The Rape of Nanjing was one of the worst atrocities committed during World War II. On December 13, 1937, the Japanese army captured the city of Nanjing, then the capital of wartime China. According to the International Military Tribunal, during the ensuing massacre 20,000 Chinese men of military age were killed and approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred; in all, the total number of people killed in and around the city of Nanjing was about 200,000. This carefully researched, intelligent collection of original essays considers the post-World War II treatment in China of the Nanjing Massacre and Japan. The book examines how the issue has developed as a political and diplomatic controversy in the five decades since World War II. In his introduction, Joshua A. Fogel raises the significant moral and historiographical issues that frame the other essays. Mark Eykholt then provides an account of postwar Chinese responses to the massacre. Takashi Yoshida assesses the attempts to downplay the incident and its effects, providing a revealing analysis of Japanese debates over Japan's role in the world and the continuing ambivalence of many Japanese toward their defeat in World War II. In the concluding essay, Daqing Yang widens the scope of the discussion by comparing the Nanjing historiographic debates to similar debates in Germany over the nature of the Holocaust.

As a field of scholarly research, Sino-Japanese studies has grown considerably over the past twenty years, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Joshua Fogel, the editor of this and two previous EastBridge volumes on the subject. Where once this emerging field may have been viewed, usually disparagingly, as a limp appendage of either Chinese or Japanese studies, it has now more or less carved out a space of its own. The essays in this final volume of the trilogy are selected from the best work that previously appeared in the periodical Sino-Japanese Studies on the intellectual and literary relations between China and Japan between the 17th and 20th centuries, all revised to varying degrees by their authors. It is hoped that the increased exposure of republication in book form will help fuel the movement to take seriously the commitment to Chinese and Japanese studies simultaneously.

Although China and Japan have had virtually uninterrupted contact going back over many centuries, the lion's share of works addressing both China and Japan's overseas contacts--cultural and political--have concerned the West. Before the twentieth century, however, Western contacts with Japan were infrequent at best. Throughout the centuries before the twentieth, Chinese culture in the form of books, art objects, religious items, and the like flowed into Japan in great quantity. Within the scholarly community, some attention has focused on Japan and the Japanese elite's reception of the cultural flow and their response to it. By contrast, little if anything has been written about how the Chinese saw the Japanese. By addressing this glaring lacuna, the essays in this volume make a unique contribution.