I found a place with lot of information regarding the too unknown Tokyo “trials”.
Nanking massacre is debunked there too.
isn’t it just natural to take victors’ “history” with a large pinch of salt? re-examining japan’s role in wwII, and prior, is likely to be less risky than revisiting the holocaust.
i’ve not read the papers, but i think it’s healthy to see the other side before making judgements about villians/heroes in war. no exceptions.
I read some articles there. It seems like another case of court history being concocted fairy tales that everyone asusmed true and nobody ever bothered to prove.
I believe they tackle the Nanjing Massacre as ‘myth’ at some point. Now, come, could an entire city have hallucinated those horrors? Nothing harms revisionism as much as negating some very simple, terrible, and provable facts.
to merlin:
i’m not going to take a position on nanking massacre, yes or no. but this paper shows kmt claims at the time of the incident to be around 20,000, and wouldn’t they have every reason to play this up a bit? anyway, that’s an order of magnitude less than the half million i’d come to believe. one would then have to wonder whether fdr’s real motives for sanctions against japan were moral, or whether darker thoughts like clipping japan’s wings to maintain american power in the east asia zone were foremost in his mind.
the kmt killed about 10 million chinese, and the communists, well, plenty more. it’s hard to gloat over the success of us foreign policy in this unhappy chapter.
I have recently researched the early post-WWII years in Japan as part of a paper I put together.
One of the lesser known part of the Tokyo Trials was the one involving the infamous Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army. No persecution followed because the tribunal president dismissed the case (brought on by the Chinese government) for lack of evidence. In reality US military authorities had agreed to provide former members of this unit with immunity on condition of passing all their material and knowledge on to them.A few of them (Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro, to quote but the most famous one) were even hired by the US government to work on their own biological weapons program. The Soviets held their own trials at Khabarovsk, involving the Unit 731 members they had captured. They were given relatively light prison sentences (mostly to keep their Maoist allies from complaining) in return for help in setting up a biological weapon facility in Sverdlovsk.
It mus be understood that Japan immediately after WWII was a desperate, miserable place. Not only had the war brought on immense devastation and losses, but the US military run the country with an iron fist, going as far as micromanaging the economy by saying which goods could be produced and which were forbidden. For example Mitsubishi had to fight hard to obtain the permit to build scooters, which had no military application whatsoever but were desperately needed to provide cheap transportation in a country which had lost most of its railways. The restrictions were lessened because someone in Washington realized an enbittered and impoverished Japan could turn to the Soviet Union out of spite. The Korean War brought on the end of the ham-fisted occupation because the US and their allies desperately needed Japan’s oil refineries and industries to keep the UN troops supplied. The 1952 Los Angeles Peace Treaty sealed the end of a very dark and confusing era.
I do not doubt for a second that the numbers of the Massacre have been zoomed. In my own country we’re all too familiar with such games. And I also fully agree that the Japanese occupation was nothing compared to Mao, and again I can see my own country’s experience mirroring that.
My only point of content is with those trying to completely do away with Nanjing: whoever has a gram of human compassion cannot do so. And to repeat myself, if revisionsim has any chance of making a dent, it must shed such foolish conceptions. I suspect Nanjing was real, horribly real.
The article says that the massacres were reported by war propaganda books and that the population of the city did not decrease during the occupation.
to merlin:
from the pdf (p.2) i cited:
“Even the KMT propaganda piece Record of Atrocities Committed by the Japanese Enemy published in July 1938, less than a year after the capture of Nanking, and produced in order to publicize acts of cruelty by the Japanese military, contained no criticism of any “massacre” in Nanking. As Higashinakano pointed out, it is clear there were no references to or criticism of any “massacre” in Nanking at the 300 or so press briefings, attended also by foreign journalists, held by the KMT government after the fall of Nanking.”
luckily the atom bomb was dropped, and the cruelty visited on the chinese avenged.
i’d make the general point that it’s potentially dangerous to write history off the back of war trials.