point to a striking gap between mission and action in the education of American youth about "multiculturalism." In order to help young people learn about other ethnic or cultural groups and to enable people of diverse origins and backgrounds to see themselves in literature, teachers have children celebrate festivals honored by all kinds of cultures, and librarians display exquisitely illustrated folktales from around the world. Festivals, folktales, as well as food and traditional clothing, are among the most ostensible and entertaining features by which you tell one culture apart from another. They are not, I would argue, defining or reliable features for some cultures. (I am Chinese even though my diet often consists of sandwiches and I rarely walk around in cheongsam.) Given the huge impact of the war against Japan on Chinese politics and culture, on lives of Chinese people, and on international relationships among China, Japan, and the U.S., it is a much less rewarding attempt to understand contemporary China and its people without knowledge of its World War II history. For some first- and second-generation immigrants from China, experience or knowledge of the war is also part of their heritage and cultural identity, and is thus meaningful to those Chinese Americans as well.

 

Through a comparative study of juvenile literature and history textbooks about the Sino-Japanese War for American and Chinese young people, I plan to search possible answers for these questions. I will measure the quality of information produced for young readers about Chinese experience during the Pacific War, using such criteria as historical accuracy, cultural authenticity, literary appeal, and age appropriateness. I wish to show American and Chinese publishers, authors, teachers, and librarians who work with children gaps and flaws in the existing body of literature, as well as to illuminate ways for enrichment and improvement.

 

My family story displeased a classmate from Japan. Granddaughter of a man who suffered in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, she sent me a raging email saying that "Chinese are worse than we Japanese." I was unable to engage her in an open discussion with me. By the time people in China and elsewhere reach an accurate understanding of Imperial Japan's role in the Pacific War, and a heightened awareness of its ongoing impact upon Asia, I hope more Japanese like her will, too, see that to confront history in its true and ugly form is part of understanding ourselves, something we must all do.

 

A final agenda in my research is to collect more stories from my hometown about Japanese invasion and the plague. Many complex factors, including scientific understanding and political disruption, have contributed to the well kept secrecy of our World War II history. For one thing, my townsfolk were unable to decipher the sophisticated germ war plan developed by Japanese medical scientists, who, by the way, mostly received immunity from the American military in a dirty exchange for the scientific data of biological warfare weapons (Harris, 2002). The bombs that did not explode, some of them went so far as surmising, were perhaps a miracle blessed by local goddesses and gods! Stories will pass our unforgettable history on to children of my town, and position themselves in a larger historical and international picture to show who they really are and what responsibilities they owe to people of the past, present, and future. Stories will travel far away to nourish other young people whose true appreciation of a multicultural society will benefit a world where tolerance, understanding, and peace are still wanting.

 

Chang, I. (1997). The Rape of Nanking: The forgotten holocaust of World War II. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

Harris, S. H. (2002). Factories of death: Japanese biological warfare, 1932-1945, and the American cover-up (Rev. ed.). New York: Routledge.

Jordan, S. D. (2004). Educating without overwhelming: Authorial strategies in children’s Holocaust literature. Children’s Literature in Education, 35(3), 199-218.

Sullivan, E. T. (1999). The Holocaust in literature for youth: A guide and resource book. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press.

Zhao, Y., & Hoge, J. D. (2006). Countering textbook distortion: War atrocities in Asia, 1937-1945. Social Education, 70(7), 424-430.

 

 

 

 

1 Dedicated to campaigning for nuclear disarmament and world peace, Toshi Maruki and her husband Iri Maruki collaborated on paintings of other atrocities, including one created in 1975 about the Rape of Nanking ("Toshi Maruki," 2006; "南京大虐殺の図," 2005).