Even during wartime, information about Japan’s defeat at Midway leaked to civilians, yet no returning soldiers spoke of a massacre in Nanjing. This section examines the gap between lived memory, contemporary journalism, and the postwar emergence of the Nanjing Massacre narrative during the Tokyo Trials.

2017-06-13
The following is a continuation of the previous section.
The lie of the Nanjing Massacre.
I entered a former middle school in 1943, but the year before that, when I was still in the sixth grade of elementary school, a boy named Tanaka Masaaki, a second-year student at the nearby higher elementary school, said, “I hear that all of Japan’s aircraft carriers, both Kaga and Akagi, have been sunk.”
I remember being shocked by this and feeling extremely uncomfortable.
This was in 1942, when people around me were still saying, “We’re winning, we’re winning.”
Looking back now, it was the defeat at Midway.
That defeat was something the Navy authorities were supposed to have completely concealed, yet the information had clearly leaked.
And this was despite the fact that the area where I lived was not somewhere that top-level classified information would normally leak.
This is where the so-called “Nanjing Massacre” strikes me as strange.
As mentioned earlier, many people who had gone to fight in the China Incident returned, even just among those around me.
Yet not a single one of them ever spoke about a great massacre in Nanjing.
Isn’t that strange?
The Navy thoroughly concealed the sinking of aircraft carriers at Midway and did not allow the wounded from that battle to leave the hospital.
Even so, the information still leaked out.
Yet no one ever spoke of any massacre having taken place in Nanjing.
There was a man named Tanaka Masaaki, who had served as secretary to General Matsui Iwane, who was sentenced to death at the Tokyo Trials for the crime of the Nanjing Massacre.
In his postwar book The Fiction of the Nanjing Massacre: Concerning the Diary of General Matsui, published by Nihon Kyobunsha, he wrote that no massacre in Nanjing had occurred.
When I read that, I thought, yes, that makes sense—so there really wasn’t one.
At the time Nanjing fell, in 1937, Japan’s economy was not bad and goods were not in short supply, so newspapers and magazines were very thick.
They contained many detailed reports about the fall of Nanjing and the war itself.
Around one hundred members of the press, including Japanese newspaper reporters, went to Nanjing, yet not a single one reported anything about a massacre.
And then, after the war, the story of the Nanjing Massacre suddenly appeared at the Tokyo Trials.
Because the Tokyo Trials could not be criticized at all due to press controls imposed by the occupation forces, all media outlets reported the narrative exactly as presented.
As a result, ordinary people came to think that such things had really happened.
Yet when one reads Tanaka Masaaki’s book, it states clearly that they did not.
Even as a child, I owned many magazines from the time when Nanjing fell.
At that time, Japanese people could travel freely to places like Nanjing and Shanghai, so there were many photographs as well.
For these reasons, I believed that such a massacre had not occurred.
To be continued.