The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum is a present-day tourist destination in southern Tokyo. This Art Deco style building was completed in 1933 and was originally the home of Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who commissioned its construction after developing a taste for that particular architectural style during his travels with his wife in France and the United States. Yasuhiko was a military man– a lieutenant general whom Emperor Hirohito transferred to the Japanese Central China Area Army in 1937 to secure the capital of the Republic of China, Nanking. (Wikipedia 2021) At the end of that year, Yasuhiko, along with his superior officer, General Iwane Matsui, oversaw what would come to be known as the Nanking Massacre or Rape of Nanking.
Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum
After World War II, the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers Douglas MacArthur decided that despite Prince Asaka’s involvement and responsibility in the Nanking Massacre, he would not sit for a war crimes trial to spare the Japanese people further humiliation after their defeat. However, Yasuhiko was deprived of his status as royalty as punishment and his Tokyo home was seized. Was this justified? Was the Prince a venerated member of the Japanese royal family and representative of Japan on the world stage, or was he a villain to the defenseless Chinese peasant farmers and villagers who were raped and killed under his leadership? Yasuhiko’s legacy in Japan and abroad is blurred by an intense debate over just how real the Nanking Massacre was.
The very lowest level of detail of the Nanking Massacre that all historians, academics, and politicians agree on is that after Japan took control of Nanking in 1937, the military went on to kill some number of Chinese prisoners of war and civilians. That is where the consensus ends. The major points of disagreement are over how many people died and in what manner they died. Japanese textbooks cover the Nanking Massacre with brevity and refute that more than a few thousand people died. The Chinese allege that hundreds of thousands were killed and in the most brutal ways imaginable. Internationally, relatively little attention has been paid to the Nanking Massacre in history books when compared to other atrocities in WWII like the Holocaust. However, in the 1990s, the scholarly debate over the Nanking Massacre flared up with the publication of Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.
In her book, Chang accuses the Japanese government and academia of covering up the Nanking Massacre. She makes a compelling argument that to this day Japan refuses to acknowledge the scope of their crimes in Nanking in 1937 and 1938. A greater consequence of this otherwise immediately Asian historical and political debate is the fact that the West has tended to stay away from studying the Nanking Massacre. Chang believes that this is a symptom of Cold War politics: After WWII ended, the US immediately transitioned from being Japan’s enemy to being their ally in redeveloping their government and economy. In contrast, by about 1948, the Republic of China was clearly losing control of China to the Chinese Communist Party. This of course meant that China was becoming an ideological enemy of the United States. Japan, on the other hand, was starting to look more western than ever as the U.S. guided the creation of a democratic government and capitalist economy. Thus, the U.S. turned a blind eye to Japan’s wartime cruelty in China as focusing on it would only serve to hurt ongoing U.S.-Japanese relations. So Chang argues that Japan has been comfortably diminishing and denying the Nanking Massacre, “bury[ing] the victims of Nanking–not under the soil, as in 1937, but into historical oblivion.” (Chang 1997, 220)
Some Japanese scholars understandably took offense to Chang’s strongly-worded accusations against Japan. Tanaka Masaaki defends both modern and imperial Japan in his 2000 book What Really Happened in Nanking: The Refutation of a Common Myth. Tanaka rebukes Chang by recharacterizing the Japanese as having been regretful that they needed to wage war against fellow Asians, but had to in order to liberate the Chinese of western imperialism. Tanaka goes on to center much of his argument around discrediting supposed photographic evidence of the Nanking Massacre, providing explanations for numerous highly-circulated images that they were either complete forgeries or taken out of context by Chinese propagandists. He then provides photographs of Japanese soldiers and Chinese civilians living peacefully alongside each other in the city following Nanking’s capture, which he presents as proof that the greater violence and killings in Nanking’s farther reaches did not happen.
To truly understand the Nanking Massacre, you need to go beyond choosing whether to believe the prevailing Japanese or Chinese perspectives. What we know for a fact is that the past did happen a certain way, but in politicians’ and historians’ descriptions of the past contradictions arise. Both Chang and Tanaka present valid evidence. Chang cites the reports of western journalists who happened to be present in Nanking during the killing, who in no uncertain words describe the indiscriminate killing of Chinese civilians. Tanaka exposes blatant attempts to misconstrue photos taken of dead people in Nanking as evidence of Japanese brutality against civilians, when in fact the dead were killed by fellow Chinese or killed in combat. The most compelling aspect of Chang’s argument is the way she arouses suspicion in the reader that Japan would try to hide an atrocity they committed because they had the means and opportunity to do so. The most compelling aspect of Tanaka’s argument is how he demands that logic be deferred to when considering whether the people killed in Nanking were really killed in a “massacre” or whether they were killed as soldiers, fighting the Japanese.
An unfortunate mutual accusation from Chang and Tanaka against each other is that they attempted to concoct evidence and lie about what really happened in Nanking. Given the endless sequence of accusations and rebuttals about the Nanking Massacre, it is hard for a western historian to derive truth from this event. Fortunately, eyewitness accounts do exist, which are perhaps closer to being unimpeachable than even photographs, depending on how much you believe the people who have come forward. In 1998’s In the Name of the Emperor documentary, eyewitness accounts from Nanking– Japanese soldiers, American journalists, and a Korean “comfort woman” –are presented which detail the barbaric acts of violence by the Japanese as well as their routine and institutionalized sexual abuse of women. Even once you are sure that such violence happened during the Nanking Massacre, you must still consider the validity of the high casualty estimates. As was the case in Europe with the Holocaust or in the postwar Soviet Union or People’s Republic of China, the true scale of human suffering during the Nanking Massacre can only be told through what evidence remains after the killing has stopped.
Bibliography
Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking – The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, 1997.
Tanaka, Masaaki. What Really Happened in Nanking – The Refutation of a Common Myth, 2000.
Wikipedia. “Prince Yasuhiko Asaka.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, September 30, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Yasuhiko_Asaka.
The staunch differences between Masaaki’s and Chang’s perspectives, truly does make the conversation about the Nanking Massacre quite polarizing. As you said, their rebuttals make it difficult for a historian to be able to take a side without further researching the subject. Chang does seem to have more reliable sources, but the amount of time for the stories to be told does bring up their validity.
I think using Prince Yasuhiko Asaka and his home was an excellent way to demonstrate the uneasy legacy of the Rape of Nanjing in Japan. As Chang mentioned, there have been high ranking Japanese officials whose careers were jeopardized because they very publically denied the Nanjing massacre and made accusations against China or the US. At the same time however, there are war memorials commemorating Japanese officers who ordered and/or participated in the atrocities at Nanjing. (Not to mention the censorship of textbooks, etc.)
Masaaki’s book really makes you think just how many of the Japanese believed or still believe that what happened at Nanking never actually happened. Of course having it barred from almost all history books goes a long way into nearly brainwashing the population. The inclusion of the Art Museum adds a bit of hubris to the ordeal, that something owned by someone that allowed something like the Nanking Massacre to happen now stands as a celebration of the beauty of the art pieces inside.