While Chang faced a barrage of attacks from other historians, as well as from the publisher contracted to translate her book into Japanese, the debate over what happened in Nanking from December 1937 to January 1938 had been raging before the publication of her book. Japan, for instance, remains divided over the number of Chinese killed in Nanking during those six weeks. The massacre camp generally supports the Tokyo War Crimes Trials figure of “upwards of 100,000” deaths; skeptics claim 15,000 to 50,000, while others venture only up to 10,000. Outside of Japan, James Yin and Shi Young, whose work Chang frequently cited, place the minimum death toll as high as 369,366. [...]
My grandfather, or Yaya, as I call him, grew up in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. Life among the soldiers was “not much different,” he’d say when he visited us in Texas. Of course, he had to bow whenever he passed the Japanese on the street. Rickshaw drivers couldn’t complain when the soldiers didn’t pay them. If you failed to remove your hat in the presence of a Japanese soldier, he might beat you with the butt of his rifle and throw you in jail. Yaya himself was never beaten, but he witnessed beatings every day, he said. [...]
With Japan’s recent re-election of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, who aspires to legitimize the military renounced long ago in the country’s post-war constitution, China has greater reason to revive its image as an imperial conqueror. Even as Abe and China’s President Xi Jinping talk of a “fresh start,” Xi stays mum during the recent anniversary of the start of the Nanking massacre. Territorial disputes roil the East China Sea, and China expands in the South China Sea. And there is the escalating threat of China’s strained ally North Korea, as well as America’s volatile role in all this. The answer to who will lead East Asia into its future may hinge on how each country makes sense of its muddled past. Or makes use.
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