Jeff Kingston's Aug. 10 article, "War and reconciliation: a tale of two countries," states that Chinese "uncritically accept Iris Chang's monochromatic view of war memory in Japan." Monochromatic? Hey, steady on. We are not talking about a war novel. We are dealing with a properly researched piece of work, one of the few authoritative texts on the Nanjing Massacre.
Iris Chang was not as one-eyed as some of her detractors might want others to believe. Toward the end of her book, she writes: "I would have to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise."
She writes of the efforts of prominent Japanese academics like professor Saburo Ienaga to set the historical record straight. She decries, however, the efforts of a rightwing elite, be it in the top levels of the Japanese government or in academia, to deny or to obfuscate the truth.
If, as Kingston maintains, there is widespread awareness among the Japanese of what really happened in Nanjing 70 years ago, why have there been no acts of official contrition? Why do the Japanese commemorate the bombing of Hiroshima but not the massacre in Nanjing? Why have the voices of Nanjing deniers like Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara often been heard, but rarely those of people like professor Ienaga? And why must the duty to promote peace fall on a holocaust museum in Nanjing instead of on Yasukuni Shrine?
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