Irene Kan '99, a first-generation Chinese American, knew vaguely of the atrocities committed by the Japanese during World War II, such as the Nanjing Massacre.
But when she read Iris Chang's 1998 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, she was horrified by the numbers: 300,000 people brutally killed, 20,000 women raped in just six weeks. And she was shocked that she hadn't heard of the massacre until her junior year at Union. Despite mass international publicity at the time, the event seemed to have slipped through the cracks of history until the publication of Chang's book.
Kan says that she wondered whether the details of the massacre were suppressed by the Chinese, American, and Japanese governments — and this question became the focus of her senior thesis. Working closely with her advisor, Assistant Professor of History Joyce A. Madancy, Kan conducted the bulk of her research last summer at the University of California at San Diego. Spending hours examining primary and secondary sources on the Nanjing Massacre and related events, she found that the governments of China, Japan, and the United States did, in fact, deliberately ensure the suppression of information about the massacre.
“After World War II, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was eager to form economic ties with Japan, and they were willing to disregard past atrocities in their own country,” she says. “While the victims of the massacre sought reparations, leaders of the CCP turned their backs on their own people since they did not want to tarnish their trading relationship with Japan or forgo Japan's economic assistance.”
China's post-World War II foreign policy goals were to obtain political recognition and international legitimacy from Japan through economic ties, she explains. Therefore, the Chinese government suppressed information about the massacre.
“I was shocked because the violent deaths of 300,000 Chinese citizens and the raping of 20,000 women is so atrocious that the least the Chinese government could have done is to commemorate it,” Kan says. “But it wasn't until four decades later that the Nanjing Memorial Massacre Museum, the first of its kind in China, was built.”
Kan discovered that the cover-up was even more elaborate in Japan. Information about the massacre was simply not disseminated to the Japanese people, she says, due to censorship of the press, including newspapers and history textbooks. In addition, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) has publicly denied or failed to acknowledge Japanese atrocities during World War II, she says. Leaders of the LDP have continued to honor many of these war criminals by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine, which treats these men as worthy of worship as gods.
Similarly, the facts of the Nanjing Massacre were downplayed in the United States during the Cold War. “The massacre was very well publicized at the time that it occurred,” Kan says. “There were Western observers there who reported what they saw. But when the Cold War began, North Korea and China became America's newest enemies. The U.S. chose Japan to serve as a bastion against communism in Asia.” By rebuilding Japan, she says, the U.S. chose not to confront past Japanese aggression.
“The best part about this project was seeing how this event was suppressed by all three governments,” Kan says. “It's fascinating to find out about the cover-up because the Nanjing Massacre was such a huge event that even today it is called the 'forgotten Holocaust.' Until now, I didn't think that the government had that much control over history — or, shall I say, the history that we read in our history books.”