Memory and Denial: The “Forgotten Holocaust”

The wall bearing the figure 300,000, the official Chinese count of the dead, at the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. Photo: Samudes (Wikimedia user), Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The Rape of Nanking · Chapter 9 of 10

Memory and Denial

How a massacre recorded in detail at the time came to be called “forgotten,” who forgot it, who denied it, and who has kept its memory.

1945–2026Nanjing · Tokyo · New York · Berlin~30 min read

Few atrocities of the twentieth century were documented as fully, as quickly, as the Nanjing Massacre. Within days, foreign journalists had filed reports; within weeks, the Safety Zone committee had sent hundreds of numbered complaints to the Japanese embassy, a German businessman was writing reports to Berlin, and an American missionary was filming the wounded. Within ten years two courts had tried it. Yet when Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, she subtitled it The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and most of her American readers had never heard of it.

The paradox is the subject of this final chapter. The massacre was never forgotten by its survivors, by the city of Nanjing, or by the Japanese historians and journalists who worked on it from the 1960s. It faded from Western public memory because the politics of the Cold War gave no government much reason to keep it alive. In Japan it became the center of a long argument between those who documented it and those who denied or minimized it, an argument fought in books, textbooks and courtrooms. In China it became, from the 1980s, a pillar of national commemoration. And with the last survivors now in their late nineties, the record they left has passed to museums, archives and a UNESCO register.

This chapter follows those threads to the present: the Western silence and its causes; Japanese reckoning and Japanese denial; the textbook and defamation cases; Iris Chang’s book, its achievement and its corrections; the memorials to John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin; the Memorial Hall, the national day of remembrance and the UNESCO inscription; the testimonies of the survivors; and Nanjing as a visitor finds it today. It ends, as the section does, with the victims.

Why the West Forgot

The first reason is simple: the massacre was overtaken by a larger war. Nanjing fell in December 1937. Within four years Europe was at war, Pearl Harbor had been attacked and the Japanese army had committed further mass crimes from Manila to Singapore. For Americans and Britons, the war against Japan began in 1941, and its emblematic atrocities were the Bataan Death March and the treatment of Allied prisoners. Nanjing was a Chinese tragedy in a period before the United States had joined the war, and it was remembered, if at all, as an early chapter.

The second reason was the Cold War. By 1950 Japan was the United States’ principal ally in Asia, its war criminals were being paroled, and the occupation’s “reverse course” had turned from punishing Japan to rebuilding it. China was divided between the People’s Republic on the mainland, which had no diplomatic relations with Washington or Tokyo until the 1970s, and the Nationalist government on Taiwan, which depended on American and increasingly Japanese goodwill. Neither Chinese government made Nanjing a priority. In the People’s Republic the massacre was a crime of the Nationalist era, in a city the Nationalists had failed to defend, and the regime’s historical narrative stressed class struggle and the Communist resistance; it did not commemorate Nanjing nationally until the 1980s.

The third reason concerns scholarship. Before 1997 there was little in English for a general reader. The contemporary documents, the IMTFE judgment and the missionaries’ letters existed, but in archives, out-of-print collections and specialist journals. The historian Robert Entenmann, reviewing Chang’s book in 1998, pointed out that “forgotten” was not quite the right word: Japanese scholars and journalists had written extensively about the massacre since the 1960s, and the subject had never been absent from Chinese memory. What had been forgotten was a Western public memory, and Chang’s book recovered it.

The recovery had begun before her book. From the late 1980s Chinese-American and Chinese-Canadian groups, among them the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, founded in 1994, organized exhibitions, conferences and campaigns for apology and compensation. The fiftieth and sixtieth anniversaries brought documentaries and newspaper retrospectives. In China, meanwhile, the 1982 textbook dispute with Japan prompted the city of Nanjing to build its first major memorial, and the government began to make the massacre a subject of national commemoration. Memory, in other words, did not return by accident. It was brought back by survivors, their descendants, historians and activists on three continents, at a time when the end of the Cold War had loosened the political constraints that had kept it quiet.

Japan’s Reckoning: Historians and Honda Katsuichi

In Japan the wartime public had been told of a victory. The newspapers that celebrated the fall of the capital, and the Tokyo Nichi Nichi reports of the “killing contest,” were the main images Japanese readers received; censorship kept out the rest, and soldiers who knew more mostly kept silent. The Tokyo trial put the massacre on the record in 1946–48, and Japanese newspapers reported it, but in the 1950s the subject receded with the end of the occupation.

Academic work began with the historian Hora Tomio of Waseda University, who published the first major Japanese study in 1967 and estimated about 200,000 Chinese dead in and around the city. The decisive change in public awareness came from journalism. In 1971 Honda Katsuichi, a reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, traveled in China and published a series, Chūgoku no tabi (“Travels in China”), based on interviews with survivors of Japanese atrocities, Nanjing among them. The series provoked a backlash and a long public argument. Honda continued the work in Nankin e no michi (“The Road to Nanjing,” 1987), which retraced the army’s advance from Hangzhou Bay; an English selection appeared in 1999 as The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, edited by Frank Gibney.

From the 1980s a group of Japanese historians, among them Fujiwara Akira, Kasahara Tokushi and Yoshida Yutaka, working through a research society devoted to the incident, built the evidentiary case from Japanese sources: unit records, the diaries of officers and soldiers, and contemporary documents. Kasahara’s Nankin jiken (Iwanami, 1997) estimated “more than 100,000, possibly close to 200,000 or more” deaths in the city and six surrounding counties between December 1937 and March 1938. Even the officers’ association Kaikōsha, which began a project in the 1980s intending to rebut the charges, published unit records and diaries in its 1989 source collection on the battle that documented the mass killing of prisoners; the diary of Lieutenant General Nakajima Kesago of the 16th Division is among them (Chapter 3). A “middle” school, represented by the historian Hata Ikuhiko, accepted mass unlawful killings but put the figure near 40,000.

This Japanese work matters for any reader weighing the evidence. Much of the strongest proof that prisoners were killed in their thousands comes not from Chinese or Western witnesses but from Japanese officers and soldiers, writing in December 1937 for themselves, and from Japanese scholars who collected and published those writings over the objections of veterans’ groups and nationalist critics. The debate inside Japan has been fierce, but it has been a debate about scale and responsibility conducted largely on the basis of Japanese evidence.

The “Illusion” School and the Denial of Nanjing

Denial in its organized form dates from 1973, when Suzuki Akira published a book whose title called the “Great Nanjing Massacre” an illusion (maboroshi). Suzuki’s main target was the “killing contest” story, which he argued had been invented by the reporters. In 1984 Tanaka Masaaki, who had been Matsui Iwane’s secretary, published a book arguing that the massacre as a whole was a fabrication; later work by Tanaka was published in English in 2000 as What Really Happened in Nanking. Tanaka’s credibility suffered a heavy blow when it was shown, in 1985–86, that in editing Matsui’s wartime field diary for publication he had altered the text in several hundred places.

The arguments of the denial school have been consistent. The population of the city was only about 200,000, so 300,000 could not have been killed. The executed men were soldiers who had shed their uniforms and could lawfully be shot as guerrillas. The photographs are fakes or misidentified. The Safety Zone reports were hearsay or propaganda. The Tokyo and Nanjing tribunals were victors’ justice. Associated with this school in the 1990s and 2000s was Higashinakano Shūdō, a professor of intellectual history at Asia University, whose principal book appeared in English as The Nanking Massacre: Fact versus Fiction.

Denial reached Japanese politics. In May 1994 the Justice Minister, Nagano Shigeto, called the massacre a fabrication in a newspaper interview and resigned within days after protests from China and South Korea. Similar statements by politicians and officials have recurred since, each followed by diplomatic protest. But the denial school has never persuaded the Japanese historical profession, and it has lost every important test in court.

The chart shows why the numbers are argued over and why the argument does not help the deniers. The estimates differ because they count different things: civilians only, or also disarmed soldiers and prisoners; inside the walls, or the whole municipality with its six rural counties; six weeks, or four months. They rest on different evidence: burial ledgers, Japanese unit reports, sample surveys, postwar depositions. Serious scholars, Japanese, Chinese and Western, disagree by a factor of several. None of them puts the figure at zero, and virtually every estimate outside the denial school runs to tens of thousands, and even the narrowest scholarly count of unlawful killings exceeds 10,000. The Japanese government’s own position, quoted below, accepts that noncombatants were killed.

Textbooks and the Ienaga Cases

In postwar Japan school textbooks must be approved by the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry’s screening of what they said about the war became a long legal and diplomatic dispute. The historian Ienaga Saburō spent more than thirty years in litigation against the screening system. He filed his first suit in 1965 and his third in 1984, after the Ministry demanded changes to his high school history text, including its descriptions of the Nanjing massacre, of sexual violence by Japanese troops at Nanjing, and of the army’s Unit 731.

The courts upheld the screening system itself as constitutional but found that particular demands had been unlawful. In October 1993 the Tokyo High Court held that the Ministry had abused its discretion in its demands concerning the Nanjing massacre and the sexual assaults there, among others. On 29 August 1997 the Supreme Court found the Ministry’s demands to delete passages on Unit 731, on the sexual assaults at Nanjing and on one other subject to have been an abuse of discretion and awarded Ienaga ¥400,000. The amount was nominal; the principle, that the state could not require textbooks to omit documented atrocities, was not.

The textbook question became international in 1982, when reports that the Ministry had pressed authors to soften language about Japan’s invasion of China provoked formal protests from China and South Korea. Since then, Japanese middle school and high school textbooks have generally mentioned the massacre, though with varying wording on numbers; a 1999 Los Angeles Times report noted that middle school texts covered it and that the National Diet Library held more than forty books on the subject. The disputes have continued with each round of approvals, especially over texts sponsored by nationalist groups.

Survivors in Court: Xia Shuqin and the Defamation Cases

The most direct test of denial came in civil courts, when survivors and journalists who had been accused of lying sued their accusers, or were sued by them.

Xia Shuqin was eight years old on 13 December 1937 when Japanese soldiers entered her family’s house at No. 5 Xinlukou; seven of the nine people in the house were killed, and she survived. John Magee filmed the scene afterwards, with a caption describing what had happened, and she testified about it for the rest of her life. Higashinakano and another writer, Matsumura Toshio, suggested in print that she was not the girl described by Magee and that her account was false. In 2006 a court in Nanjing awarded her 1.6 million yuan in damages against both men. More important was the Japanese case. Japanese courts found that Higashinakano had defamed her, and on 5 February 2009 the Supreme Court of Japan finalized an award of ¥4 million against him and his publisher, Tendensha. The decisive point was evidentiary: he could not show that Xia and the girl in Magee’s film were different people.

The “killing contest” was tested the other way. In 2003 relatives of the two executed lieutenants, Mukai Toshiaki and Noda Tsuyoshi, sued Honda Katsuichi and the Asahi and Mainichi newspapers for defamation. The Tokyo District Court rejected the suit on 23 August 2005, holding that the 1937 reports could not be called fabrications, and the Supreme Court let that judgment stand in December 2006 (Chapter 8). In both cases Japanese judges, applying ordinary rules of evidence, found the documentary record more reliable than the deniers’ arguments.

What the Government of Japan Says

Japan’s official position has been stable for decades and is less often quoted than the statements of individual politicians. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs states in its published questions and answers that the government of Japan “believes that it cannot be denied that following the entrance of the Japanese Army into Nanjing in 1937, the killing of noncombatants, looting and other acts occurred.” It adds that there are numerous theories about the number of victims and that it is difficult to determine the correct figure. (Earlier versions of the page referred to the killing of “a large number of” noncombatants; the current wording omits that phrase.) The same answer recalls the “deep remorse and heartfelt apology” expressed in Prime Minister Murayama Tomiichi’s statement on the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s end in 1995, carried forward by Prime Minister Koizumi Jun’ichirō in 2005 and stated to be upheld in Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s statement of 14 August 2015.

Between 2006 and 2010 the two governments sponsored a Japan–China Joint History Research project. Its report, released on 31 January 2010, presented parallel papers. The Chinese members gave the official figure of more than 300,000. The Japanese members wrote that a massacre had occurred and that estimates ranged from 20,000 and 40,000 up to 200,000, depending on definitions. The disagreement over numbers, in other words, is now largely about scale, not about whether the massacre happened.

Iris Chang and The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang (1968–2004), born in Princeton, New Jersey, the daughter of Chinese immigrant scientists, was a journalist and author whose first book, Thread of the Silkworm (1995), was a biography of the rocket scientist Qian Xuesen. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II was published by Basic Books on 21 November 1997. It spent about ten weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and sold more than half a million copies in the United States. The Penguin paperback of 1998 carried a foreword by the Harvard historian William C. Kirby, who wrote that Chang “shows more clearly than any previous account just what [the Japanese] did.”

The book’s achievement was threefold. It told the story in a form general readers would read: the Japanese soldiers, the Chinese victims, the Westerners of the Safety Zone. It recovered the story of John Rabe, whose diaries Chang helped bring to light in 1996 by tracing his granddaughter, Ursula Reinhardt, in Berlin (Chapter 6). And it made Nanjing a subject in the United States, prompting new documentaries, museum exhibitions, congressional resolutions and a wave of scholarship, some of it written in reaction to her. The historian David Askew observed that the book even revived interest in Japan.

Chang’s Book and Its Corrections

Because the book reached so many readers, and because its subject was contested, specialists scrutinized it closely. Readers of the book today, including the owner of this site, will find it worth knowing where later scholarship has corrected it. None of these corrections touches the central facts.

A planned Japanese translation became a controversy of its own. The publisher asked for corrections, photo changes and an appended rebuttal; Chang accepted some corrections of dates and spellings but refused the annotations, and the edition was withdrawn in 1998–99. A Japanese translation finally appeared in December 2007. The fairest summary is that Chang’s book is a landmark of public history, readable and largely accurate on the core events, whose numbers, captions and Japanese background were corrected by specialists. This collection follows her lead in telling the story and the specialists in anchoring each fact in primary sources.

Chang went on to write The Chinese in America (2003) and began research on American prisoners of the Japanese in the Philippines. After a period of severe depression, she took her own life on 9 November 2004, at the age of 36. Her statue stands at the Memorial Hall in Nanjing.

Remembering the Rescuers: Rabe, Vautrin and the Safety Zone

The publication of John Rabe’s diaries in German in 1997 (edited by Erwin Wickert, a former German ambassador to China) and in English in 1998 as The Good Man of Nanking made Rabe the best-known of the rescuers. In 1997 his tombstone was moved from Berlin to Nanjing, where it is displayed at the Memorial Hall. His house at Xiaofenqiao No. 1, on what is now the Gulou campus of Nanjing University, was restored with German support and opened on 31 October 2006 as the John Rabe and International Safety Zone Memorial Hall. Films followed in 2007 (the American documentary Nanking) and 2009 (Lu Chuan’s City of Life and Death and Florian Gallenberger’s John Rabe).

Minnie Vautrin, who took her own life in 1941 (Chapter 4), is remembered at the former Ginling campus, now the Suiyuan campus of Nanjing Normal University; in 2015 the government in Taipei honored her and Rabe posthumously. The Americans’ letters and diaries are preserved in the Yale Divinity Library’s Nanking Massacre Project, and Magee’s film in Nanjing and New Haven. Those who rescued others in and around the city are increasingly remembered by name: the Danish engineer Bernhard Arp Sindberg and the German Karl Günther at the Jiangnan Cement Works, the Chinese staff of the refugee camps, and the Red Swastika Society volunteers who buried the dead.

The Memorial Hall at Jiangdongmen

The Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders opened on 15 August 1985, the fortieth anniversary of Japan’s surrender, on the site of a mass grave at Jiangdongmen in the southwest of the city, known as the “pit of ten thousand.” Skeletal remains were excavated there in 1985 and again in 1998, and part of the excavation is displayed. The original complex, designed by the architect Qi Kang, covered about 28,000 square meters; it was enlarged in 1995 and greatly expanded in the 2000s, and a research institute was established there on 1 March 2016. Admission is free, with advance registration.

The memorial’s visual language is restrained and monumental: a stone wall carved with the number 300,000; the sculpture “A Mountain Split in Half”; the “To Flee” group of bronze figures; a wall of victims’ names; bronze casts of survivors’ footprints; portraits of survivors; a cross marked with the dates 1937.12.13 and 1938.1; and at the end of the route a statue of “Peace.” The figure on the wall is the official Chinese count, discussed in the chart above; the evidence in the halls, much of it contemporary, documents the massacre whatever figure the visitor accepts.

National Memorial Day and the UNESCO Register

On 27 February 2014 the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress designated 13 December as a National Memorial Day for the victims of the Nanjing Massacre, and the first state ceremony was held at the Memorial Hall on 13 December 2014. Each year since, air-raid sirens sound across the city during the ceremony and traffic stops.

In October 2015 UNESCO inscribed the “Documents of Nanjing Massacre” on its Memory of the World Register, on China’s nomination of 2014. The inscription covers three groups of records: documents from 1937–38, among them diaries, film and the records of the Safety Zone; the files of the Nationalist government’s postwar investigation and military tribunal of 1945–47; and records of the People’s Republic’s judicial authorities from 1952–56. The Japanese government protested and said it would review its funding of UNESCO. The inscription placed the contemporary record in the same category of documentary heritage as other records of twentieth-century atrocity.

The Last Survivors and Their Testimony

In 1937 the survivors who are still living were children. Their numbers are now very small. The Memorial Hall keeps a register of survivors; it listed 24 living in December 2025, and on 3 January 2026 it announced that Xu Deming had died the previous day at the age of 96, leaving 22. An association to aid the survivors was founded in Nanjing in 2004, and since the 1980s the Memorial Hall, Chinese researchers and journalists have recorded many of their accounts.

Their testimony has been preserved to the standards developed for Holocaust survivors. From 2012 the USC Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg to record the testimony of Holocaust survivors, worked with the Memorial Hall to record video interviews with Nanjing survivors; thirty testimonies, in Mandarin with English subtitles, are in its Visual History Archive, and the Foundation also digitized John Magee’s Nanjing reels after the Yale Divinity Library received them in 2016. As the generation that saw the massacre disappears, these recordings, the 1937–38 documents and the tribunal records are the evidence on which memory will depend.

Denial Claims and the Record

The arguments of the denial school are still repeated online. Each can be set against the record described in this collection.

Visiting Nanjing Today

Nanjing today is a city of more than nine million people, and most of the places of December 1937 lie under the modern city. Many are marked. The Memorial Hall at Jiangdongmen is the principal site. The John Rabe House stands at Xiaofenqiao No. 1, at the southeast corner of the Gulou campus of Nanjing University, the former University of Nanking, close to the old University Hospital. The Ginling campus, still with Henry Murphy’s buildings, is the Suiyuan campus of Nanjing Normal University. The southern Zhonghua Gate, the largest of the Ming city gates, survives largely intact, and much of the wall can be walked. The Yijiang Gate in the northwest, where retreating soldiers and civilians were crushed on the night of 12 December, has been rebuilt.

19372021

Along the Yangtze north and west of the walls, where the largest mass executions took place, memorial stelae stand at Yanziji (Swallow Rock), Caoxiexia (Straw String Gorge), Mufushan and other killing sites. Yuhuatai, south of the Zhonghua Gate, was the battlefield of the 6th Division in December 1937 and the execution ground of Tani Hisao and the three officers shot in 1948; it is now a large memorial park, chiefly to Communist martyrs. In the Qinhuai district, the Lijixiang site, one of the best-preserved of the military “comfort stations” the Japanese army opened after the massacre, became a museum in 2015.

For visitors from the United States, the sites connect to American history: the University of Nanking and Ginling College, the hospital where Robert Wilson operated and John Magee filmed, and the river where the Panay sank (Chapter 7). On 13 December the city observes its day of mourning.

Remembering the Dead

This collection has tried to tell the story of Nanjing as the evidence tells it: the advance up the Yangtze, the fall of the city, the killing of prisoners and civilians, the rape of tens of thousands of women and girls, the refuge that a few dozen people of many nations kept open in the northwest of the city, the courts that tried the crime, and the long argument over its memory. Numbers have been unavoidable. They are disputed, and this collection has shown all of them, with their sources.

Behind every number were people, most of them unnamed in any record. The survivors whose names we know, Li Xiuying, Xia Shuqin, Xu Deming and the others who testified for decades, spoke so that the rest would not be forgotten. Li Xiuying’s words are displayed at the Memorial Hall in three languages, including Japanese: “Remember history, but not with hatred.” That is the spirit in which this section was written, and in which it ends.