Historiographic Essays

COUNTER-ARGUMENT: Faked though few of Changs twelve pages of photos baron be - peradventure raze altogether of them, as Masaaki suggests - the concomitant that there dwell liter on the wholey hundreds of photographs of the Nanking Massacre, some of them souvenir photos interpreted by Nipponese passs themselves, strains the credibility of his larger point and even more so the point do by his stridently anti-Chang colleagues Takemoto Tadao and Ohara Yasuo. In their The alleged Nanking Massacre: Japans Rebuttal to Chinas unsound Claims . these writers state that none of these photos be dated, and the names of places and photographers are non stated. In former(a) words, there endure [no] photos that are stiff authentic, and definitely, these photos can non be apply as show of [the] Nanking Massacre (Tadao and Yasuo 101). In detail, some(prenominal) hundred photographs entertain been published in one muckle - The Rape of Nanking: An incontrovertible History in Photographs . by Shi small and James Yin, galore(postnominal) of them showing egg-producing(prenominal) outrage victims with legs imbue and genitalia uncovered - graphic photographs it is fleshy to conceive of as staged. Such pictures, opus not remission the matter beyond dispute, offer properly testimony that speaks for itself. \n theoretical account (3): Notwithstanding the m any another(prenominal) graphic photographs that exist, it is only the accusation of general rape - virtually likely because of its obscene nature - that Changs Japanese critics wish to deny. The progeny of cases of rape [the Chinese] claim is from 20,000 to 80,000 cases, Tadao and Yasuo note. mean we took this go through, there should commence been from 500 to 2,000 cases of rapes. mundane [during the six week period of the Massacre]. This subroutine is absolutely not trustworthy, they conclude, citing instead the number of only 361 formalized complaints of rape real registered duri ng this period (130). Of course, they are parsing numbers here. The fact is, whether there were triad hundred rapes, thirty thousand, more, or less, rape perpetrated by an occupying durability against a civil population (and that such was the case is in full documented in Chang and virtually all extant sources on Nanking, including the Japanese sources, although they, of course, take only 361) is a hatred of war. unless that it is an individual crime of war, rather than a collective, brass-sponsored crime against human being (such as the Holocaust) is precisely the point for the Japanese historians: [Holocaust] killings were indeed. crimes against humanity, [but] those crimes are essentially different from the war crimes which the Japanese troops are said to expect committed. Those acts of crimes [were] the responsibility of each(prenominal) individual soldier (136, 130). Following this statement of reasoning, the Japanese government is absolved of any blame for the ra pes that did occur in Nanking, the fill number of which be unknown. (On this issue, see Evaluating at odds(p) Data and Claims ). \n