Authors: Mo Hayder
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Honda, a Japanese journalist, has been working since 1971 to |
bring the truth to his sceptical nation. In spite of the fact that there has been a recent sea change in the Japanese appreciation of their past - the Nanking invasion has been cautiously reintroduced to the school curriculum, and no one who witnessed the event will forget the shocked and baffled tears of middle-aged 1 Japanese parents learning the truth from their children - Honda >
Katsuichi nevertheless lives anonymously for fear of right-wing attacks. His 1999 collection of testimonies The Nanjing Massacre contains several witness accounts of the ‘corpse mountain’ somewhere in the region of Tiger Mountain, including the living human column attempting to climb to safety on thin air. It also contains an almost unbearable first-hand account of an unborn child being cut from its mother’s womb by a Japanese officer.
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In addition to Honda’s work, I also plundered the scholarship of the following: John Blake; Annie Blunt of the Bright Futures Mental Health Foundation; Jim Breen at Monash University (whose excellent kanji database can be found at csse.monash.edu.au); Nick Burton; John Dower (Embracing Defeat}; George Forty (Japanese Army Handbook}; Hiro Hitomi; Hiroaki Kobayashi; Alistair Morrison; Chigusa Ogino; Anna Valdinger; and all at the British Council, Tokyo. Any remaining errors I claim as my own.
Thank you to the city of Tokyo for permitting me to tinker with its remarkable geography, also to Selina Walker and Broo Doherty, for their faith and energy. The usual resounding howl of gratitude goes out to: Linda and Laura Downing; Jane Gregory; Patrick Janson-Smith; Margaret O.W.O. Murphy; Lisanne Radice; Gilly Vaulkhard. A special smile to Mairi the great. And most of all, thank you to my constants, the best constants a heart could hope for: Keith and Lotte Quinn.
For the sake of clarity all Japanese names have been presented according to the Western tradition: personal name followed by family name. Chinese names, however, are represented traditionally, the family name preceding the personal. Chinese names and terms have been mostly transcribed in the official pinyin system of the People’s Republic of China. Exceptions are names or terms that are well known in the West in their Wade-Giles form. These include (with pinyin in brackets) the Daoist classic the I-Ching (Yijing), Sun Yat-sen (Sun Yixian), the Kuomintang (Guomindang), the Yangtze (Yangzi), Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi), and most importantly the city of Nanking as it was known in the 1930s, now known in pinyin as Nanjing.
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