December 13, 2007 marks the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Chinese city of Nanking to the Japanese army. The "Nanking Atrocity" of winter 1937-8, also known as the "Nanking Massacre," lies at the core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers the most recent scholarship about what actually happened in Nanking and places those findings in the context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to the event ever since; an event that is coined, on the Chinese side, as "the forgotten Holocaust," after the subtitle of Iris' Chang's 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to the contributors of this volume. However, the authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that Nanking was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume presents new facts and fresh interpretations with the overriding aim to "complicate the picture" and to debunk myths, expose fallacies, and rectify misconceptions that obstruct a clear understanding of the issues and prevent ultimate reconciliation between China and Japan.

Preface and Acknowledgments
Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Table
Maps

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Messiness of Historical Reality
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

Chapter 2. The Nanking Atrocity: An Interpretive Overview
Fujiwara Akira

Section One: War Crimes and Doubts

Chapter 3. Massacres outside Nanking City
Kasahara Tokushi

Chapter 4. Massacres near Mufushan
Ono Kenji

Chapter 5. Part of the Numbers Issue: Demography and Civilian Victims
David Askew

Chapter 6. The Nanking 100-Man Killing Contest Debate, 1971–75
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

Chapter 7. Radhabinod Pal on the Rape of The Tokyo Judgment and the Guilt of History
Timothy Brook

Section Two: Agressors and Collaborators

Chapter 8. Letters from a Reserve Officer Conscripted to Nanking
Amano Saburô
Chapter 9. Chinese Collaboration in Nanking
Timothy Brook

Chapter 10. Westerners in Occupied Nanking: December 1937 to February 1938
David Askew

Chapter 11. Wartime Accounts of the Nanking Atrocity
Takashi Yoshida

Section Three: Another Denied Holocaust?

Chapter 12. The Nanking Atrocity and Chinese Historical Memory
Joshua A. Fogel

Chapter 13. A Tale of Two Atrocities: Critical Appraisal of American Historiography
Masahiro Yamamoto

Chapter 14. Higashinakano Osamichi: The Last Word in Denial
KasaharaTokushi

Chapter 15. Nanking: Denial and Atonement in Contemporary Japan
Kimura Takuji

Postscript

Chapter 16. Leftover Problems
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

Appendix

Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index