Analysis of Photographic Evidence
Joshua Fogel credits Ikuhiko Hata with being "largely responsible for discrediting virtually every one of the photographs that adorn the pages of Iris Chang's book", although Hata himself only claimed to have discredited 11 of the 40-odd photographs. Robert Entenmann comments, "Hata claims that eleven photographs in Chang's book are 'fakes, forgeries, and composites,' although he succeeds in demonstrating that with only two." Shudo Higashinakano, Susumu Kobayashi and Shinjiro Fukunaga analyzed the photographic evidence supporting the allegations of the Nanking Massacre. After a detailed analysis of the photographic evidence, they concluded that "all the photographs are montages, staged, or falsely captioned." They asserted that most of the photographic evidence "cannot constitute viable evidence of the alleged atrocities in Nanking".
Higashinakano and his colleagues point out that, for instance, one of the photos shows many lying dead bodies, which they claim are the bodies of soldiers killed in battle. In another photo, a man in Japanese military uniform is swinging a sword down on the neck of a Chinese to execute him. They argue that this was staged by the Chinese as there are distinctions in Chinese and Japanese styles of swinging a sword and the style depicted is Chinese. In another photo, the direction of one man's shadow is different from the others, which leads them to conclude that the photo was a composite of multiple photos.
Higashinakano argues that these photos are the result of the effort by the Kuomintang propaganda bureau to disseminate its own photographs all over the world under the names of foreign journalists, and to enlist the support of the United States for their war against Japan, as mentioned in the confession of Theodore H. White, an adviser to the propaganda bureau; "It was considered necessary to lie to it, to deceive it, to do anything to persuade America... That was the only strategy of the Chinese government... " (In Search of History: A Personal Adventure)
Read more about this topic: Nanking Massacre Denial
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