The Foreign Languages Press published Tokyo Trial: Evidence and Judgment of the Nanjing Massacre in September. Daniel Filmus, a former Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation of Argentina, read the book soon after its publication. Following are excerpts of his comments on the book:
Cover of the book Tokyo Trial
The English publication of Tokyo Trial: Evidence and Judgment of the Nanjing Massacre is excellent news. It has particular relevance in today’s global context, marked by increasing armed conflicts, growing tensions between nations, and numerous situations of ethnic and religious persecution.
The Nanjing Massacre of winter 1937-38 meant the killing of more than 300,000 civilians, the rape of tens of thousands of women, the torture of detainees and the looting and plundering of the population’s material goods. Chinese society and its government have always honored the memory of the victims and demanded justice. It is a symbol of the people’s courage in the face of national suffering and foreign aggression. However, in much of the West, this barbarity committed by the Japanese Armed Forces remains little known. Nor has the role played by the Tokyo Trial been sufficiently disseminated, particularly in achieving justice and punishing those politically and militarily responsible for the massacre, as well as those who failed to act to prevent it.
Reading the testimonies and reports presented in the book makes us aware of the dehumanization with which the Japanese military acted. The eyewitness accounts are particularly heartbreaking.
They enable the reader to approach the massacre not only as an observer, but also as someone emotionally feels the victims’ pain and shares the conviction that such testimonies must never be forgotten, but passed down from generation to generation, so that atrocities like those described are never repeated. The same applies to the accounts of the repeated sexual violence suffered by the women of Nanjing. As in other cases of genocide, in Nanjing women became the main targets chosen by soldiers in their attacks on defenseless civilian populations.
One of the particular characteristics of the Nanjing Massacre was that the selection of victims by the Japanese soldiers was completely random. With few exceptions, there was no military reason for deciding whom to arrest or kill. No one was safe. This pattern of indiscriminate killings created an atmosphere of terror throughout the population, with the aim of paralyzing their ability to organize any form of response. Unlike the Holocaust, it was not a bureaucratized genocide, precisely planned with state or military command structures.
The book shows that, in this case, it was a chaotic massacre, a mass killing, encouraged—or at least tolerated—by the high command. This is why the testimonies and reports presented at the trial were so important in providing overwhelming evidence that allowed the guilty to be condemned. Nanjing became a key reference and central evidence for the tribunal to establish the responsibility of military leaders such as Iwane Matsui and political officials like Koki Hirota—both sentenced to death—for the systematic atrocities committed over several weeks against the civilian population and prisoners of war.
Undoubtedly, the book is a major contribution to preventing attempts to deny or downplay the massacre. At the same time, it is a tool to reclaim the humanity and dignity of the victims. By recounting the atrocities and cruelty inflicted on the civilian population, it preserves memory as an act of moral justice and prevents forgetting from becoming a second death. At the same time, it restores the voices of those who were silenced by irrational violence. If Nanjing shows us that barbarity is possible, then its memory must become an antidote against its repetition.
I conclude this brief commentary by once again stressing the importance of making available to the English-speaking public the story of the massacre and the importance of the trial and punishment of its perpetrators. This is not only a dramatic history experienced by the Chinese people; it is part of a global memory against the atrocities of war, against impunity, and in favor of building a collective consciousness that prevents their recurrence. As stated in the book’s Preface, together with the Holocaust, the Nanjing Massacre stands as another attack on the dignity of humanity that must never be forgotten. The painful and moving reading of this book contributes both to preventing such crimes and to building a more just and peaceful world. –The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item