The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame (Studies of the Pacific Basin Institute)

Rating:
Summary: History can show the future
Review: After study and work in Japan for 8 years, I am sure there are very little Japanese can really face the Nanjing Massacre and the Japan's National Shame. Most Japanese only consider the war made Japan as a victim of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but they never think about the reason of these victims are linked to the victims in Nanjing Massacre. The history can tell the future. It means, without understand the link between Nanjing and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, history may be repeated again in future. God bless both Chinese and Japanese to stop this cycle.

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Summary: A must-read for all with interest in the Nanking massacre
Review: Honda Katsuichi has written what may possibly be the most brutally important book yet published in English on the truth about the Nanjing massacre, something which he conceived as an investigative journalist after interviewing tens of victims on his journey to China. It's a factual, highly authentic account of eyewitnesses' interviews after Katsuichi traces out en route batches of living victims which has survived those terrible times. Back in Japan, its Japanese original version was one of the few publications which forced academic recognition that the Nanjing massacre is no longer something which could be swept under carpet.

I wonder why some Japanese reviewers still strenuously refused to admit the truth of the matter, a thing which is even in Japan no longer denied. Are they really so uninformed by the Japanese mainstream history academia, or is it really something else? Taking one misleading example of the "truth" as reported by a previous reviewer, Hiromi, China has always tended to downplay the massacre in Mao's time, not to up-play it. One wonders how "anti-Japanese" Honda is; what he has done is merely to uncover the truth, and the accusation is the equivalent of branding a German who admits to the Holocaust as an "anti-German". This book is certainly even more credible and better-written than Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking, since it is written by a Japanese for the Japanese themselves.

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Summary: Typical Anti-Japanese Japanese.
Review: Honda Katsuichi is self-admitted Anti-Japanese Japanese. He openly states that he is never responsible to what "happened" in China during the war like this so-called Nanjing Massacre which he eagerly propagates because he is a "citizen of the world", not a "evil" Japanese.
It is true that aggressive nationalists have been targetted him as a "wicked" left-winger for years so Honda has to disguise with a wig and sunglasses. I am not sorry for him, but, still, I disapprove of those nationalists' attack on him. Violence only drives real patriots into a tight corner giving excuse to the Anti-Japanese propagandists. On top of that, it is totally unnecessary to use violence to debunk Honda's sloppy arguments.
Although this book has been praised by some scholars such as Carol Gluck and John W. Dower, I do not believe this book has scholarly value.
First, as it is mentioned in this book, the testimonies of the Chinese "survivors" of the Massacre were taken under tight control of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party. When Honda first went to China and was allowed to interview those "survivors" in 70's, the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong were still alive. "Survivors" never missed to say that they were very happy now thanks to the Chairman Mao.
Besides, many of them include testemonies of the ex-Japanese soldiers had been debunked by other "Nanking Massacre" researchers as fabrications. If you read those stories of the "survivors" carefully, you will find many of the witnesses themselves actually contain a lot of hearsay.
Secondly, this may not be Honda's fault, but, this book misleads readers by mentioning novelists Ishikawa Tatsuzo and Hino Ashihei as plain "writers" and their novels as "books" so that readers can assume that they are writers who were writing documentary stuffs. In original Japanese version, Honda clearly wrote "the novelist Ishikawa" and his "novel", however, in this translation those words were carefully omitted.
Any way, Ishikawa himself later stated that he never saw massacre in China at all. There was no massacre scene in the novel in the first place, so why Honda mentioned this novel as an evidence of the massacre?
Lastly, I should warn you that there are ex-Japanese soldiers who "confessed they committed the Massacre", who were, in fact, brain-washed in China from '51 (after suffering in Siberia for 6 years as P.o.Ws which was ex-Soviet Union's violation to the Potsdam Declaration) to late 50's. Honda mentioned one of them, Uno Shintaro (p130,n2) as an eyewitness for a "massacre" by samurai sword.
As for the notorious "killing contest", it was merely a tale of bravery to boost the Japanese soldiers' morale. First it appeared in Tokyo Nichi-Nichi newspaper as the two officers' story to kill a hundred of the Chinese soldiers with just one sword which is truely absurd because a samurai sword can never be capable of such performance. Besides, the officers belonged to an artillery, so they had never had a chance to fight a close combat. Any way, it was a combat story after all. Nevertheless, Chinese and English newspapers translated the story as "civilian killing contest". Those papers were produced as "hard" evidences at the War Crimes Court in Nanking after the war and the two officers were executed for the story. (The Court of Tokyo Trial dropped the case because newspapers cannot be accepted as evidences.)
It is clear that this is a book written by an anti-Japanese Japanese for a propaganda purpose co-operated with the Chinese Communist Party propaganda department. I urge all readers to read this book with cool, critical mind even though some renowned scholars have given imprudent applause to it.

Rating:
Summary: Journalist?
Review: I do not think Katsuichi Honda is a journalist but an agent for the Chinese Communist Party.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent book with a contemptible introduction
Review: In a disturbing and sometimes stomach-turning account of the series of massacres, mass rapes, mutilations, tortures and other atrocities the Imperial Japanese Army perpetrated from its landings at Hangzhou bay all the way along the bloody "road to Nanjing," Honda Katsuichi clearly establishes that the barbarous behavior of the troops who took the capital was no unique aberration, but rather business as usual writ tragically large. By juxtaposing excerpts from chauvinistic wartime Japanese press coverage and the official histories of Japanese army units with the recollections and diaries of survivors, witnesses, and participants, he also presents a sobering picture of the gulf between perception and reality that in many cases persists in Japan to this day.

Mr. Honda presents much of his material with the clinical detachment of a police homicide report--complete with photographs and diagrams showing the various positions of perpetrators and victims as well as the lay of the land where the crimes were committed--thus largely avoiding the kind of partisan posturing that often plagues atrocity histories. There are occasional signs of the traditional pro-Chinese Communist biases of the Japanese left, but they inform rather than overwhelm the narrative. In spite of, or perhaps even because of, the slightly cold-blooded presentation, the violence, brutality, and downright evil described throughout somehow never lose the ability to shock. I found the tales of cruelty and human depravity to be so gut-wrenching that I had to stop reading the book after five in the evening for fear of the twisted and harrowing nightmares it was routinely inspiring. This is not a book for the faint of heart.

One can only marvel at the courage that it must have taken for Mr. Honda, who was the first Japanese since the war to enter many of the small towns on the road to Nanjing, to not only confront the past and the hatreds and hostilities it inspired, but to record it in uncompromising detail. That his efforts have been largely met with hostility, indifference, and the "disgraceful anti-internationalist behavior of the Japanese government and the conservative forces," seems not to have discouraged him. He appears content to present the truth and to let it affect those of his countrymen who are prepared to deal with it.

As laudable as Mr. Honda's achievements are, I cannot recommend this book without reservation. For as valuable as the work itself is, its publication in English represents the shameful complicity of some members of the Japanese left and their American associates in a mean-spirited right wing smear campaign designed to discredit Iris Chang and her work THE RAPE OF NANKING. That this was clearly the goal becomes evident when one reads editor Frank Gibney's gratuitous hatchet job of an introduction. The outrageous sophistries Mr. Gibney tries to pass off as scholarship are far too numerous to detail, but are perhaps best represented by his incredible claim that Ms. Chang "hopelessly exaggerates an 'atmosphere of intimidation' in Japan" a scant fourteen pages before we learn from Mr. Honda that after he published an account of the Nanjing Massacre in 1971, he was subsequently "targeted by Japan's extreme right-wing forces and received a number of threats which prompted me to move out of my home and keep my address and telephone number a secret, a policy that I have continued TO THIS DAY. BUNGEI SHUNJU and other magazines put out by conservative publishers have continued their attacks on me FOR MORE THAN TWENTY YEARS [emphasis added]." Nor was Mr. Gibney apparently aware of the blurb appearing on the back of the book, of which he is the ostensible editor, in which a man relates meeting Mr. Honda "wearing a wig and sunglasses in order to conceal his identity from right-wing politicians and activists." It is hard to see how such an atmosphere could be "hopelessly exaggerated," but here as elsewhere Mr. Gibney's partisan ardor seems remarkably unburdened by considerations of mere reality.

Mr. Honda has produced an outstanding work that serves as a cautionary tale of the evil that men can do to one another, and that was once done by his country's army. He has taken a bold step by exposing that evil not only to his fellow Japanese, but now to the world. He sees himself as "an ardent Japanese patriot," and in the tradition of Ron Ridenhour, Seymour Hersh, Daniel Ellsberg, Neil Sheehan, and belatedly even Robert McNamara, I believe that his is the truest type of patriotism. He is a credit to his country and to mankind generally. His association with Mr. Gibney is unfortunate.

Though I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this tragic chapter of world history, I strongly advise against giving the introduction any credence whatsoever.

Rating:
Summary: Somewhat useful material, which begins with CIA hatchet job
Review: Mr Honda Katsuichi does a very good job of compiling an exhaustive litany of personal interviews from participants and victims of the Japanese campaign to Nanjing in 1937. He sets the political and military background of the campign to provide enough context in which to see the subsequent evolution of rape, murder, looting and eventually genocide.

The strengths of the book are its personal narrative quality, and attention to detail. The sketch maps are excellent, and the footnotes are a must read, as many refer to details of sensitive issues even today, including frank discussion of feuds betweem Mr Katsuichi and other Japanes journalists over the "truth" of Nanjing. The author has made several trips to China and has interviewed many people--the "cascade effect" of so many personal stories, dispersed in time and space, is to render the denials of Nanjing absurd.

If you are looking for a book that directly considers and confronts the Japanese military culture, the way of the warrior, the psychology of the killer and decision and implementation of genocidel policies, this is not it. However, as a primary source reader for a truly troubling episode in 20th century history, it is invaluable.

A subtle advantage of this book for the more than casual reader of genocide is the differences that arise between the Japanese, german, Russian and Rwandan models. While the beheadings are a "popular" aspect of the Nanjing story, there was also a lot of mass machine-gunning, something not ususally found, for example, in the German example [Entefest excepted].

Bottom Line:

If you are a serious reader of genocide, this is a book you should read, but if you are looking for a one volume "primer" on Japanese genocide against the Chinese in WWII, this is not it.