난징사건과 도쿄재판

The “Rape of Nanking” at the Tokyo Trial:

With the fall of Nanking imminent in December 1937, a handful of American missionaries and their fellow humanitarians chose to stay in the war-torn city to protect Chinese refugees. Thanks in no small part to their heroism, an elaborate narrative of the “Rape of Nanking” emerged through the course of the Tokyo Trial. Several missionaries offered damning testimonies which, together with their detailed records kept at the time of the atrocities, laid bare the culpability of the perpetrators. However cryptic and contestable, the judgment of the Trial also set a precedent in expanding the ambit of criminal responsibility for Japanese troops’ misdeeds at the war front. That said, the missionaries’ accounts fell short, as did the Trial’s overall findings, of furnishing conclusive clues to such contentious issues as distinguishing innocent civilians, surrendered soldiers, and unresisting stragglers from combat casualties (not to mention the total death toll). The defense at the Trial, while reportedly feeble in their objections, managed to leave an array of substantive misgivings on record that later inspired avid revisionists to manipulate the Trial’s shortcomings to their own ends. They are predictably partial, casuistic, and sometimes just plain unconscionable. But the questions they raise in the process are to be taken seriously nevertheless. By reviewing trial records and wartime source material in light of those questions, this paper seeks to make sense of today’s unabated wrangle over victimhood and, it is hoped, to help further candid dialogue on that past.