TOKYO — Once again, Japan is at war over history.
This time, the flash point is California author Iris Chang. The Japanese edition of her best-selling "The Rape of Nanking" was scrapped late last month after a long-running dispute between Chang and her Japanese publisher, and the controversy has cast a spotlight on this country's ambivalence about its wartime past.
In a bizarre twist, Chang has come under attack not only from Japanese ultranationalists--who assert that the 1937 massacre of Chinese civilians by Japanese troops never took place--but also from Japanese liberals, who insist it happened but allege that Chang's flawed scholarship damages their cause.
Chang accuses the publisher of caving in to right-wing threats. But Hiromu Haga, editor in chief of publishing firm Kashiwa Shobo, said it wasn't the threats but Chang's unwillingness to correct what he alleges were significant errors that led to the cancellation of publication. Chang in turn charges that many of the "errors" were not mistakes at all but differences of opinion, and she accuses Haga of trying to censor her book.
Meanwhile, some Japanese and U.S. scholars are concerned that the increasingly bitter flap will leave Westerners with the misimpression that little has been written in Japan about Japanese atrocities in Asia, including those in Nanking, now known as Nanjing.
In fact, the National Diet Library holds at least 42 books about the Nanjing massacre and Japan's wartime misdeeds, of which 23 have been published since 1992, 21 of them by liberals investigating Japan's wartime atrocities.
In addition, geriatric Japanese soldiers have begun publishing their memoirs and giving speeches and interviews in increasing numbers, recounting the atrocities they committed or witnessed. And after years of government-enforced denial, Japanese middle school textbooks now carry accounts of the Nanjing massacre as accepted truth.
"Dozens of Japanese scholars are now actively engaged in research on every aspect of the war," historian Joshua A. Fogel of UC Santa Barbara wrote in a review of Chang's book. "Indeed, we know many details of the Nanjing massacre, Japanese sexual exploitation of 'comfort women,' and biological and chemical warfare used in China because of the trailblazing research" of Japanese scholars.
Revisionist View Still Top Seller
