Despite the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and Japan’s acceptance of those findings as part of the San Francisco Peace Treaty, denials by some Japanese officials and scholars since the 1950s have not only hidden the truth of the Nanking Massacre from the Japanese public but have distorted global historical understanding of the atrocities. In addition, the failure on the part of the Japanese government to squarely face up to its wartime past, including the Nanking Massacre, has contributed to regional and global sociopolitical tensions.

1950s

Part of post-war Japan’s governmental strategy for rebuilding its nation included the reframing of the wartime past in terms that were favorable to a positive national identity. Signs of this emerged in the early 1950s with the Ministry of Education’s censoring of educational materials and whitewashing of Imperial Japan’s aggressions. One author of a textbook censored in the early 1950s was Ienaga Saburo, who then spent from 1965 onwards fighting the government over its censorship with a 10-trial battle and three lawsuits that spanned over a 32-year period. In Ienaga’s book Japan’s Past, Japan’s Future: One Historian’s Odyssey, published in 1997,  Ienaga cited many examples of censorship and whitewashing by Japan’s Ministry of Education, including: “invaded” changed to “advanced into;” “Nanking Massacre” changed to “incident;” and any references to “Comfort Women” taken out.

For his efforts and partial victories with the lawsuits, some parliamentarians of European Union, the United States, Canada and Japan, and scholars such as Noam Chomsky nominated Saburo for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999.

1970s

By the 1970s, public interest in investigation of Japan’s wartime past had grown, in part due to reflections on the Vietnam War. Several researchers spent time in China interviewing survivors, diaries of soldiers and witnesses were uncovered, and some former Japanese soldiers and eyewitnesses came forward to testify. One of the most prominent Japanese researchers of this period was the journalist Honda Katsuichi, who wrote a series of articles titled “The Journey to China” in 1971 that detailed his interviews with survivors of the Nanking Massacre. These works were later folded into a book titled The Nanking Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame, which was published in 1999.

This interest and the growing consciousness of the wartime past was met with strong resistance by right-wing ultranationalists in Japan who promoted and continue to promote an ultranationalist interpretation of the Asia-Pacific War that involves the denial of the crimes against humanity committed by the Imperial Japanese Army during the war. In March of 1972, the right-wing scholar Yamamoto Shichihei issued his “Reply to Honda Katsuichi” that denied the occurrence of the Nanking Massacre. In April of that same year, Suzuki Akira published The Phantom of the Nanking Massacre, which also flat-out denied the Massacre.

1984

Tanaka Massaki wrote the book What Really Happened in Nanking that denied the occurrence of the Nanking Massacre.

1986

Hata Ikuhiko wrote the book Nanking Incident, which unlike previous publications did not outright deny the Massacre. Instead, he argued that the numbers were far lower than commonly thought (between 38,000-42,000). He also argued that the killing of surrendered or captured soldiers should not be counted as part of the massacre. His book was subsequently referenced and endorsed by the Japan Ministry of Education.

1990

Ishihara Shintaro, a prominent Japanese parliamentarian and author said of the Nanking Massacre in a Playboy Magazine interview that “it is a story made up by the Chinese…it is a lie.” Ishihara Shintaro was elected Governor of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012 and his denial position has remained the same.

In that same year, in 1990, the Deputy Japanese Consul in Houston said that according to Japanese sources, “the Nanking Massacre never occurred.”

1994

Japanese Justice Minister, WWII veteran, and former chief of staff of the army, Nagano Shigeto, told a Japanese newspaper that “the Nanking Massacre and the rest was a fabrication.” He resigned from his position a few days later after an uproar about his revisionist claims.

1999

Chinese survivor of the Nanking Massacre LI Xiu-Ying—who was captured in John Magee’s film footages shot during the Nanking Massacre—filed a lawsuit in a Japanese court over defamation in Matsumara Toshio’s book Big Doubts about the Nanking Massacre. The book had accused LI of falsely claiming to have survived the massacre. She was supported by both Japanese and Chinese lawyers and activists in her lawsuit, for which she was awarded compensation but not an apology in 2002. Wanting the defendants to publish a public apology as well, LI appealed to the Tokyo High Court in 2002 and won in 2003. The defendant then appealed to the Supreme Court, which issued a verdict in 2005 that upheld the previous court’s judgment. The court’s ruling was also an admittance of the Nanking Massacre.

2000

Nanking Massacre survivor XIA Shuqin sued author Higashinakano Shudo for discrediting her testimony in his book, Complete Investigation into the Nanking Massacre. XIA won the lawsuit, which was later upheld in 2009 by the Japanese Supreme Court.

2004

Politicians in Japan block the publication of images in a comic book depicting the Nanking Massacre.

2007

Chair of the Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanking Kase Hideaki stated that, “When [the Allied Powers] opened the so-called Tokyo war-crimes tribunal [after World War II], they needed evidence that Japan committed greater atrocities [than the Tokyo air raids and use of atomic bombs], so they made up the so-called Nanking Massacre, which was completely unfounded.”

Higashinakano Shudo, Professor of intellectual history at Asia University of Tokyo, argued that the Rape of Nanking was a hoax and that many of the published photographs of the Massacre were fake.

Fujioka Nobukatsu, Professor of Education and Cultural Anthropology at Takushoku University, stated that, “It is absolutely clear that Nanking is a fabrication…The Chinese figure of 300,000 civilian deaths is nonsense.

2009

Educator-activist Matsuoka Tamaki, a Japanese primary school teacher who felt it was her duty to seek out and teach the truth about the Asia-Pacific War, interviewed hundreds of Chinese survivors in Nanking and Japanese veterans since early 1988. She compiled her research into books and a documentary film “Torn Memories of Nanjing,” which was released in 2009.

2012

Nagoya mayor Kawamura Takashi denied the Nanking Massacre to a delegation from Nanking.

2013

Former Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama Yukio apologized for Japan’s wartime crimes while touring the Memorial Hall of the Victims of the Nanking Massacre in Nanking, a move that earned him the title of “traitor” back in Japan.

2014

Matsubara Jin, the Democratic Party of Japan’s Diet affairs chief, declined to retract his denial of the Nanking Massacre from seven years before.

A governor of Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK HYAKUTA Naoki, denied that the Nanking massacre took place.

China applied to list materials related to the Nanking Massacre and the “comfort women” on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Registry. Japan responded to China’s application to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Registry by demanding the removal of the bid for the Nanking Massacre documents, indicating that while it doesn’t deny the massacre happened, it insists that China has exaggerated the death toll.

2015

Toshio Tamogami, governor of Tokyo, told BBC reporter Rupert Wingfield-Hayes that there was no Nanjing Massacre and claimed that there were “no eyewitnesses” of Japanese soldiers slaughtering Chinese civilians.