Reevaluating Time's "Reevaluating the Rape of Nanjing"

Time Magazine has a column by Coco Master titled, "Reevaluating the Rape of Nanjing". It's a very interesting article. The part on how Coco Master felt some shame about his Japanese heritage after learning about the massacre that occurred in Nanjing by the Japanese in 1937 was very moving, touching, blah blah, all that jazz.

But the one thing that really bothers me about the piece is the how he includes information from two professors on the fault of the United States in supposedly covering up the atrocities. He writes that

Serious historians do not doubt that the massacre took place. But there is much disagreement over the details. Were 200,000 people killed or 300,000? Were 20,000 raped or 80,000? The whole truth may never be known. According to Samuel Yamashita, a professor at Pomona College in the U.S., details of the massacre and other atrocities were swept under the rug in postwar Japan, because the U.S. needed a strong Japanese nation on their side to counterbalance the growing threat of Communist China. "Execute a few heinous individuals and forget about everything else." That's how Joshua Fogel, a modern Asian studies historian at York University in the U.S., describes the American response to the massacre. "Just imagine if that had been the solution for postwar Germany rather than the Nuremberg Trials," Fogel says.

I found some serious errors in these conclusions:

- Why would during the post-WWII years the United States have "swept under the rug" these atrocities to counterbalance Communist China. China was a republic until 1949, four years after WWII had ended. Though the Chinese Civil War did begin again in 1947, the United States did not actively need a strong Japan to support Chiang Kai-shek's vicious regime. It didn't even know if it should support the nationalists.

- And why would the US want a strong Japan? The US just fought a massive war against it. At that time, a militaristic Japan was more cause for concern than a communist China.

- Onto what Joshua Fogel says about "executing a few heinious individuals and forget about everything else". That's not true either. 25 major Japanese political figures and over 5,700 Japanese nationals were charged for war crimes under the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. That doesn't sound like "just a few" individuals to me. Oh, and these tribunals began in 1946 and ended in 1948, before the rise of Communist China.

I think the paragraph was included to get the attention of the American readers of the article. As with most things American, if we aren't in it, we aren't interested.

But that doesn't mean you have to place blame on the US for the coverup of the rape of Nanjing. That won't alleviate your shame anytime soon.


**I know my sources are wikipedia, which isn't the most reliabled, but I wanted to type this up in a hurry. I had nothing else. **