Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre

The Historiography of the Nanjing Massacre is the representation of the events of the Nanjing Massacre as history, in various languages and cultural contexts, in the years since these events took place. This historiography is disparate and sometimes contested, owing to conflicting currents of Chinese and Japanese nationalist sentiment and national interest, as well as the fog of war.

Japanese-language historiography on the subject has ranged from nationalist-revisionist accounts which completely deny Imperial Japanese culpability in war crimes, to leftist critics of militarism who prefer to center the narrative on the accounts of Chinese survivors of the events. Although Japanese revisionist accounts, which have sometimes arisen in the context of Japanese domestic politics, have been controversial, particularly in China, the Japanese-language historiographical material regarding the massacre has featured much diverse and sophisticated research.^[1]

In contrast to the Japanese research that have been ongoing since the late 1950s, Chinese-language research has for a long time been hindered by the limitations on free speech in mainland China, much of the secondary material merely agreed on the government statement of the day, making it difficult to describe the situation as a "debate".^{[citation needed]}

While mainly written by non-academic lay authors, revisionist works of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan have been increasingly vocal in the past years^[when?] and have caused international disputes and stoked nationalist tensions. Despite many failed attempts for a collaboration, Japan and China have been unable to agree upon the death toll of the massacre, and the debate remains a cornerstone of the current instability in the far east Asian geopolitics.