Whitewashing history ? ---- truth of Nanjing massacre (old version)

It is known that Nanjing massacre was caused in 1937 with 300,000 victims in Nanjing by Japanese imperial military. But do you know that it has still been seriously discussed in Japan? These days, there published increasing number of books that claims that Chinese communism party made up most of the pics to make the incident to look brutal.

As far as I know, I had seen seldom books, until 2000 written in Japanese ,that question the existence of Nanjing massacre. Most of the books simply investigated brutality of the Japanese crime until then.

I ran a search in amazon.co.jp for the books published about Nanjing massacre, finding 176 kinds of copies otbainable online. It's an enourmous number.



Surprisingly, only one book out of best sold 10 books considers it positive about the existence, while the rest of 9 are likely to be negative. One of them is even titled , "We investigated Iris Chang's book and found the manipulation of information by Chinese communism."

May be Chinese communism made up pics. I don't know. But we'll keep an eye on whether Japanese people just want to whitewash the history. Anyway, what I can say about it is that Japan is a democratic country. Let them publish whatever they want, and they'll know what should be believed. Whichever the Japanese conclusions are going to be, I'll respect the general opinions after open discussions rather than the conclusion by a dictated country.

Just as Japan, China must give citizens the right of speech and make them dispute. Otherwise, people get the wrong idea. They were taught that Chinese communism made Japan surrender, not America. And the people still believe that. How can they know if they can't access some webpages because of strict censorship.

The big difference is the freedom of speech. Notice that those rightists in Japan finally emerged after 50-year open discussion!

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Look what I got! This is the best seller in Japan on the Nanjing's investigation. Since I'm living far from Japan, I ordered one copy from amazon. The book examines 143 pictures that are supposed to the evidence of Nanjing Massacre, and explains how those pics are made up by Chinese Communists. The title says "Analyzing the photographic evidence of Nanking massacre."

I'll spend several weeks to read and introduce some of them to you.
I already read some of this, and found it interesting, although I don't think all of his claims are acceptable.

The main point I want to emphasize in my colomn is the gap between American and Japanese. Look at the picture below.

This pic was taken just after Nanjing was captured by Japan in Dec. 24th 1937. Tokyo Asahi Newspaper highly publicized the victory of Japan with this pic in which kids are flocking to pick up sweets from Japanese military. The author sets out his investigation of pics with this "TRUE" pics, saying "why would they come out and pick up? Weren't they very intimidated by brutal Japanese military?"