Not forgotten
Young 23-year-old historian publishes book about Nanking Massacre
At the mention of Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture, many young Chinese today probably are only familiar with the prefecture’s red-cheeked mascot bear Kumamon – a fact that had long annoyed Jiang Zichen, the 23-year-old co-author of the recently published Nanking Massacre-focused work Records of Military Operations and Atrocities of Japan’s Kumamoto Sixth Division during the Battle of Nanking.
“I thought everybody in China knew about the Kumamoto Sixth Division – one of the major criminals behind the Nanking Massacre – they are mentioned in our middle school history textbooks!” the Xi’an-based part-time writer told the Global Times on Sunday via e-mail.
But the truth is that a large majority of young Chinese that Jiang has spoken to have no idea of the atrocities that Kumamoto soldiers committed in Nanjing, or Nanking, then capital of the Republic of China (1912-49), 80 years ago, when they participated in the massacre of more than 230,000 Chinese civilians.
Meanwhile in Japan, veterans of the Kumamoto Sixth Division and rightwing forces have been trying to wipe out this history by publishing books denying the war crimes committed in Nanjing and calling Tani Hisao – the division’s commander – a “national hero.”
This gave the young office workerturned-amateur-historian the desire to write a book about the subject.
A different approach
Jiang’s first published work, cowritten with 24-year-old historian Wu Jingmao, the 320,000-character book took them three years to write and was published by the Chongqing Publishing House in late September, two and a half months before the 80th anniversary of the Nanking Massacre. It focuses on the Kumamoto Sixth Division’s military march toward Nanjing starting from November 1937 until the execution of Tani Hisao by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal in 1947.
Unlike many similar books previously published in China that mainly used Chinese sources for reference, Jiang said he and Wu set out to detail the history of the Nanking Massacre by using Japanese materials.
Roughly 80 percent of the research material presented in the book is from Japan, including memoirs of Japanese veterans and historical records of the Japanese military divisions operating in China during World War II. “We wanted to use material written by their countrymen to show right-wing Japanese that they’re wrong,” Jiang told the Global Times.
In some of this material, Jiang, who taught himself Japanese, found a number of first-hand accounts from veterans who witnessed the massacre. For instance, a veteran from the Sixth Division recalled in a Japanese book titled The Crying Yangtze River: Records of the Kumamoto Sixth Division’s Military Operations in the Chinese Mainland how his fellow soldiers butchered the civilians they met and burned down their homes in the city after the division marched into Nanjing.
Since 2014, the two writers managed to collect hundreds of Japanese records of Japanese aggression in China during the 1930s and 1940s with help from friends in Japan. From these sources, they managed to acquire a great number of rare materials.
In the end they spent hundreds of thousands of yuan attaining research materials, Jiang recalled. Due to a lack of funding, they had to use their own money – most of which was earned from their writings for military history websites and magazines.
Not giving up
“I had nightmares every night while writing this book,” Jiang said. “For a while there, I wanted to quit writing about the Nanking Massacre… I was afraid that if I kept going, I would end up killing myself.”
For him, what haunted him the most was not the brutality that he read about in historical accounts, but his country men’s ignorance of that period of history and, moreover, the cold and even hostile attitude some young people have when he tries to broach the subject with them.
This attitude unnerves Jiang, as he has had a passion for history since he was young. He first began researching military history when he was 15 and published his first article on thepaper.cn at age 20. Now, with nearly 400,000 followers on Sina Weibo, he has earned a reputation as a veteran military and history blogger.
However, this fame online also means the young man has encountered his fair share of cyberbullying.
Jiang recalled when Kumamoto was hit by an earthquake in 2016, many Chinese netizens posted messages asking people to “pray for Kumamoto” on social media platforms such as Sina Weibo. Jiang didn’t feel this was a problem until a Sina Weibo blogger with more than 200,000 followers began posting messages such as “we should forget history and join hands.”
When he wrote a post calling for people not to forget the history of the Kumamoto Sixth Division and the Nanking Massacre, he was attacked by a wave of angry netizens online, many of whom calling him “nuts.”
That was not the first time that Jiang had been treated coldly by those around him who know about his afterwork hobby. “They think it is a waste of time and money. They think I must be crazy to have spent the last eight years doing this silly stuff,” Jiang said.
During a dark time in 2014 after his first draft of the book had been turned down again and again by dozens of publishers, Jiang thought about giving up. But then a ChineseAmerican netizen he met online told him about Iris Chang – author of Rape
of Nanking – and the difficulties she went through to reveal to the Western world the atrocities that occurred during Nanking Massacre.
“She said Chang changed the world’s opinion toward the Nanking Massacre,” Jiang recalled. “She said ‘Even though, as a woman, she experienced far more difficulties that you as a man would ever experience, she finished her work. So why can’t you?’”
Encouraged, Jiang continued with his work.
His current dream is to complete four more books, not just about the Nanking Massacre, but also extending to a general history of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1931-45).