The Nanjing Massacre

Arnaud Nanta, director of research at the CNRS, is a historian of Japan from the late 19th century to the present day. He studies the history of knowledge and its relationship to politics, in metropolitan Japan and within its colonial empire. His publications include: "Le droit et la justice en contexte colonial à Taiwan et en Corée durant la colonisation japonaise" (Cahiers Jean Moulin, 2021); "Les sources primaires des officiers japonais lors du massacre de Nankin" (La violence politique vue par les historiens du Moyen- et de l'Extrême-Orient, Hémisphères, 2023).

Japanese historian KASAHARA Tokushi's Le massacre de Nankin (Nankin jiken), originally published in 1997, is for the first time available in a European language. This work, a synthesis of KASAHARA's early works, is one of the most important global works on the question of the Nanking massacre (winter 1937), which is analyzed both in terms of its causes and the mechanisms at work, as well as in terms of the details of the event, within the limits of what can be grasped from historical sources. In this book, historian and sinologist KASAHARA Tokushi mobilizes all available corpus: Chinese, Japanese, military sources made available around 1990, collections of testimonies from Chinese soldiers and survivors, or even American and German documents, to deliver a fine analysis of one of the most important events of war violence of the 20th century.

Organizer : Juliette Genevaz (Univ. Lyon 3/Ifrae)