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Nanking Massacre

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It has been more than seventy years since the Nanking atrocity of 1937-38. This event is better known as the “Rape of Nanking” or “Nanking Massacre” (Wakabayashi). Even today, there is no healthy dialogue between the countries of China and Japan in regards to the atrocity that occurred there so long ago. The last time that there were any concessions made in regards to the atrocities in China were during and after World War II. Much of the historiography has been limited due the amount of silence that has been present throughout the world. Because of this, research about the atrocity had just recently begun to surface. Due to this fact, there are many factors that are brought into question when looking specifically at a historical event, especially one that is tied to such brutal emotion. The authors I have chosen each attempt to explain why there has been such a delay in Nanking’s historiography and at the same time attempt to explain what actually occurred there in 1937-38. I selected three books for this paper. The first is The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38 by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. The book was released on the 70th anniversary of the fall of the Chinese city of Nanking to the Japanese army. The perspective offered is by majority non-American with the exception being two contributors. Wakabayashi discusses what lies at the core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that hinder healthy Sino-Japanese relations to this day. The Nanking Atrocity, 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. Wakabayashi further discusses how the west has constantly held broad misconceptions of the events that took place in

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