![]() ![]() These acute revisionist challenges actually coincided with the rise of public awareness that Japan was not only a victim, but also a perpetrator. Their claims included assertions that Imperial Japan was not an aggressor, but a liberator that the so-called comfort women were not sex slaves, but prostitutes and that the Nanjing Massacre was not a historical fact, but a lie. Their outspoken remarks received broad attention in the media, infuriating many people both in Japan and abroad. In the late 1990s, the mass media, both inside and outside Japan, reported vigorously about the surge of revisionists in Japan who claim that, by taking notice of atrocities like Nanjing, Japanese education in the postwar era had unfairly demonized Imperial Japan. Although the rise of human rights standards has contributed to an increase in published scholarly work on the Nanjing Massacre, I argue that, paradoxically, the Massacre has also become a rallying point for nationalism and ethnocentrism in Japan, China, and the United States. Many historians of Nanjing have obviously been led to examine abuses of human rights during the atrocities, and their sympathies have not been limited to any particular national or ethnic groups. The internationalization of Nanjing probably coincides with the development of standards for the protection of universal human rights. Yet the internationalization of the scholarly and popular discussions of the Nanjing Massacre is a recent phenomenon. It is fair to say that the Nanjing Massacre today is one of the best-known symbols of Japanese wartime atrocities. Definitions and interpretations of the Nanjing Massacre, however, have changed significantly over time, in response to corresponding changes in both the social and political contexts that have stood behind the debate. Between December 1937 and January 1938, Japanese invading forces killed tens of thousands Chinese in Nanjing and its surrounding areas, including civilians and prisoners of war.
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