The Nanking Massacre: Fact Versus Fiction, A Historian's Quest for the Truth.

THE NANKING MASSACRE: Fact Versus Fiction, a Historian's Quest for the Truth. By Higashinakano Shudo. Tokyo (Japan): Sekai Shuppan. 2006. x, 395 pp. (Maps, B & W photos.) [yen]3500, cloth. ISBN 4-916079-13-2.

Higashinakano Shudo (Osamichi) is a Nanjing denier. This is the English translation of a book he published in Japanese in 1998, plus two essays written since then. In August 2006 he lost a lawsuit served by Nanjing survivor Xia Shuqin over his assertion that she fabricated an account of her family's murder (pp. 156-63). Although the PRC law court cannot force compliance abroad, it ordered Higashinakano to pay Xia damages, and his original publisher Tendensha, to recall the book from circulation and halt further production.

In a nutshell, the thesis of this controversial book holds that reliable Japanese, Chinese and Western primary sources dating from 1937-8 fail to support claims of a massacre with hundreds of thousands of victims--claims that emerged only after the war ended. The thesis is largely valid when phrased at this level of generalization, but the devil is in the details, and this is where the author falls short; e.g., what makes a source "reliable," why were so few generated at the time, or how crucial is the number of deaths? A short review precludes examining other Japanese atrocities at Nanjing, so I look at only one issue: Higashinakano's definition of "massacre."

"Denial" brings to mind a total repudiation of the fact that Japanese troops killed Chinese in the tens of thousands at Nanjing, but Higashinakano fully acknowledges that fact. He also grants that the Japanese committed rape, arson, pillage and other crimes--albeit far less than alleged in "unreliable" Western and Chinese accounts. What he denies is the claim that Japanese killings were a "massacre," defined as the wholesale murder of non-belligerents under international law in 1937. This definition of course excludes the killing of combatants, but also that of plain-clothes troops and other Chinese men, women and children suspected of being guerrillas, or what we now call "unlawful insurgents." Illegal killings that did occur, Higashinakano holds, took the form of unintended collateral damage, which is tragic but unavoidable in any situation of armed conflict.

Western observers condemned the Japanese for capturing and killing Chinese "ex-soldiers," but Higashinakano defends that practice on the grounds that they had no rights enjoyed by POWs under international law. This was because their commander had fled the scene and had not supervised their capitulation and surrender of arms. Moreover, the defeated ex-soldiers violated laws of war by casting off uniforms, donning plain clothes, and merging with civilians when they fled into an International Safety Zone reserved for bona fide refugees, which was supposed to be fully demilitarized. The Japanese considered these men to be guerrillas and suspected them of plotting uprisings from that refugee area. Was this fear genuine or just a pretext to "massacre" those men, especially since most discarded their arms? What lends cogency to the author's argument is his disclosure of the fact that these ex-soldiers retained access to weapons. Japanese troops in the Safety Zone uncovered huge caches of Chinese civilian clothes, along with 7000 rounds of live ammunition, 39,000 tank shells, 55,122 hand grenades, 1963 rifles and revolvers, and four tanks--but, admittedly, no weapons of mass destruction (p. 122).

This denial book thus differs from those that say the Holocaust never happened. Higashinakano gets many things wrong, but he submits a provocative argument about what constitutes a "massacre"--one that supporters of today's war in Iraq must, by force of logic, find compelling.

BOB TADASHI WAKABAYASHI

York University, Canada