Between December 1937 and January 1938, Japanese invading forces killed tens of thousands Chinese in Nanjing and its surrounding areas, including civilians and prisoners of war. Definitions and interpretations of the Nanjing Massacre, however, have changed significantly over time, in response to corresponding changes in both the social and political contexts that have stood behind the debate. It is fair to say that the Nanjing Massacre today is one of the best-known symbols of Japanese wartime atrocities. Yet the internationalization of the scholarly and popular discussions of the Nanjing Massacre is a recent phenomenon. The internationalization of Nanjing probably coincides with the development of standards for the protection of universal human rights. Many historians of Nanjing have obviously been led to examine abuses of human rights during the atrocities, and their sympathies have not been limited to any particular national or ethnic groups. Although the rise of human rights standards has contributed to an increase in published scholarly work on the Nanjing Massacre, I argue that, paradoxically, the Massacre has also become a rallying point for nationalism and ethnocentrism in Japan, China, and the United States.

In the late 1990s, the mass media, both inside and outside Japan, reported vigorously about the surge of revisionists in Japan who claim that, by taking notice of atrocities like Nanjing, Japanese education in the postwar era had unfairly demonized Imperial Japan. Their outspoken remarks received broad attention in the media, infuriating many people both in Japan and abroad. Their claims included assertions that Imperial Japan was not an aggressor, but a liberator; that the so-called comfort women were not sex slaves, but prostitutes; and that the Nanjing Massacre was not a historical fact, but a lie.

These acute revisionist challenges actually coincided with the rise of public awareness that Japan was not only a victim, but also a perpetrator. Certainly, these revisionists have existed in Japan throughout the postwar years, but they were most intensely active in the 1980s and 1990s, precisely because the growing inclination among many Japanese to acknowledge the nation’s war guilt made them feel an urgent need to respond. Between 1993 and 1995, for example, the revisionists waged a nationwide petitioning effort to oppose a Diet resolution to offer an apology to neighboring nations for Japan’s misdeeds during the war. This campaign collected more than five million signatures. By the late 1990s, revisionist literature that denied the atrocities in Nanjing, military sex slavery, and other Japanese atrocities flourished in the Japanese market.

Unfortunately, the rise of nationalistic narratives on Nanjing was not unique in Japan. In China, the Tiananmen Square Protest of 1989 led the PRC government to promote so-called patriotic education and to revise the history of the Nanjing Massacre. Seeking to foster a spirit of patriotic unity in the present day, Chinese officialdom has tended to use history to promote the myth that the Chinese people were completely united in their struggle against the Japanese forces. In the 1990s, intentionally or unintentionally, the mass media paid significant attention to the Japanese revisionists, including their denials of Nanjing, contributing to provoking anger and nationalistic sentiment among the public in China.

In the United States, the relative decline of Japan's strategic importance, the increasing perception of Japan as an American economic threat, the dispute over the Enola Gay exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution in 1994-95, and the 50th anniversary of V-J Day all contributed to the rise of nationalistic and ethnocentric narratives of the Nanjing Massacre. During the Enola Gay dispute, those who sought to justify America's use of the atom bomb often referred to the Nanjing Massacre to argue that the nuclear assaults were justified because they put an end to Japanese aggression in Asia. By the logic of those who justified the bombings, the very fact of the victims’ nationality made them guilty of the crimes of the Japanese state, and therefore deserving of mass death. Whereas Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of WWII enabled many Americans to discover the wholesale atrocities in Nanjing, the book underscored a stereotypical collective image of the Japanese.

Without any doubt, the rise in concern for human rights in the postwar era contributed to an increase in scholarly publications on the Nanjing Atrocities and to the globalization of the history and memory of Nanjing. At the same time, however, nationalistic and ethnocentric accounts on Nanjing increased in Japan, China, and the United States. Whether written in Japanese, Chinese, or English, these emotional publications tend to provoke hatred toward the perceived Other and to place unequal value on human lives according to nation or ethnicity. In my view, these publications are no less biased and tendentious than the wartime propaganda. Moreover, I am afraid that these emotional narratives of Nanjing will only serve to marginalize well-researched and more complex historical analyses of the Nanjing Massacre. It would be a pity if ethnocentric or nationalistic points of view came to dominate the world’s perception of Nanjing during the very period when more and more people are claiming to be concerned with respecting and preserving the human rights of the people of all nations.