#IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY RANKS PLUS#
#IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY RANKS PROFESSIONAL#

#IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY RANKS PLUS#

He is as critical of the official histories of the campaign for concealing by omission facts unfavorable to the imperial army as he is of Japanese whose appeals to the world about Hiroshima and Nagasaki gain Japan a reputation for emphasizing Japanese victim hood 'without ever reflecting upon our own violent aspect.' (139) In its English-language version, The Nanjing Massacre combines the translation of Nankin e no michi with selected excerpts of Chugoku no tabi and Nankin Daigyakusatsu plus an introductory overview written by Frank Gibney and an afterword prepared by Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira. Now, available for a wider English-reading audience, Honda's work is, after its own fashion, a far more compelling indictment of the imperial army than Iris Chang's bestseller. Honda tells his English language readers that his purpose in approving the translation of his work is to stir Americans to exert gaiatsu (outside pressure), that mysterious external force that somehow compels Japanese bureaucrats to mend their ways, and in this case make the government acknowledge its horrific past, or as Honda puts it 'bring about change in the disgraceful anti-internationalist behavior of the Japanese government and the conservative forces.' (xxvii) This statement implies either that his own efforts in Japan have proven unsuccessful in this regard or that his latest book Nankin Daigyakusatsu (1997) in conjunction with gaiatsu will change opinions. Iris Chang's bestselling The Rape of Nanjing has reignited, at least in the American academic community, the issue of Japanese military atrocities committed in China, and general readers familiar with Chang's book may find Honda's accounts just more of the same. The facts are there, but the intensity and emotion are gone. Honda's works are as much period pieces of reportage as anything else, and reviewing an English language translation of Nankin e no michi ten years after reading the book in the original ranks as an antiquarian experience. In other words, timing was everything, and without that special immediacy conferred by the context in which it originally appeared, the overall impact of Honda's indictment is diminished. There was an immediacy and intensity to the gruesome depictions of the murderous and rapacious conduct of the Japanese army in China that made them fresh and powerful indictments of a military organization gone amok and a society unwilling to confront either that historical fact or its legacy. When originally published, Honda's polemics were topical to contemporaneous political, social, and educational debates in Japan. Although at that time still a work in progress, Honda published the book to weigh in on the textbook controversy of the early 1980s which, among other things, had sparked a high profile dispute created between Japanese revisionists and conservatives over the 'truth' of the Nanjing Massacre. Honda's next book on the atrocities, Nankin e no michi, (1987) more specifically focused on the 1937 Central China campaign culminating in the slaughter at Nanjing. The section on the Nanjing massacre created a sensation surfacing as it did at a time of Japanese-Chinese rapproachment exemplified by Prime Minister Tanaka Kakukei's impending to visit Beijing. Honda's first book on the subject, Chugoku no tabi, (1972) originally appeared in Japan in serialized form in the Asahi shimbun during 1971.

#IMPERIAL JAPANESE ARMY RANKS PROFESSIONAL#

Since the early 1970s Honda Katsuichi has devoted a good part of his professional life to recounting the brutality of the Imperial Japanese Army in China, particularly the Nanjing Massacre.

Imperial japanese army ranks