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.
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".
While mainly written by non-academic lay authors, revisionist works of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan have been increasingly vocal in the past years 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.
Sino-Japanese War
During the war, the Japanese Government kept tight control over the news media. As a result, the Japanese public was not aware of the Nanjing Massacre or other war crimes committed by the Japanese military. The Japanese military was, rather, portrayed as a heroic entity. Japanese officials lied about civilian death figures at the time of the Nanjing Massacre, and some Japanese ultranationalists are still deny that the killings occurred.
One brief lapse in the Japanese government's control over negative depictions of the war was the fleeting public distribution of Tatsuzō Ishikawa's wartime novel, Living Soldier (Ikiteiru heitai), which depicted the grim and dehumanizing effects of the war. Ishikawa and his publisher tried to satisfy government censors by a deliberate decision to self-censor lines about soldiers "forag[ing] for fresh meat" and "search[ing] for women like dogs chasing a rabbit", while still preserving the overall tone and import of the novel. The novel was published in 1938 but was pulled from circulation within days; Ishikawa was sentenced to a four-month prison term for disturbing "peace and order".
Controversy and confusion over the Nanjing massacre occurred even soon after, in 1943 George Orwell wrote in Looking Back on the Spanish War: "Recently I noticed that the very people who swallowed any and every horror story about the Japanese in in 1937 refused to believe exactly the same stories about Hong Kong in 1942. There was even a tendency to feel that the atrocities had become, as it were, retrospectively untrue because the British Government now drew attention to them ... There is not the slightest doubt, for instance, about the behaviour of the Japanese in China ... The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads—they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because The Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late."
It was not until the Tokyo Trial (tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East) and the Nanjing Trial that the truth of the Nanjing Massacre was first revealed to Japanese civilians. The atrocities revealed during the trials shocked Japanese society at the time.
Postwar
In the 1950s, author Yoshie Hotta wrote a series of pieces of historical fiction about the atrocities in Nanjing.
In 1967, Tomio Hora published his seminal account "Nankin Jiken" ("Nanjing Incident") in which he refuted revisionist denial of the massacre. This detailed treatment of the incident was the first meaningful and in-depth description of the massacre in Japanese postwar historiography. Some leftwing Japanese journalists of the decade were inspired by the American war in Vietnam to research the events.