Honda Katsuichi
| Katsuichi Honda | |
|---|---|
| Born | January 28, 1932 |
| Nationality | Japanese |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Katsuichi Honda (本多 勝一 Honda Katsuichi, born January 28, 1932) is a Japanese journalist and author most famous for his writing on the Nanking Massacre. During the 1970s he wrote a series of articles on the atrocities committed by Imperial Japanese soldiers during World War II called "Chūgoku no Tabi" (中国の旅, "Travels in China"). The series first appeared in the Asahi Shimbun.
Honda also worked as a war correspondent in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, an experience which, according to some historians, contributed to stoking his interest in Japanese wartime history.
Honda was a war correspondent in Vietnam, from December 1966 through 1968. He published a book on the Vietnam War entitled 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.
Although atrocities committed by Imperial Japanese forces during World War II had never been mentioned by anyone, including Mao Zedong, during and in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the Cold War led to the stigmatizing of Marxist or certain historians who were critical of "imperial myths and morals". Leftist historians were "purged" from their jobs. 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.
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