raharris1973
Gone Fishin'
One thing I've noticed alot in 20th century discussions about militarist Japan is reference to the Nanjing massacre as the catch-all, focal point of Japanese atrocities, and the Nanjing Massacre (probably better known at the time as the 'Rape of Nanking') being treated as something that anyone who the Japanese dealt with anywhere in the 1930s and 1940s would have known about and hated/distrusted the Japanese over at the time.
This is a massive projection backward of the notoriety, focus, and revival of interest the Nanjing massacre inspired since the publication of Iris Chang's book about the massacre in the 1990s, and later works it inspired. Although the rape/massacre of Nanjing was an international scandal at the time it happened among pro-Chinese circles and left-wing and anti-fascist circles, it wasn't all-consuming, took place in a time filled to the brim with nasty, international news, and didn't make a decisive impression on all people's the Japanese encountered in all places they went in their military campaigns through WWII, where millions of people either didn't have exposure to news of the massacre or ranked its importance lower than other things when making decisions related to Japanese invaders/occupiers.
Certainly, it was an awful atrocity for real, no doubt about that, and it did motivate more determined Chinese resistance for rational reasons. The Chinese Nationalist regime also exploited it for full propaganda value to gain sympathy, support, try to exert world economic and diplomatic pressures on Japan. But that was a long, slow, campaign that didn't work until a bunch of other intervening factors, like the Japanese tripartite pact with Germany, and provocations, like the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, emerged over the next 3 plus years after the massacre.
The massacre was cited for American audiences in Frank Capra's 'Why We Fight' series, the 'Battle of China' series during WWII. But after the end of the war, and the Tokyo War Crimes trials, and with the shift of focus to post-war rebuilding, and the Cold War, the massacre was basically forgotten, except for direct survivors, for about fifty years and consigned to the memory hole or memory locker for fifty years, until the 1990s and Iris Chang's book. The Chinese Nationalist regime, holding out against Communist conquest and economically dependent on Japan in the Cold War, didn't dwell on it alot. The Chinese Communists, who weren't in the Nanjing area resisting in force and who really were focused on getting Japanese trade and aid in the 1970s and 1980s and early 1990s didn't dwell on it alot.
It was remembered and rediscovered when well-written works were published on it internationally and when it was politically convenient for the message to be amplified. It's somewhat like how the Holocaust wasn't widely known, named, or discussed in full gruesome detail in terms of all its particular victims and perpetrators until a couple decades after WWII. It wasn't exactly unknown, but the number of people who studied, obsessed, wrote, and cared about it was limited to smallish circle immediately after the war, until an explosion in scholarship and commemoration in the 1970s.
Anyway, back from the Holocaust tangent.
What does this observation mean about the Nanjing massacre and scenarios involving militarist Japan?
Basically, Japanese atrocities in Nanjing were going to be far more relevant to the Chinese, and ethnic Chinese living in Southeast Asia, than any other local ethnic group in the areas Japan invaded or nearly invaded.
For ethnic Vietnamese, Burmese, Indians, Malays, Javans, Thai, it was something nasty that happened to other people they didn't know well. At the outset of the war, much closer to top of mind for these groups were last nasty things that the French, British, or Dutch did to them. The French, British, and Dutch authorities certainly weren't worth fighting for to many of these folks, except inasmuch as they were fighting for a paycheck, career and their buddies in the unit. It took their own personal experience of getting bombed by the Japanese or getting abused face-to-face by the Japanese, not vicarious experience of people in far away China, for the amounts of anti-Japanese sentiment that did emerge to develop.
British, French, or Dutch marveling at how these colonial subjects could acquiesce to or even collaborate with Japanese invaders who were 'obviously worse' based on 'see what they did at Nanjing' would strike most of these peoples as diversionary whataboutism. Many of these people had during the war experiences that showed the Japanese to be worse, but they had no proof of it pre-war, and post-war, the Japanese became immediately irrelevant and the threat of renewed colonial domination became paramount once more. It's not hard to figure out.
The Indians are an interesting case. Obviously, although some PoWs and some defectors fought for the Indian National Army, the Indian Army fought loyally, bravely, successfully for the most part alongside Commonwealth forces.
But honestly, I think that loyalty had more to do with doing what made sense pragmatically, in terms of their paychecks, careers, and comrades in their units that were *not* overrun than by any great political preference for the Raj over the political ideas of Subhas Chandra Bose. Yes, and allegedly when they captured members of the INA they abused and probably murdered some. But I don't know if that's so much political, as taking an opportunity to vent post-battle frustration against an easy, unprotected target. After all, in modern India, Subhas Chandra Bose is *not* a universally reviled figure like Quisling in Norway or Petain in France. And though Indian troops killed plenty of Japanese troops, and vice versa, in WWII, the Indian judge at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, Ravinder Pal, prioritized sticking it to Britain and the western countries for their hypocritical victors justice and unpunished colonialism over punishing the Japanese for their wartime atrocities.
