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This chapter explores three references to fetal imagery in Japanese mythology and cultural memory where the fetal reference clearly works as symbol. Though historically dispersed, these three examples provide a map for locating a certain kind of fetal imagination: the fetus that is unusual, out of place, or somehow violated. This chapter demonstrates how these examples offer a typology of sorts for imagination of the fetus. The fetus that garners attention is the fetus that does not turn out right, somehow does not follow the norms of reproduction, or explodes an essential counter-memory dominating collective memory of the past.

This chapter analyzes the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China from 1971 to 1989. The year 1982 was a turning point in the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China. Fears of so-called spiritual pollution by Western influences prompted the government to stress the teaching of the history of the Anti-Japanese War.

More than sixty years have passed since the series of historical events now called the Nanjing Massacre (also known as the Nanjing Atrocity and the Rape of Nanjing). The repudiation by certain Japanese of the Nanjing Massacre over roughly the past two decades had contributed to a recrudescence of Chinese anger primarily at Japan but also at the Chinese regimes for not encouraging research on the subject earlier and exposing it to the world. The Japanese deniers of the atrocities are themselves part of a recent Japanese renewal of nationalism that has cleaved to right-wing politics and rejected any foreign role in the articulation of Japanese identity. What actually happened in Nanjing is almost irrelevant in and of itself to these people—all that matters is that Japan's image not be stained, and therefore the atrocities must be denied.

This chapter turns to the Nanjing Massacre on China’s web and discusses how digital resources allow national communities to collectively ‘remember’ their past. The analysis of these processes starts with the online encyclopaedias that China’s major search companies maintain online. How do these information repositories present knowledge on the Nanjing Massacre? Next, the chapter discusses the discourses that websites on this issue construct and the digital features that such websites deploy. As this chapter shows, the Nanjing Massacre discourse draws mostly from authoritative, vetted sources in a static way that offers very little space for discussion and that treats this episode of modern history as a shrine rather than a forum. This outcome offers an intriguing glimpse into how China’s web works on established, political issues, and how it is today essentially an info-web: a traditional mass-communication space in which established stake-holders shape nationalist discourse for their own purposes.

This chapter analyzes Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre between 1990 and 2008. Over this period, the official narrative came to include admissions of responsibility and apologies, and then backtracked to resume mythmaking and relativizing (while continuing to apologize.) Pressures from China and Korea, along with transnational activism, contributed to the shift to apologizing and deepening acknowledgment. At the same time, domestic political considerations in Japan – most notably, domestic contestation, party politics and electoral concerns, and concerns about compensation claims – frequently shaped the content and extent of changes in the state’s narrative. In particular, deepening revisionism in Japan, including high-profile “gaffes” related to “history issues” and official visits to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine, both fed and served as markers of the backtracking.

This chapter analyzes Japan’s narrative over the course of the Cold War. The first phase of Japan’s narrative was characterized by silencing, mythmaking, and relativizing and lasted from the return of Japan’s sovereignty in 1952 until the beginning of negotiations to normalize relations with China in 1971. The second phase began in 1971 and extended through 1982. Alongside a continued focus on Japanese victimhood, the official narrative shifted to include general acknowledgment, along with vague expressions of regret. The third phase began in 1982 and ended with Emperor Hirohito’s death in early 1989. Overall, the official narrative more explicitly identified the Nanjing Massacre and Japan’s aggression, although the general tenor of acknowledgment remained vague. Broadly speaking, these changes arose from the normalization of relations between Japan and China, pressures from China and other victim states, and domestic contestation of “history issues” and war responsibility.

In “Shooting the Enemy: Photographic Attachment in Nanjing Massacre Cinema and the Curious Case of Scarlet Rose” Michael Berry highlights the role of photography as a tool within Nanjing Massacre cinema as a means to both chronicle and provide witness to historical atrocities. Eventually his discussion turns away from feature film to television, offering an extended analysis of the genre-crossing 2007 television miniseries Scarlet Rose: The Goddesses of Jinling (Xuese meigui: Jinling nushen). Through his discussion of Scarlet Rose, Berry delineates not only a transition from realism and melodrama to a more diverse and genre-crossing mode of representation, but also a shift away from tropes of passive victimization and historical testimony to a new phase of “history making” in Nanjing Massacre cinema and television.

This chapter traces the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in Japan from 1937 to 1945. Although accounts that escaped censorship did record and condemn the random killings, looting, and rape in Nanjing, at the height of hostilities with China, such brutalities seemed almost indistinct from the rest of the fabric of enmity, nationalism, and war. In the immediate aftermath of the outrages at Nanjing, only the most attentive observers in Japan were aware that they had even happened.

This chapter begins with an overview of the history of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War, followed by a discussion of contested elements of this history. The second part of the chapter outlines the factors that influenced the establishment of the official narrative in the wake of World War II, and the themes that emerged in the Occupation period and in the first few years after the end of the occupation. These early themes included a neglect of Asian victims, an emphasis on Japanese victimhood, and the contention that a small group of military leaders was responsible for the war. The last part of the chapter traces the trajectory of the narrative over the past sixty years, and concludes with a discussion of how the book’s argument accounts for changes and continuities in Japan’s narrative.

This chapter examines the history and memory of the Nanjing Massacre in China from 1937 to 1945. During this period, the atrocities in Nanjing were by no means the main symbol of Japanese aggression. The Nanjing atrocities were most prominent in local rather than national awareness. The Guomindang government focused more intensively on indiscriminate bombings and chemical warfare rather than on the Nanjing Massacre.

Chapter 4 continues the analysis of China’s web by discussing what the social and political meanings of hyperlinks might be, how power works in networked structures, and what ‘issue networks’ on the web can tell us about digital ecologies. It also discusses how linking practices work in China’s web spaces, showing how the websites that deal with the two cases of the Nanjing Massacre and the Diaoyu Islands make only limited use of the web’s interactive affordances. An analysis of link-structures and site-maps reveals that issue websites on Sino-Japanese relations resemble traditional archives more than they resemble interactive information hubs. Following this, the chapter provides an analysis of how these issue sites tie into wider digital networks. The main players in these networks are large corporations, state agencies, and Party institutions, which together form a national web space that reflects many of the governance mechanisms that are at work ‘offline’.

“Under the Flag of the Rising Sun: Imagining the Pacific War in the Japanese Cinema” offers a survey of Japanese variations on the “World War II Combat Film” genre, spanning from the 1930s to the 2000s, with close readings focused on war-themed films of the 1950s and 1960s: placing special attention on such titles as, Harp of Burma (1956), Fires on the Plain (1959), The Human Condition trilogy (1959-61), Hoodlum Soldier (1965), and Red Angel (1966). Among these essentially anti-war works, Desser discerns a duality or tension between representations of Japan as perpetrator and Japan as victim. The second half of his chapter scrutinizes cinematic representations of four recurring icons which have generated much debate: the Comfort Women issue, the Nanjing Massacre, Yasukuni Shrine, and the Atomic Bombs.

This chapter introduces the book’s core questions, summarizes the stakes of inquiry, introduces the two narratives analyzed in the book, outlines the central argument, and situates this study in relation to existing scholarship on memory, transitional justice, and international norms. Given the challenges of reckoning with the past, what are the sources of continuity in states’ narratives of dark pasts, and when and why do states choose to change such narratives? To answer these questions, this book analyzes the trajectories over the past sixty years of Turkey’s narrative of the Armenian Genocide and Japan’s narrative of the Nanjing Massacre and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Extrapolating from this analysis, the book argues that international pressures increase the likelihood of change in official narratives of dark pasts, while domestic considerations determine the content of such change.