During the war, Japanese media and newspapers typically portrayed a positive view of the war in China. Reports on the massacre were generally muted, and newspaper reports and photos typically emphasized cooperation between Chinese civilians and Japanese soldiers. Massacre denialists claim that the news published in the Japanese media and newspapers were "true" and "reliable" stories. However, most mainstream historians counter that it is well known that the (
Cabinet Information Bureau), a consortium of military, politicians and professionals created in 1936 as a "committee" and upgraded to a "division" in 1937, applied censorship of all the media of the
Shōwa regime and that this office held a policing authority over the realm of publishing. Therefore, the
Naikaku Jōhōkyoku activities were proscriptive as well as prescriptive. Besides issuing detailed guidelines to publishers, it made suggestions that were all but commands. Article 12 of the censorship guideline for newspapers issued in September 1937 stated that any news article or photograph "unfavorable" to the Imperial Army was subject to a gag. Article 14 prohibited any "photographs of atrocities" but endorsed reports about the "cruelty of the Chinese" soldiers and civilians. Owing to the censorship, none of the hundred Japanese reporters in Nanjing when the city was captured wrote anything unfavorable to their countrymen. In 1956, however, Masatake Imai, correspondent for the who reported only about the "majestic and soul-stirring ceremony" of the triumphal entry of the Imperial Army, revealed he witnessed a mass execution of 400 to 500 Chinese men near
Tokyo Asahis office. "I wish I could write about it", he told his colleague Nakamura. "Someday, we will, but not for the time being. But we sure saw it", Nakamura answered.
Shigeharu Matsumoto, the Shanghai bureau chief of , wrote that the Japanese reporters he interviewed all told him they saw between 2,000 and 3,000 corpses around the
Xiaguan area and a reporter, Yuji Maeda, saw recruits executing Chinese prisoners of war with bayonets. Jiro Suzuki, a correspondent for the , wrote, "When I went back to the Zhongshan Gate, I saw for the first time an unearthly, brutal massacre. On the top of
the wall, about 25 meters high, the prisoners of war were rounded up in a line. They were being stabbed by bayonets and shoved away off the wall. A number of Japanese soldiers polished their bayonets, shouted to themselves once and thrust their bayonets in the chest or back of POWs." Historian
Tokushi Kasahara notes, "Some deniers argue that Nanjing was much more peaceful than we generally think. They always show some photographs with Nanjing refugees selling some food in the streets or Chinese people smiling in the camps. They are forgetting about
Japanese propaganda. The Imperial Army imposed strict censorship. Any photographs with dead bodies couldn't get through. So photographers had to remove all the bodies before taking pictures of streets and buildings in the city ... Even if the photos were not staged, the refugees had no choice but to fawn on the Japanese soldiers. Acting otherwise meant their deaths".
Revived international interest in the Nanjing Massacre Iris Chang's 1997 book,
The Rape of Nanking, renewed global interest in the Nanjing Massacre. The book sold more than half a million copies when it was first published in the US, and according to
The New York Times, received general critical acclaim.
The Wall Street Journal wrote that it was the "first comprehensive examination of the destruction of this Chinese imperial city", and that Chang "skillfully excavated from oblivion the terrible events that took place".
The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that it was a "compelling account of a horrendous episode that, until recently, has been largely forgotten". The text, however, was not without controversy. Chang's account drew on new sources to break new ground in the study of the period.
Japanese ultranationalists maintained that the Nanjing Massacre was a fabrication which sought "to demonize the Japanese race, culture, history, and nation".
Massacre affirmation vs. massacre denial Takashi Hoshiyama characterizes opinion in Japan about the Nanjing Massacre as "broadly divided into two schools of thought: the massacre affirmation school, which asserts that a large-scale massacre took place, and the massacre denial school, which asserts that, a certain number of isolated aberrations aside, no massacre took place". In the massacre affirmation school, both
Ikuhiko Hata and
Tokushi Kasahara are representative academic leaders of this school. The books the two wrote were published and widely read, based on reliable researches. However, even in the school over 300,000 casualties are decided to be too large, considering the population and the scale of the military and this is against the formal released number of China.
Japanese perspectives on the massacre Japanese affirmationists not only accept the validity of these tribunals and their findings, but also assert that Japan must stop denying the past and come to terms with Japan's responsibility for the war of aggression against its Asian neighbors. Affirmationists have drawn the attention of the Japanese public to atrocities committed by the Japanese Army during World War II in general and the Nanjing Massacre in particular in support of an anti-war agenda. The most extreme denialists, by and large, reject the findings of the tribunals as a kind of "
victor's justice" in which only the winning side's version of events are accepted. Described within Japan as the Illusion School (), they deny the massacre and argue that only a few POWs and civilians were killed by the Japanese military in Nanjing. More moderate denialists argue that between several thousand and 38,000–42,000 were massacred. ==Prominent Japanese denialists==