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星期日, 八月 26, 2007
张纯如给旧金山纪事报的信暨Charles Burress原文
San Francisco Chronicle refused
to publish Iris Chang's rebuttal
to July 26, 1998 article by Charles Burress
In August 1998, Iris Chang wrote a lengthy letter to the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. Chang wanted to rebut the charges made by Chronicle reporter Charles Burress in his article seen in the Chronicle, July 26, 1998. The Chronicle did not publish the letter.
From: IrisChang
To: Richard Rongstad
You may be interested in reading the letter I wrote to the San Francisco Chronicle last year, in response to his (Charles Burress') article about THE RAPE OF NANKING.
August 30, 1998
To the Editor:
(Note to editor: The Chronicle has given a great deal of space to an article by Charles Burress devoted almost entirely to repeating charges of my right-wing Japanese critics. The letter that follows is long, but I believe the length and detail of Mr. Burress's charges require a response in some detail. For the record, I plan to post this letter on the internet and keep a copy of this letter on file for any journalist who asks me about Burress's article. A hard copy of my letter will also be mailed to the Chronicle this week.)
As the author of THE RAPE OF NANKING, I must respond to Charles Burress's July 26th article, "Wars of Memory," which describes the controversy my book has provoked in Japan.
The often rabid criticism of my book among Japanese conservatives is certainly a proper subject for a press report, but Mr. Burress does a disservice to your readers by failing to explain the context of the criticism and by giving blind credence to charges made by Japanese revisionists.
One disturbing tendency in his article is to quote right-wing Japanese critics without demanding evidence to back up their allegations. I will cite three instances of this tendency.
(1) He writes that Ikuhiko Hata of Nihon University argued that eleven of the photographs in my book are fakes or misrepresentations. But not once in his article does Burress cite any evidence offered by Hata to support the charge or to describe how any of these pictures were artificially altered. Instead, Burress focuses on the caption under one photograph in my book, and uses what he claims is misleading in this one caption to support Hata's blanket charge of doctored photographs. (I discuss the caption below.)
Burress also failed to tell readers that Hata is not regarded as a serious scholar in Japan or the United States, very much because he is a regular contributor to ultra right-wing Japanese publications like Bungei Shunju. To provide a sense of the extreme nature of the views found in these publications (something Burress should have done when airing Hata's charges against me) the Bungei Shunju recently published an article that accused me, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Rupert Murdoch of being part of a gigantic conspiracy of the Chinese Communist party. Also, Marco Polo magazine -- formerly a Bungei Shunju publication before it was forced to shut down -- published as serious history an article from a Holocaust denier claiming that no gas chambers were used to kill Jews in Germany.
(2) Burress mentioned that a group of conservative Japanese professors held a press conference in June to attack my book as "grossly exaggerated and containing fake photographs." But here is reportage sleight of hand. To encourage credulity among readers only marginally familiar with the issues, Mr. Burress quotes only the most constrained language of his sources. Left out of his article is that some of these academics told reporters that the Japanese army not only refrained from committing any massacre but were applauded for their kindness and good manners. Dokkyo University professor Akira Nakamura even insisted that it was the Chinese army that raped and murdered Chinese civilians before they retreated from the area and that the Japanese were "massacred unilaterally" by the Chinese up to that point. (Burress cannot claim to be ignorant about these statements, which would have greatly undermined the credibility of these critics with any sensible Chronicle reader, because he faxed me the original 22-page press release distributed during the press conference. I am enclosing a copy of this press release with this letter.)
(3) Burress also tells his readers that the Japanese ambassador to the United States called my book inaccurate and one-sided without mentioning that when grilled by reporters the ambassador failed to come up with one solid example of a historical inaccuracy in my book. He also neglects to mention that the ambassador's statements provoked immediate protests not only from Chinese officials but from Chinese American organizations, my publisher and the Simon Wisenthal Center. (In a letter to ambassador Kunihiko Saito, Rabbi Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized him for failing to come up with any specific details to back up his serious allegations. He also wrote: "Mr. Ambassador, this is a unique time in history when people and nations across the globe are finally taking stock of errors, misdeeds, and crimes against humanity during the World War II era. Indeed, I recently met in Tokyo with a group of repentant Japanese war criminals who publicly recounted their grisly crimes against innocent people which they carried out in the name of their emperor and nation. It is a sad state of affairs that the Japanese government lacks the vision and commitment to do the same.")
The criticism of my book offered by Burress himself is also demonstrably false. Here are two serious mistakes:
(1) On the first column of the second page of the article, Burress writes: "She calls her book the first in English to document the Nanjing tragedy (although one critic says that distinction belongs to "What War Means," an account published in 1938 by H. J. Timperley, a British reporter for the Manchester Guardian.)"
This is certainly not true. On page 10 of THE RAPE OF NANKING, I clearly mention that THE RAPE OF NANKING: AN UNDENIABLE HISTORY IN PICTURES by Shi Young and James Yin was published in 1996, a year before my own book was published. My book also mentions other works that have devoted chapters to documenting the Nanjing tragedy, such as George Fitch's MY EIGHTY YEARS IN CHINA and Hsu Shuhsi's DOCUMENTS OF THE NANKING SAFETY ZONE.
On the book jacket, the editors at Basic Books wrote the following: "Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, has written what will surely be the definitive, English-language history of this horrifying episode..." Definitive, not first. Surely not a claim that my book is the first English-language history of the Nanking massacre.
William Kirby, chairman of the history department at Harvard University, wrote in his foreword to my book: "This is the terrible story that Iris Chang tells so powerfully in this first, full study in English of Nanking's tragedy." Again, "the first, full study," not as Burress charges, "the first in English to document?"
Careless reading has led Mr. Burress to his careless reporting. I defy him to find one sentence in my book that specifically quotes me as saying that I have written the very first book in English that documents the Nanjing atrocity.
(2) In the second column of the second page of the article, Burress writes "Other mistakes occur in Chang's book, which quotes as 'compelling evidence' a secret telegram by Japan's foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, 'in a fashion reminscient of Attila and his Huns,' had slaughtered 'not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.' This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere."
Once again, the mistake is Burress's. On January 17, 1938, Foreign Minister Koki Hirota in Tokyo relayed the following message to his contacts in Washington, DC, a message that American intelligence intercepted, deciphered, and later translated into English on February 1, 1938:
"Since returning (to) Shanghai a few days ago I investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts (of) reliable eye-witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility (is) beyond question afford convincing proof (that) Japanese Army behaved and (is) continuing to behave in (a) fashion reminiscent (of) Attila (and) his Huns. (Not) less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians slaughtered, many cases (in) cold blood."
While true that Manchester Guardian correspondent H.J. Timperley originally wrote a report, which was stopped by Japanese censors in Shanghai (this is discussed in the paperback edition of THE RAPE OF NANKING), his estimate of 300,000 deaths found its way into the message sent by Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki to Washington, DC, which, in turn, was intercepted and decoded by the Americans. The significance of this piece of Japanese evidence is not that the Japanese were the first to report the enormity of the massacre but that that the Japanese government knew about the 300,000 figure given by Timperley, and included it in government communiqu?s. I continue to stand by my assertion that it represents a compelling piece of evidence that this was not something that occurred among low-level soldiers without the knowledge or complicity of Japanese higher-ups.
Finally, I must discuss the photograph of the villagers that the Chronicle enlarged and printed on page four. Burress claims that my use of this photograph is an error because - as Hata points out - this photograph was taken not in Nanking during the massacre, but shortly before the Nanking massacre, in a village occupied by Japanese troops.
Nowhere in the caption do I state when and where the picture was taken. My book reports on much of the horror of the Japanese invasion of China, as context for the Nanjing Massacre. In my book, the caption under the photo reads, "The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution." Those two statements are indisputable facts.
But there is an even more bizarre claim by Burress regarding this one photo. He claims that two villagers in the photograph are smiling, though how he can tell a smile from a grimace in a sixty-year-old photo escapes me. None of those many people who saw the photographs have noted any villagers smiling. It isn't obvious to me, it isn't obvious to the editors at Basic Books or Viking Penguin, and I doubt it is obvious to anyone who reads the San Francisco Chronicle.
But even if a smile is suspected, it does not erase the fact that the Japanese committed endless atrocities against Chinese men, women and children in occupied territory. A common tactic of Holocaust deniers is to pick at one small piece of evidence to draw attention away from scope and magnitude of the genocide. But a photograph of a Jewish child smiling as he gets off a train and heads for a concentration camp is not proof that the Holocaust didn't happen, but only of the irrepressible optimism of human nature. Nor is it proof that the child was happy and smiling a month later, when no cameras were around. Burress's nitpick here is also reminiscent of a dreadful time in our own history, and of those apologists for slavery who argued it could not have been that bad because the slaves were often seen singing.
The Japanese, like the Nazis, relied on deception to make mass executions and mass rapes more manageable. The hapless Chinese men, women and children rounded up by the Japanese were usually kept ignorant about their fate until it was too late to escape. In Nanking, women were guided to "marketplaces" to buy ducks and chicken, only to find platoons of soldiers waiting to rape them. Men were assured of food, shelter and safety by Japanese soldiers, only to be lured to remote areas and used for bayonet practice or decapitation contests. Whether a woman or two is smiling as they are escorted across the countryside by Japanese soldiers is really a non-issue. What matters is how these women were treated once they reached their destination.
Burress's sloppy reporting cannot rehabilitate those right-wing Japanese militants who still refuse to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army against their subjugated nations. Instead, it tarnishes the fine reputation of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Yours truly, Iris Chang
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or: http://www.irischang.net/press_article.cfm?n=9
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附：Wars of Memory
When Iris Chang wrote ``The Rape of Nanking,'' to memorialize one of the bloodiest massacres of civilians in modern times, she wasn't prepared for the firestorm she started
Charles Burress, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, July 26, 1998
How can it be, asks a young Chinese American author, that we have virtually erased from living memory a 20th- century instance of rape, pillage and slaughter that rivals anything committed by Tamerlane or Attila the Hun?
Sixty years ago, in what was then China's capital, Nanjing (then called Nanking), Japanese troops laid waste to the city in ``an orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history,'' writes Sunnyvale author Iris Chang in her incendiary best-seller, ``The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.''
In about seven weeks, from mid- December 1937 into February 1938, in Japan's war with the Nationalist Chinese government,Japanese soldiers ``systematically raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 civilians.''
That's more, Chang says, than those killed in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and more than the combined civilian losses of Britain, France and Belgium in the whole of World War II.
``Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests,'' she writes. ``An estimated 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced . . . So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified.''
The book draws its emotional impetus from the author's conviction that the 1937 massacre, though it still looms painfully large in Chinese memory, has almost disappeared into a black hole of oblivion in the memory of the rest of the world.
Chang's most inflammatory charge may be that the Japanese have committed a ``second rape'' by suppressing and even denying what happened in Nanjing. ``When it comes to expressing remorse for its own wartime actions before the bar of world opinion,'' Chang writes, ``Japan remains to this day a renegade nation.''
To say that the book touches a raw nerve is an understatement. It thrusts a scalding probe into what may be the most sensitive issue dividing the two dominant powers of Asia -- Japan's responsibility for the Pacific War, particularly its bloody invasion of China before Pearl Harbor, and its willingness to face up to it.
``Sixty years later, the ghosts of Nanking still haunt Chinese-Japanese relations,'' William Kirby, a China scholar and head of Harvard's history department, writes in a foreword to the book.
Chang has been propelled into an international spotlight, cast both as long-awaited heroine and irresponsible distorter of history. Before she published the book at age 29 in December, she thought it would land quietly in the history section of libraries, much like her first book, on the scientist who developed China's missile program. As she said at an appearance in May on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., it was not expected to spark ``a firestorm of controversy.''
``The Rape of Nanking'' has won virtually unanimous praise in major U.S. papers, and is regarded almost as a bible by Chinese American activist groups lobbying for Japanese war accountability. Meanwhile, American scholars are sharply divided over its merits, and a group of conservative Japanese professors held a press conference in June attacking it as grossly exaggerated and containing fake photographs. The Japanese ambassador to the United States called it inaccurate and one- sided, provoking a sharp response from Chinese officials.
The book landed on the New York Times' best-seller list for 10 weeks and sold more than 125,000 copies in four months, a record in the 48-year history of its publisher, Basic Books of New York. It was excerpted in Newsweek and secured Chang interviews on ``Nightline'' and ``Good Morning America.'' ``Something beautiful, an act of justice, is happening in America today,'' wrote George Will in a column praising the book.
By the end of May, Chang had toured 50 cities. So many people showed up for her talk in March at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., that a second lecture had to be scheduled. In May, the Organization of Chinese American Women named her National Woman of the Year.
Negotiations are under way for a Hollywood film based on the book, and a musical is being planned in Singapore. A Chinese translation has already appeared, to be followed by Japanese, Korean, Spanish, German, Italian, Czech and Hungarian versions. Viking-Penguin will publish a paperback edition in November.
``Everyone's been waiting for this book to come out for 60 years,'' Chang said recently. ``There are people spilling out the door'' at her public appearances, she said, ``and people weeping on my shoulder, and people saying, `I'm so happy this book has been written finally. You make me proud to be Chinese American.' ''
Her book has evidently tapped into a reservoir of Chinese bitterness. At a conference in April on ``Japanese War Memories'' at the University of San Francisco, the Asia scholar Chalmers Johnson noted a 1997 poll of young people in China. ``On hearing the word Japan, 84 percent of them think of the rape of Nanjing,'' he said. ``Only 49 percent think of Japan's consumer electronic goods.''
Chang, whose grandparents fled Nanjing just before Japanese troops moved in, writes that when she was a child growing up in Champaign- Urbana, Ill., the ``Great Nanjing Massacre'' was always in the back of her mind as ``a metaphor for unspeakable evil.'' Her parents, who became professors in the United States, did not witness the massacre, but their voices were ``quivering with outrage'' when they told her stories of how the Japanese ``sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths,'' and how ``the Yangtze River ran red with blood for days.'' However, when she went to the public library to find out more about it, she drew a blank.
Then, at a 1994 conference on Japanese war atrocities in Cupertino, she saw poster-sized photographs of Nanjing victims -- ``some of the most gruesome photographs I had ever seen in my life.'' In a ``single blinding moment,'' she found herself ``suddenly in a panic'' that the massacre ``would be reduced to a footnote of history,'' or, worse, that ``the world might actually one day believe the Japanese politicians who have insisted that the Rape of Nanking was a hoax.''
She threw herself into two years of research, poring over diaries of American missionaries and other foreigners who were in Nanjing at the time, traveling to Nanjing to talk to Chinese survivors and reading Chinese accounts, confessions by Japanese army veterans and the unpublished diary of John Rabe, the Nazi leader of the international relief settlement in Nanjing.
She calls her book the first in English to document the Nanjing tragedy (although one critic says that distinction belongs to ``What War Means,'' an account published in 1938 by H.J. Timperley, a British reporter for the Manchester Guardian).
One problem for Chang is that she didn't conduct research in Japan, making her vulnerable to criticisms of her portrayal of how modern Japan is facing up to the war. Another problem is the question of whether she is primarily an activist or a historian. At her appearances, there are often leaflet-distributing representatives of Chinese and Chinese American groups, including the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, which sponsored the Cupertino conference where Chang saw the photos that inspired her book.
``A lot of people see me not just as an author but as a leader of an emerging movement,'' said Chang, who majored in journalism at the University of Illinois and worked briefly as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Associated Press after graduating in 1989 and before entering a master's program at Johns Hopkins University in 1990. But she says she still considers herself primarily as an ``author,'' while acknowledging that she shares the movement's ``sense of outrage that there's been a wrong that has not been righted.''
The book has been at the forefront of a surge of American attention to Nanjing, including two recent novels, a book of photographs and a documentary. ``At no time in history, I believe, has as much research been done, or has discussion of the Nanjing incident, or massacre, been as sharp,'' said history professor Irwin Scheiner, acting director of UC Berkeley's Institute of East Asian Studies and organizer of a conference on Nanjing at the university in April at which Chang was the keynote speaker.
The attention has rekindled debate over the numbers of civilians killed -- estimates by those who claim to have studied the question in depth range from 10,000 to 450,000 -- and the reliability of the evidence. In a scathing attack in the conservative Japanese magazine Shokun!, a senior Japanese history professor, Ikuhiko Hata of Nihon University in Tokyo, argued that 11 of the photos in Chang's book that represent sexual atrocities and beheadings are fakes or misrepresentations.
One photo, which the book credits to the military Politburo of the Chinese Nationalist government, shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, and carries the caption: ``The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution.''
The truth is, Hata said, that, although the photo was published with a similar caption by the Chinese Nationalists in 1938, apparently as anti-Japanese propaganda, it originally appeared the previous year as one of four in a Japanese newspaper, Asahi Gurafu, showing peaceful scenes of Chinese villagers under Japanese occupation, with women and children returning home from the fields. In the sharper original photo, it is possible to see that two of the villagers are smiling, and there is a woman pulling a cart of freshly harvested cotton that was cropped out of the Nationalist Chinese version. The cropped photo appeared in a recent book on Nanjing by a Japanese professor as an illustration of Japanese army atrocities in China. But after its interpretation was challenged, the publisher of his book apologized and retracted it.
Other mistakes occur in Chang's book, which quotes as ``compelling evidence'' a secret telegram by Japan's foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, ``in a fashion reminiscent of Attila and his Huns,'' had slaughtered ``not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.'' This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere.
The book also describes Japan as the first nation to use air power ``as a means of terrorizing civilian populations,'' a distinction generally attributed to the Germans in World War I.
Chang's errors illustrate the difficulty of sorting through a historical record contaminated with propaganda. But many scholarly critics agree that Nanjing nevertheless ranks as one of the modern era's most horrifying acts of barbarism. At issue are the scale of the brutality and Chang's claims that the massacre is a ``forgotten holocaust'' that the Japanese have tried to cover up.
Chang cites Japanese politicians and academics who justify Japan's war effort or even deny Nanjing. She accuses Japanese textbooks of whitewashing the war and emphasizes right-wing extremist threats of violence against those who criticize the emperor and Japan. Her book aims, she writes, to ``shed light on how the Japanese, as a people, manage, nurture and sustain their collective amnesia -- even denial.''
The way for Japan to heal the wounds of the war, she argues, is to confess and apologize for Nanjing, to pay reparations to the survivors and to teach future generations of Japanese about the evils it committed.
But according to her critics, Chang builds her case on emotion and unrepresentative statements and anecdotes. Many nations, some argue, have committed atrocities against civilians, including the U.S. atomic bombs and firebombs dropped on Japan. And many contest the assertion that the story of Nanjing has been suppressed in Japan.
``For decades after 1945, Japanese high school and university textbooks, influential and widely read historical works, to say nothing of magazines and newspapers that circulate in the millions, informed their readerships of the Nanjing massacre in detail,'' wrote UC Berkeley history Professor Andrew Barshay, in a letter responding to the New York Times' favorable review of the book by Orville Schell, China expert and dean of UC Berkeley's graduate school of journalism.
In Japan today, Nanjing and the war continue to provoke heated debate in numerous books and articles. The mainstream news media allows that a major massacre occurred, if not of the scale and brutality that Chang describes. Japanese officials say the government has promoted research and scholarly exchanges to document the truth about the war, and although Japanese textbooks have given the war short shrift at times in the past, especially in the 1980s, a current seventh-grade history text, for example, states that the number of Chinese killed in the ``Nanjing Massacre'' ``is said to be 200,000.''
Perhaps the most hard-hitting American criticism of the book, by Stanford University historian David Kennedy, said the book legitimately seeks to call attention to the horrors of Nanjing but fails in its attempt to explain them. In a review in the Atlantic Monthly, he laments the modern era's emphasis on `the politics of suffering'' at the expense of the ``effort to understand the psychology of evil,'' and criticizes Chang's reliance on ``accusation and outrage, rather than analysis and understanding.''
Japanese officials say Japan has frequently admitted being the aggressor in the war and causing widespread suffering, as evidenced in particular in former Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama's statement expressing ``deep remorse'' and ``heartfelt apology'' on the 50th anniversary of the end of the war in 1995.
This the often reiterated government position, and Japanese leaders say that it is not the government's fault if the press gives more attention to irresponsible and extreme statements by politicians who don't represent the mainstream.
Chang, who calls on Japan to apologize specifically for Nanjing, does not mention the official government apologies. Rather, she quotes six or seven leading politicians saying that Japan was trying to liberate Asia from Western colonialism or denying that Nanjing was a massacre. Nearly all of their statements, however, were repudiated by the government, and critics say her omission of the mainstream view makes her book misleading and one-sided.
As for the issue of compensation to victims, Japan's view is that the question was settled when China relinquished claims to reparations in a 1972 agreement. Chang contends that Beijing sold out the victims to gain economic aid and to improve its relationship with wealthy Japan.
Tokyo, meanwhile, has made attempts recently to demonstrate its remorse to China. Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto visited a war museum in China in September last year and reiterated Japan's apology, and the acting secretary general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Hiromu Nonaka, became the first leader from his party to visit the victims' memorial in Nanjing on May 9, laying flowers at the site.
But many say Japan has not done enough. ``What is missing in Japan's case is the kind of national reflection, led by government leaders, that transcends a verbal apology,'' said Schell. Compared to Germany, Japanese society ``has not undertaken a commensurate effort'' to understand and atone for its misdeeds, he said. Yet Kennedy suggests that the portrayal of Germany as a model penitent and Japan as an obstinate recalcitrant has become ``a cliche of Western criticism of Japan in recent years.''
The issue remains alive today in a Bay Area exhibit on Japanese World War II atrocities at the old Navy library on Treasure Island. Open weekends through September 27 and organized by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, the five-city exhibit focuses on biological warfare experiments by Japan's infamous Unit 731 but includes material on the Nanjing massacre.
Reconciliation seems far away. All parties claim they seek the truth and accuse others of distortion and fabrication. It is a debate ``drenched in politics,'' as one magazine put it, yet peace in the region may well hinge on its resolution.
``The war is really one of the crucial issues for East Asia, not only in the past but in the coming decades,'' Nicholas Kristof, Tokyo bureau chief for the New York Times and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in China, said in an interview. ``If there is another war in Asia, I think that it will have roots not just in disagreements yet to arise but in the 1930s and '40s.''
This article appeared on page SC - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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