The Rape of Nanking (book)

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non-fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre—the mass murder and the mass rape of Chinese civilians which was committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing (Nanking), the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It describes the events which lead up to the Nanjing Massacre, provides graphic details of the war crimes and the atrocities which were committed by Japanese troops, and it lambasts the Japanese government for its refusal to acknowledge the atrocities. It also criticizes the Japanese people for their ignorance about the massacre. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and it has been translated into several languages. The book significantly renewed public interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, Southeast Asia (including the Philippines) and the Pacific.

The book received acclaim and criticism by the public and academics. It has been praised as a work that "shows more clearly than any previous account" the extent and brutality of the episode, while elements of Chang's analysis of the motivations for the events, Japanese culture, and her calculations of the total number of people who were killed and raped were criticized as inaccurate because of her lack of training as a historian. Chang's research on the book was credited with the finding of the diaries of John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, both of whom played important roles in the Nanking Safety Zone, a designated area in Nanjing that protected Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre.

The book prompted AOL executive Ted Leonsis to fund and produce Nanking, a 2007 documentary film about the eponymous massacre.

Background

Inspiration

When she was a child, Chang's parents told her that during the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." Her parents and their families had escaped from China by moving to Taiwan and after World War II, they moved to the United States. In the introduction of The Rape of Nanking, she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanjing Massacre "remained buried in the back of [her] mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil." When she searched the local public libraries in her school and found nothing, she wondered why no one had written a book about it.

The subject of the Nanjing Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned that film producers had completed documentary films about it. One of the film producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce Magee's Testament, a film that contains footage of the Nanjing Massacre, shot by the missionary John Magee. The other producer was Nancy Tong, who, together with Christine Choy, produced and co-directed In The Name of the Emperor, a film containing a series of interviews with Chinese, American, and Japanese citizens.

In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanjing Massacre, held in Cupertino, California, and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write her 1997 book. As she wrote in the book's introduction, while she was at the conference:<blockquote>I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it. Also, she incorporated the most recent work on the subject by Chinese and Chinese-American historians by including many disturbing photographs and a myriad of translated documents.

Before its publication, the book was reviewed by Rana Mitter and Christian Jessen-Klingenberg of the University of Oxford; Carol Gluck of Columbia University; and William C. Kirby of Harvard University. At the time of writing, the Japanese government classified Japan's World War 2 archives, making archival records unavailable to investigators.

The diaries

Chang's research led her to make what one San Francisco Chronicle article called "Significant Discoveries" on the subject of the Nanjing Massacre, in the forms of the diaries of two Westerners who were in Nanjing leading efforts to save lives during the Japanese invasion. Rabe's diary is over 800 pages, and contains one of the most detailed accounts of the Nanjing Massacre. Translated into English, it was published in 1998 by Random House as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe.

The other diary was written by belonged to Minnie Vautrin, the American missionary who saved the lives of about 10,000 women and children when she provided them with shelter in Ginling College. Vautrin's diary recounts her personal experience and feelings on the Nanjing Massacre; in it, an entry reads, "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today." It was used as source material by Hua-ling Hu for a biography of Vautrin and her role during the Nanjing Massacre, entitled American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin.

Chang dubbed Rabe the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking" and she dubbed Vautrin the "Anne Frank of Nanking." and states that women from all classes were raped, including Buddhist nuns. Furthermore, rape occurred in all locations and at all hours, and both very young and very old women were raped. Not even pregnant women were spared, Chang wrote, and that after gang rape, Japanese soldiers "sometimes slashed open the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out the fetuses for amusement." Not all rape victims were women, according to the book, Chinese men were sodomized and forced to perform repulsive sexual acts. Some were forced to commit incest—fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers.

Death toll

Chang wrote about the death toll estimates which were given by different sources: The book remained on the New York Times Best Seller list for 10 weeks and sold more than 125,000 copies in four months.

Chang became an instant celebrity in the US: she was awarded honorary degrees; invited to give lectures and to discuss the Nanjing Massacre on shows such as Good Morning America, Nightline, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer; profiled by The New York Times; and was featured on the cover of Reader's Digest.

According to William C. Kirby, Professor of History at Harvard University, Chang "shows more clearly than any previous account just what [the Japanese] did," and that she "draws connections between the slaughter in Europe and in Asia of millions of innocents during World War II." wrote that the book is "scholarly, an exciting investigation and a work of passion." Beatrice S. Bartlett, Emeritus Professor of History at Yale University, wrote, "Iris Chang's research on the Nanking holocaust yields a new and expanded telling of this World War II atrocity and reflects thorough research." Robert Entenmann, professor of history at St. Olaf College, disagreed with her description of the massacre. Entenmann opined that her explanations on why the massacre occurred were inadequate. Disagreements notwithstanding, he acknowledged that her book will help preserve the memory of the atrocity.

Sonni Efron of the Los Angeles Times opined that the bitter row over Iris Chang's book may leave Westerners with the misimpression that little has been written in Japan about the Nanjing Massacre, when in fact the National Diet Library holds at least 42 books about the Nanjing massacre and Japan's wartime misdeeds, 21 of which were written by liberals investigating Japan's wartime atrocities. In addition, Efron noted that geriatric Japanese soldiers have published their memoirs and have been giving speeches and interviews in increasing numbers, recounting the atrocities they committed or witnessed. After years of government-enforced denial, Japanese middle school textbooks now carry accounts of the Nanjing massacre as accepted truth. According to Efron, Japanese liberals alleged that the mistakes found in her book could undermine their endeavors, which include bringing the knowledge of the massacre to the Japanese public and pressuring the Japanese government into apologizing and atoning for the massacre. In the letter, she offered criticism of her own concerning Burress's article. She said Hata is considered as an untrustworthy scholar because of his regular contributions to ultra right-wing Japanese publishing companies such as Bungeishunjū, which published an article that promoted Holocaust denial and another that accused Chang, the MacArthur Foundation and Rupert Murdoch of being part of a conspiracy organized by the Chinese Communist Party.

In reference to the photo that shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, she wrote: <blockquote>"The Japanese, like the Nazis, relied on deception to make mass executions and mass rapes more manageable. The hapless Chinese men, women and children rounded up by the Japanese were usually kept ignorant about their fate until it was too late to escape. In Nanking, women were guided to "marketplaces" to buy ducks and chicken, only to find platoons of soldiers waiting to rape them. Men were assured of food, shelter and safety by Japanese soldiers, only to be lured to remote areas and used for bayonet practice or decapitation contests." In 1999 Fujiwara said that:<blockquote>“A campaign to deny the Nanking massacre itself by presenting the weaknesses of Iris Chang’s book is being developed. The massacre denial groups have been using these kinds of tactics to maintain there was no massacre by presenting the contradictions in testimony quoted or by the use of inappropriate photos. Yet it is impossible to deny the occurrence of the incident itself because of these few mistakes. It is an illogical jump in reasoning to deny that the Nanking massacre ever happened by attacking her book.”

In an attempt to prevent her Japanese publisher from releasing a Japanese translation of her book, right-wing Japanese groups threatened and pilloried Chang, her publisher and Japanese historians. A Japanese literary agency informed her that several Japanese historians declined to review the translation; one professor backed out because of pressure placed on his family from "an unknown organization"; and her publisher said he was risking his life by publishing her book.

Chang's death

After publishing the book, Chang received hate mail, primarily from Japanese ultranationalists, added a wing dedicated to her in 2005.

In the US, a Chinese garden in Norfolk, Virginia, which contains a memorial to Minnie Vautrin, added a memorial dedicated to Chang, including her as the latest victim of the Nanjing Massacre, and drawing parallels between Chang and Vautrin, who also took her own life.