Historiography of The Nanking Massacre - Sino-Japanese War

Sino-Japanese War

During the war, the Japanese Government kept tight control over the news media. As a result, the Japanese public was not aware of the Nanking Massacre or other war crimes committed by the Japanese military. The Japanese military was, rather, portrayed as a heroic entity. Japanese officials lied about civilian death figures at the time of the Nanking Massacre, and some Japanese ultranationalists are still active in attempting to deny that the killings ever occurred.

One brief lapse in the Japanese Government's control over negative depictions of the war was the fleeting public distribution of Tatsuzo Ishikawa's wartime novel, Living Soldier (Ikiteiru heitai), which depicted the grim and dehumanizing effects of the war. Ishikawa and his publisher tried to satisfy government censors by a deliberate decision to self-censor lines about soldiers 'forag for fresh meat' and 'search for women like dogs chasing a rabbit,' while still preserving the overall tone and import of the novel. The novel was published in 1938 but was pulled from circulation within days; Ishikawa was sentenced to a four-month prison term for disturbing 'peace and order.'

Controversy and confusion over the Nanking massacre occurred even soon after, in 1943 George Orwell wrote in Looking Back on the Spanish War: "Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in Nanking in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the Nanking atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them... There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China... The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads — they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."

It was not until the Tokyo Trial (tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and the Nanjing Trial that the truth of the Nanking Massacre was first revealed to Japanese civilians. The atrocities revealed during the trials shocked Japanese society at the time.