First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang’s bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang’s book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

First published in 2007, The Nanking Atrocity remains an essential resource for understanding the massacre committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanking, China during the winter of 1937-38. Through a series of deeply considered and empirically rigorous essays, it provides a far more complex and nuanced perspective than that found in works like Iris Chang’s bestselling The Rape of Nanking. It systematically reveals the flaws and exaggerations in Chang’s book while deflating the self-exculpatory narratives that persist in Japan even today. This second edition includes an extensive new introduction by the editor reflecting on the historiographical developments of the last decade, in advance of the 80th anniversary of the massacre.

Acknowledgements to the Second Edition
Preface to the First Edition
Wade-Giles to Pinyin Conversion Table
Maps

Introduction: Iris Chang Reassessed: A Polemical Introduction to the Second Edition

Chapter 1. The Messiness of Historical Reality  
Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi

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

SECTION I: WAR CRIMES AND DOUBTS

Chapter 3. Massacres outside Nanking City
Kashara 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 Nanking: The Tokyo Judgment and the Guilt of History
Timothy Brook

SECTION II: AGGRESSORS 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 III: 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
Kasahara Tokushi

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