Katsuichi Honda

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Honda was a war correspondent in Vietnam from December 1966 to 1968. He published a book on the Vietnam War titled Vietnam War: A Report through Asian Eyes in 1972.

During the 1970s Honda wrote a series of articles on the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers during World War II (including the Nanjing Massacre) called "Chūgoku no Tabi" (中国の旅, "Travels in China"). The series first appeared in the Asahi Shimbun.

The U.S. Occupation authorities in Japan at first banned the teaching of Japanese history. After the ban was lifted in November 1946, school textbooks referred routinely but briefly to the Nanjing Massacre. These references disappeared from about 1955 with the stigmatizing of Marxist historians who were critical of "imperial myths and morals" during the Cold War. The "spirit of patriotism" was to be written into school textbooks, to take the place of the "red textbooks" which were critical of the state and the Emperor. The Nanjing Massacre was written out of Japanese textbooks completely from the 1950s to 1970s, until disgust with the Vietnam War led Japanese society to rethink Japanese militarism in the World War II period. Katsuichi Honda's 1971 "Travels in China" was a keystone of this reexamination of the war era.

Just as Honda, in writing about the Vietnam War, had sought to narrate the war "through Asian Eyes", his scholarship on Imperial Japanese action in China sought to depict Japanese aggression from a Chinese perspective. The text stimulated much interest and debate, and had both supporters and detractors. Among the more intense rebuttals to the text was that of Yamamoto Shichihei, a World War II veteran and popular commentator, who attacked in particular an account recorded by Honda of a contest to kill Chinese people using swords. The contest would become a favorite target of revisionist writers in regards to the Nanking Massacre, in later years. Tomio Hora answered skepticism of the account with subsequent scholarship. Detailed research by Wakabayashi subsequently claimed that the competition was indeed a press fabrication of the time.

1999 saw the English language publication of Honda's The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan's National Shame. The book was principally a translation of Honda's The Road to Nanjing (南京への道, Nankin e no michi, 1987) but was also supplemented with excerpts from his "Travel to China" and The Nanjing Massacre (南京大虐殺, Nankin Daigyakusatsu, 1997). The book, translated by Karen Sandness, was published by M.E. Sharpe in connection with the Pacific Basin Institute. Pacific Basin's founder, Frank Gibney, also edited the book, writing an introduction critical of Iris Chang and her popular treatment of the massacre, The Rape of Nanking, which had been published two years prior.

Other works by Honda available in English include The Impoverished Spirit in Contemporary Japan: Selected Essays of Honda Katsuichi and Harukor: An Ainu Woman's Tale.

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