New history, old wounds

Most people may believe that the reason for studying history is to learn what happened in the past," begins the foreword to Japan's "New History Textbook," "but that is not necessarily correct."

This is not the kind of opening that inspires confidence in a text's objectivity. The "New History Textbook" was introduced in 2001 by a group of right-wing scholars and politicians with the explicit aim of giving junior high school students a more positive sense of their national history. It characterizes Japanese aggression in World War II, notably its invasion of China, as a counterattack against Western imperialism, and consigns the Japanese Army's atrocities following its 1937 conquest of Nanjing -- known as the "Rape of Nanking" -- to a footnote, even questioning the number of victims.

The book has proven disastrous for Japan's image abroad; indeed, it seems there are more Chinese students who have rioted over the "New History Textbook" than Japanese students who have read it. Almost no Japanese junior high schools have actually adopted the text -- just 18 out of more than 11,000. But it is certified by the country's Education Ministry, and the Chinese find this deeply offensive.

The book's recertification in April 2005 touched off weeks of riots across China, as crowds thousands strong vandalized Japanese businesses and consulates. The protests threatened lasting damage to Sino-Japanese relations, which had already been strained by the nationalistic, pro-Taiwan stances of former Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, who advocated a stronger role for Japan's military and made repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine (which contains the remains of 14 "Class A" war criminals, among thousands of other war dead).

Koizumi's successor, the equally nationalistic but less flamboyant Shinzo Abe, has sought to mend relations between the countries. Curiously, one of the more prominent initiatives in Abe's campaign is a joint history project bringing together 10 Japanese and 10 Chinese scholars to conduct research on topics of mutual interest. With the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking coming up later this year, the hope is that finding common approaches to the countries' contentious history will help lay grudges to rest. The scholars met for the first time Dec. 26-27 in Beijing. They expect to release the results of their research by the end of 2008.

Consider it a tribute to the Confucian reverence for scholarship that two Asian powers with competing geopolitical aspirations should appeal to a group of bespectacled historians to calm the waters. It seems a promising idea: As one of the scholars, Osaka University history professor Kazuya Sakamoto, said in a telephone interview, serious Chinese and Japanese historians generally agree on the broad outlines of Sino-Japanese history. The differences lie at the level of what issues are most significant, and how to approach them.

At the group's first meeting, the scholars diplomatically refrained from addressing the question of what subjects they will actually study. "We just talked about how we will decide the subjects we will consider," said Sakamoto. The subjects themselves will be selected at the next meeting, in March.

But already, divisions are surfacing. Sakamoto, for instance, is not interested in the war itself; he would prefer to explore differences between Japanese and Chinese perceptions of how the countries put the war behind them and reestablished relations in the 1970s.

"When the war ended, China gave up the right to reparations," Sakamoto notes. Japan recognized mainland China in 1972 on condition that Beijing waive its claims to reparations. Even so, he says, despite this and the 1978 Japan-China Treaty of Peace and Friendship, "many Chinese people still believe that Japan has not done enough for the war. Most Japanese believe that we have done enough."

For Bu Ping, professor of history at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the head of China's delegation to the joint commission, it is the war that remains key. In an essay in the Jan. 16 issue of the Chinese biweekly "The Globe," Bu wrote that Japanese historians have been influenced by what he termed "deconstructionist" historiography, which he said focused on purely empirical questions at the "micro" level. Bu seemed to be saying that by embracing a skeptical approach, suspicious of master narratives, Japanese historians were ducking condemnation of Japan's overall role in the war. "Such 'deconstructionist' history," Bu wrote, "tends to overlook the fundamental question of judgment" -- that is, blame.

Take the Nanjing massacres. The major events are not in dispute. Japan had been propping up a client state in Manchuria since 1932. In June 1937, Japanese forces near Beijing got into a skirmish with forces of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang government, and Japan soon launched an all-out invasion of China. On Dec. 13, the Japanese took Nanjing, the Kuomintang capital, without a fight. Over the following six weeks, Japanese soldiers massacred, tortured, and sexually abused tens of thousands -- or by some estimates, hundreds of thousands -- of civilians.

Official Chinese histories long downplayed the event; they preferred to concentrate on the Communist resistance to the Japanese. But beginning in the early '90s, as Chinese historiography became more nationalist and less Party-oriented, the Nanjing massacres assumed greater importance. Chinese-American journalist Iris Chang's 1997 book, "The Rape of Nanking," drew on Western documentary sources to present the massacres in gruesome, personal detail, and put the number of victims at more than 300,000. It sold widely in China, where the consensus is that Japan waged an imperialist war of aggression in East Asia, and that its soldiers committed atrocities on a vast scale, in part due to a sense of racial superiority over other Asians.

The Japanese nationalist fringe tries to pick this narrative apart. Japan intervened in Manchuria, it argues, to counter Russia, which had been expanding into the region since the 19th century. The Japanese claim their aim was to drive Western imperialists out of East Asia, not to oppress other Asians. Japanese nationalists go into paralyzing detail to claim that Chinese soldiers were responsible for the clash that provoked the war. And in Nanjing, they say, Japanese soldiers were hunting Kuomintang soldiers who had blended into the local population; civilian deaths were inevitable. They quibble over a few misattributed photos in Chang's and other anti-Japanese works, and claim the actual number of victims was 40,000, or less.

Haggling over whether 300,000 civilians were killed in Nanjing, or "only" 40,000, seems unlikely to be morally significant. Either way, Japanese soldiers clearly committed large-scale atrocities. But it is no accident that Chang, who embraced the 300,000 figure, was writing a pro-Chinese, anti-Japanese polemic, accused by many critics of sensationalizing the massacres and stereotyping the Japanese; while those who promote the lower figures are apologists for Japan's wartime behavior.

Japanese attempts to excuse the massacres are often accompanied by tangential complaints that the Chinese fail to acknowledge the billions of dollars in economic aid Japan has given China since the '80s. Others trenchantly point out that China suppresses the history of its own massacre at Tiananmen in 1989. Chinese recriminations over the massacres, meanwhile, are often followed by accusations that Japan is stealing Chinese territory in obscure maritime disputes, or that Japanese car companies compete unfairly against Chinese ones.

It is important to remember that Japan's revisionist, nationalist historians, like those behind the "New History Textbook," are a fringe group. The country's best-selling school history textbooks sharply condemn Japanese militarism in World War II, and acknowledge the Nanjing massacres, if not as prominently as the Chinese would like. Last year, the right-of-center Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun ran a yearlong investigation into Japan's war guilt. "As for China," the paper found, "Japan must accept the fact that its actions there, on the whole, constituted an act of aggression" (though it found that calling Japan the "sole villain" was "too biased").

Such efforts hold out the hope that the joint Sino-Japanese research project might help reconcile the countries' lingering historical resentments. There are signs of a thaw on the Chinese side, as well. Former radio host Ping Ke, who now runs the widely popular blog antiwave.net, and TV host Rui Chenggang have both inveighed recently on their blogs against the excesses of Chinese Japanophobia.

Other signs, however, hold out less hope for the possibility of objective popular history, in China, Japan, or anywhere else. This year will see the release of at least three films on the Nanjing massacres. Chinese producers are making "The Rape of Nanking" (based on Chang's book), which is scheduled to wrap later this year. In a predictable counteroffensive, a group of Japanese nationalists in late January announced plans to make their own, Nanjing-denialist feature, "The Truth About Nanjing."

And then there is the American version: "Nanking," a documentary (with dramatic readings by Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway) which debuted at Sundance in January. It focuses on 22 European and American expatriates who stayed behind in the Japanese-occupied city, using their precarious influence to establish a "safe zone" that protected some 200,000 grateful Chinese residents.

If there's one point on which Japanese and Chinese historians agree, it is that World War II did have the salutary effect of ending Western imperialism in East Asia. But focusing on the heroism of Western expats will no doubt help the film, and its moral message, reach a wider Western audience. In one way, then, Japan's "New History Textbook" is right. Most people may believe that the reason for studying history is to learn what happened in the past, but that is not necessarily correct.

Matt Steinglass lives in Hanoi, where he writes for the Globe and other publications. "