15 Questions re: Jeff Kingston’s Japan Focus Essay (2008) Regarding the Nanking Massacre

Statue of author and journalist Iris Chang at the Nanking Massacre Memorial in Nanjing, China | Image via Behind the Curtain

Dr. Jeff Kingston is a historian of contemporary Japan who occupies a number of important positions at Temple University’s Japan campus.

In 2008, he published the following essay on the subject of memorials and Nanking Massacre controversy; this essay is the focus of the questions that follow:

Jeff Kingston, “Nanjing’s Massacre Memorial: Renovating War Memory in Nanjing and Tokyo,” Japan Focus, August 22, 2008 <http://japanfocus.org/-Jeff-Kingston/2859>.

In 2010, he followed up with another visit to China’s various war museums in Sichuan province, and wrote an excellent essay about that experience for the Japan Times.  (A compendium of his rather impressive output for that newspaper is available here.)  I was pleased to meet Dr. Kingston in Chengdu in fall 2010 when he was preparing one of those essay, and very much enjoyed a roundtable that included Dr. Kingston, Chinese composer/intellectual Gao Ping, myself, and a large number of “beverages with Chinese characteristics.”

Inspired by Kingston’s work, I took a trip myself to Nanking in December 2010 and wrote briefly about that visit here, with some original photographs.

A note in italics for my students at Queen’s University:

Please read the whole of Dr. Kingston’s 2008 essay (linked in bold face above) with the exception of the sections labelled:

“Politicizing History” // Monolithic Myths: Fragile Relations // Conclusion

You should then respond to one or more of these questions in the form of a comment of about 200 words on this entry.  I recommend using your first name and last initial to identify yourself, or you can get creative and send me an e-mail with your assumed name so I know who you are.   Please include the number(s) of the specific question to which you are responding! 

Also, be aware that the first two paragraphs are a quick set-up simply to show that the writing concerns a very contemporary issue, circa 2008; there is no need for readers to get too hung up on the details of those two paragraphs and the essay begins in earnest in paragraph 3. 

15 Questions re: Jeff Kingston’s Japan Focus Essay (2008) Regarding the Nanking Massacre

1. What is the relationship between the larger theme of China’s “century of humiliation” and the memory of the Rape of Nanking?  Is it historically accurate to call the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 the culmination of the “century of humiliation”?

2. What problems and opportunities does Nanking represent for “patriotic education” in China?

3. A note, and then a question: Kingston writes that the Chinese government/ Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chose not to commemorate the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 2008, and that this might be cause to see an emerging moderation from the CCP.  I write about the commemoration of July 7, the Marco Polo Bridge, in 2005, when anti-Japanese themes were at full volume, and now they are back in 2012 to full volume.  The easy question: What was the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, and why should it be commemorated or at least recalled?

4. What is Yasukuni Shrine, and the Yushukan Museum?  Is Kingston justified in juxtaposing the two museums (Yushukan and Nanking Massacre Memorial)?  Is it fair to say that Kingston accurately shows how the museums are actually in dialogue with one another?

5. Where does the title “forgotten holocaust” with regard to Nanking come from?

6. Why does China take such pain to emphasize the casualty figure of 300,000 deaths in Nanking in 1937-38?  How is this different from the official count for the massacre from the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Tokyo Trials, 1946-48)?

7. In what ways does Kingston believe that “the numbers debate” or undue focus on “the abacus of history” plays into the hands of Japanese revisionists (who wish to reduce the historical significance of Nanking or deny it altogether)?

8. Regarding periodization: Histories of the Battle of Shanghai and the Rape of Nanking tend to be taken more or less separately.  Does Kingston’s essay point us in the direction of a new periodization where the Battle of Shanghai and the Nanking Massacre who are seen as part of the same fabric?  Might this solve also the question of “300,000 deaths” in the Nanking inferno?

9. What role did the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) play in defense of Nanking in 1937?  Why did the CCP for so long avoid telling the story of the massacre to the Chinese people?  (Hint: It has something to do with Taiwan, and the year 1949; check your lecture notes.)

10. What happened to the KMT (Kuomintang/Nationalist Party, led by Chiang Kai-shek and the leading party in the Republic of China) general who was in charge at Nanking?  Does the behavior of Tang Shengzhi fit in with General Iwane Matsui’s 1932 allegations about the selfishness and disunity of Chinese generals and warlords?

11. Cindy Zhang’s e-mails to Dr. Kingston are an interesting example of a contemporary view of the Nanking Massacre.  Why does the author solicit these views, rather than simply convey the content of the museum that it is his task to review?

12. Cindy Zhang says she is somewhat emotionally removed from the history of the Nanking Massacre even as she is seeking to understand it.  Is this the right attitude to take?  Why or why not? Shouldn’t she be empathizing with the victims?

13. Cindy Zhang brings to light problems created by the Chinese government’s consistent recent portrayal of itself as a historical victim, especially as regards Nanking. What kind of problems are these?

14. Dr. Kingston notes what he perceives as the hallowness of the “Peace Tower” and reflective lake that forms the end of the museum experience.  While you may not yet have been to the museum yourself, can you think of why this might be?  Could the CCP instead mount a kind of montage about the need for revenge or lay out specific goals for overtaking and beating Japan in other ways?

15. Take a survey of the endnotes and citations at the end of Kingston’s extensive essay.  Does this appear to be a credible piece of scholarship?  Focusing in at endnote #9, would you be comfortable citing the same essay that Kingston does, or would you need to read it first?

Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, the Official English Homepage

Nanking Film Trailers

Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman, “Nanking,” 2007, a documentary interspersing authentic historical footage with reenacted readings of journals, diaries, and letters by Westerners who were in the Chinese capital city in 1937-38.

Lu Chuan’s “City of Life and Death” (2009), a black-and-white cinematic masterpiece. Realism, and the Japanese point of view, is the advanced technique taken by this Chinese director.  ”City of Life and Death” did quite well nevertheless in the PRC box office.

and an excerpt from Lu Chuan’s film showing a Japanese Army drum ceremony and festival dance in Nanking:

and the whole film, with Chinese subtitles:

“John Rabe” by Florian Gallenberger (2009), about the German businessman and Nazi Party member who stayed in the Nanking Safety Zone and saved perhaps up to 20,000 Chinese lives.  The whole film is available in German on YouTube, but English subtitles are available elsewhere:

“Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking,” a production put together to honor the life and research of the young Chinese-American journalist whose 1997 book of the same name blew the lid off the public Nanking debate and continues to generate controversy:

and finally, a US wartime classic, the 1944 propaganda film “The Battle of China,” which runs nearly an hour long:

Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor”

In the process of teaching about East Asia during World War II (and the road to that conflict, whose origins in Asia are still controversial), I have frequently made use of Bertolucci’s Oscar-winning film, “The Last Emperor.”  Much of the film was shot on location in the Forbidden City in Beijing and in various palaces and government buildings which are still existent in Changchun dating from the Manchukuo era. To my delight, the film was made available in good definition not too long ago on YouTube.

Much of the film was shot on location in Fushun at the old center for Japanese war criminals “reform.”  My own work on this site can be referenced at:

Adam Cathcart. “War Criminals and the Road to Sino-Japanese Normalization: Zhou Enlai and the Shenyang Trials, 1954-1956,” with Patricia Nash, Twentieth-Century China 34:2 (April, 2009): 89-111.

Reprinted in Caroline Rose, ed., Sino-Japanese Relations : History, Politics, Economy, Security : Volume II: History Revisited, Critical Concepts in Asian Studies (London: Routledge, June 2011): 49-70.

Revolutionary Continuity

Pyongyang, October 12, 2012 – Image via NK Leadership Watch

Cold War Analysis of Chinese History

Includes interviews with Pearl S. Buck and Theodore White, plenty of Orientalism (the music score is a treatise itself in stereotypes and aural affects) and such gems as describing Shanxi warlord Yan Hsi-shan as “the treacherous opium addict” and the precursor of the notion of China as dominated by “the poet and the executioner.”

Bombing North Korea

via Curtis Melvin:

Naturally, the air fields employed for the bombing were not in South Korea, but instead Japan.

For more information on Japanese roles in the Korean War, the tremendous scholar Tessa Morris-Suzuki recently released an incredible research paper: Tessa Morris-Suzuki, “Post-War Warriors: Japanese Combatants in the Korean War,” | 「戦後の軍人−朝鮮戦争で戦った日本人戦士」 , Japan Focus, July 30, 2012.

Sino-Japanese Strife and Accomodation: An Academic View

Deng Xiaoping with Naboru Takeshita, August 1988 – links to description of Deng’s 1978 trip to Japan

Sometimes through all the contemporary hyperventilating, it can be considered an almost extreme position to look for historical context that lies apart from the mainstream narrative of eternal, almost existential, national conflict between China and Japan.  In a recent journal article, two scholars based in Stockholm have taken the steps of looking for that context.  As the abstract explains:

For the last four decades Sino-Japanese relations have been characterized by steadily growing economic and sociocultural interactions. Yet, greater interdependence has developed in tandem with bilateral tensions. Many analysts have attempted to explain the latter as a result of Japan trying to balance or contain the burgeoning growth of Chinese capabilities. In this article, we question and qualify this widespread understanding of Japan’s response to China’s rise by examining how Japan has handled China’s rise between 1978 and 2011. More precisely, how has Japan dealt with China’s long-term core strategic interests, which are embodied in the post-1978 Chinese “grand strategy” that is believed to have been instrumental to China’s rise? Our main finding is that to a significant degree Japan has accommodated the rise of China rather than balanced against it.

The full text can be accessed by those with an in at a major research library; I’ll endeavor to plow through the whole thing soon and return with a report of some kind. In the meantime it’s all Manchukuo, all the time, for my own Sino-Japanese studies this short week.

Anti-Japanese Protests in Beijing, and the History of Diaoyu Protests

Three suitably breathless Global Times articles and photo galleries are linked below, but for a sane appraisal of at least part of what is going on, I recommend MIT professor M. Taylor Fravel’s September 15 article.  Respectively, the articles below deal with the protests in Beijing, Ferraris at the protests in Beijing, and the newly-publicized “40-year social movement” to protect Diaoyu/Senkakus with liberal borrowing from Taiwan’s archives.  Unfortunately, none of this seems to get at what happened in San Francisco in 1951 and what the PRC said about the issue then, but then again, that is what Cold War historians of East Asia (like myself) are supposed to do.

Oprah vs. Juche: Reviewing the Laura Ling/Euna Lee North Korea Memoirs

Brian Gleason is a young analyst of North Korean refugee issues and international studies at Yonsei University in Seoul.  Through his work on the site SinoNK.com, Gleason and I connected, and determined to write an in-depth review of two memoirs that ostensibly dealt with the refugee issue, security along the Chinese-North Korean border, and international politics.  An earlier version of this review was there published on SinoNK.com on July 3.  The extended print version is now available in Korean Quarterly, as the featured article in the second section of their summer issue, jpgs of which are offered below with the publisher’s permission.

Don’t Believe the Hype

courtesy Rodong Sinmun, August 15, 2012

“Amazing!” says Bloomberg, channeling some rather bullish conference remarks by a Chinese member of the relevant investment committee, “North Korean special economic zones (SEZs) on the Sino-Korean frontier might be ‘the next Shenzhen’.”

Now stop for a second and read for the silence in this story.  North Korean representatives did not even attend the conference in question.

North Korean representatives don’t even attend most of the major regional conferences that regularly take place in Changchun, which is a (by North Korean standards) relatively fleet overland journey from the DPRK border.

Next to nothing has been done at one of the island zones near Dandong, as I reported from the border zone last month.  Until the DPRK trusts their own representatives enough to send semi-empowered delegations to gin up foreign investment, they will dependent on enthusiastic Chinese boosters, whose patience – as even China Daily and Global Times are now noting with greater obviousness – may ultimately wear thin.