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 Nanking Massacre, the massacre and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after it captured Nanjing, then capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It documents the events, based on the author's research, leading up to the Nanking Massacre and the atrocities that were committed. The book also presents the view that the Japanese government has not done enough to redress the atrocities. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanking Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages.
The book was a source of fame for Chang but was also controversial; it has been praised as a work which "shows more clearly than any previous account just what [the Japanese] did", and at the same time was criticised as "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations". It was received with both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. 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 which protected Chinese civilians during the Nanking Massacre.
The book prompted AOL executive Ted Leonsis to fund and produce Nanking, a 2007 documentary film about the Nanking Massacre, after he read it.
Inspiration
When Iris Chang was a child, she was told by her immigrant parents, who had escaped from China via Taiwan to the United States during World War II, that during the Nanking Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths". In the introduction of The Rape of Nanking, she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanking 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 nobody had written a book about it.
The subject of the Nanking Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned of producers who had completed documentary films about it. One of the producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce Magee's Testament, a film which contains footage of the Nanking Massacre itself, 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. Chang began talking to Shao and Tong, and soon she was connected to a network of activists who felt the need to document and publicize the Nanking Massacre. In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanking Massacre, held in Cupertino, California, and it was what she saw and heard at the conference that motivated her to write The Rape of Nanking. As she wrote in the introduction of the book, while she was at the conference, she 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".
[edit]Research
Chang spent two years on research for the book. She found that raw source materials were available in the US, contained in the diaries, films, and photographs of American missionaries, journalists, and military officers who were in Nanjing at the time of the Nanking Massacre. Additionally, she traveled to Nanjing to interview survivors of the Nanking Massacre and to read Chinese accounts and confessions by Japanese army veterans. Chang did not, however, conduct research in Japan, and this left her vulnerable to criticisms on how she portrayed modern Japan in the context of how it deals with its World War II past.
Chang's research led her to make what one San Francisco Chronicle article called "significant discoveries" on the subject of the Nanking Massacre, in the forms of the diaries of two Westerners that were in Nanjing leading efforts to save lives during the Japanese invasion. The first diary was that of John Rabe, a German Nazi Party member who was the leader of the Nanking Safety Zone, a demilitarized zone in Nanjing that Rabe and other Westerners set up to protect Chinese civilians. The other diary belonged to the American missionary Minnie Vautrin, who saved the lives of about 10,000 women and children when she provided them with shelter in Ginling College. The diaries documented the events of the Nanking Massacre from the perspectives of their writers, and provided detailed accounts of atrocities that they saw, as well as information surrounding the circumstances of the Nanking Safety Zone. Chang dubbed Rabe the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking" and Vautrin the "Anne Frank of Nanking". Rabe's diary is over 800 pages, and contains one of the most detailed accounts of the Nanking Massacre. Translated into English, it was published in 1998 by Random House as a book on its own, called The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. Vautrin's diary recounts her personal experience and feelings on the Nanking 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 for a biographical book about Vautrin and her role during the Nanking Massacre, called American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin, written by Hua-ling Hu.
[edit]The book
The Rape of Nanking is structured into three main parts. The first part uses a technique that Chang called "the Rashomon perspective" to narrate the events of the Nanking Massacre, from three different perspectives: that of the Japanese military, the Chinese victims, and the Westerners who tried to help Chinese civilians. The second part was written on the postwar reaction to the massacre, especially the reaction of the American and European governments. The third part of the book is dedicated to examining the circumstances that, Chang believed, have kept knowledge of the massacre out of public consciousness decades after the war.
[edit]Atrocities
The book depicted in detail the killing, torture, and rape that occurred during the Nanking Massacre. Chang listed and described the kinds of torture that were visited upon the residents, including live burials, mutilation, "death by fire", "death by ice", and "death by dogs". Based on the testimony of a survivor of the massacre, Chang also described a killing contest amongst a group of Japanese soldiers to determine who could kill the fastest. On the rape that occurred during the massacre, Chang wrote that "certainly it was one of the greatest mass rapes in world history." She estimated that the number of women raped ranged from twenty thousand to as many as eighty thousand, and stated that women from all classes were raped, including Buddhist nuns. Furthermore, rape occurred in all locations and at all hours, and women both very young and very old 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.
[edit]Death toll
Chang wrote of the death toll estimates given by different sources; Chinese military specialist Liu Fang-chu proposed a figure of 430,000, officials at the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall and the procurator of the District Court of Nanjing in 1946 stated at least 300,000 were killed, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) judges concluded that more than 260,000 people were killed, Japanese historian Fujiwara Akira approximated 200,000, John Rabe, who "never conducted a systematic count and left Nanking in February", estimated only 50,000 to 60,000, and Japanese author Ikuhiko Hata argued the number killed was between 38,000 and 42,000.
The book discussed the research of historian Sun Zhaiwei of the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences. In a 1990 paper entitled The Nanking Massacre and the Nanking Population, Sun estimated the total number of people killed at 377,400. Using Chinese burial records, he calculated that the number dead exceeded the figure of 227,400. He then added estimates totaling 150,000 given by Japanese imperial army major Ohta Hisao in a confessional report about the Japanese army's disposal efforts of dead bodies, arriving at the sum of 377,400 dead.
Chang wrote that there is "compelling evidence" that the Japanese themselves, at the time, believed that the death toll may have been as high as 300,000. She cited a message that Japan's foreign minister Hirota Koki relayed to his contacts in Washington, DC in the first month of the massacre on January 17, 1938. The message acknowledged that "not less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians [were] slaughtered, many cases in cold blood."
[edit]Acclaim
Second edition (1998) of the book.
The Rape of Nanking 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. Iris Chang became an instant celebrity in the US; she was awarded honorary degrees, invited to give lectures and to discuss the Nanking Massacre on shows such as Good Morning America, Nightline, and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and was profiled by The New York Times as well as featured on the cover of Reader's Digest. The book was on the New York Times' Best Seller list for 10 weeks and sold more than 125,000 copies in four months. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House, US historian Stephen Ambrose described her as "maybe the best young historian we’ve got", and the Organization of Chinese Americans named her National Woman of the Year. The book's popularity prompted a lengthy book tour, with Chang visiting 65 cities in over a year and a half.
The book received praise from news media. 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 Atlantic Monthly wrote that it was "a crushing indictment of the Japanese army's behavior". The Chicago Tribune wrote that it was "a powerful new work of history and moral inquiry" and that "Chang takes great care to establish an accurate accounting of the dimensions of the violence." The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that it was a "compelling account of a horrendous episode that, until recently, has been largely forgotten", and that "animals do not behave the way the Japanese troops of the Imperial Army behaved."
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". Ross Terrill, an associate in research at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University, 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."
[edit]Chang's death
The book was the main source of fame for Iris Chang, who was well-respected in China for raising awareness of the Nanking Massacre in the Western world. At the same time, Chang received hate mail (primarily from Japanese ultranationalists), threatening notes on her car and believed her phone was tapped. She would respond overwhelmingly to any question of the validity of her work. Her own mother said the book "made Iris sad". Chang suffered from depression and was diagnosed with "brief reactive psychosis" in August 2004. She began taking medications to stabilize her mood. She wrote:
I can never shake my belief that I was being recruited, and later persecuted, by forces more powerful than I could have imagined. Whether it was the CIA or some other organization I will never know. As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me.
Succumbing to her battle with depression, Chang took her own life in November 2004. After her suicide, a memorial service was held in China by Nanking Massacre survivors at the same time as her funeral in Los Altos, California, and the Memorial Hall of the Victims in the Nanjing Massacre, a memorial site in Nanjing built to commemorate the victims of the Nanking Massacre, 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 Nanking Massacre, and drawing parallels between Chang and Vautrin, who also took her own life. Vautrin exhausted herself trying to protect women and children during the Nanking Massacre and subsequently during the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, finally suffering a nervous breakdown in 1940. She returned to the US for medical treatment, committing suicide a year later.
[edit]Criticism
Joshua A. Fogel, Canada Research Chair at York University, argued that the book is "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations." He suggested that the book "starts to fall apart" when Chang tried to explain why the massacre took place, as she repeatedly commented on "the Japanese psyche" which she sees as "the historical product of centuries of conditioning that all boil down to mass murder" even though in the introduction, she wrote that she will offer no "commentary on the Japanese character or the genetic makeup of a people who could commit such acts". Fogel criticized that part of the problem is Chang's "lack of training as a historian" and another part is "the book's dual aim as passionate polemic and dispassionate history". David M. Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winning professor of history at Stanford University, also pointed out that while Chang noted that "this book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character," she then wrote about the "'Japanese identity'—a bloody business, in her estimation, replete with martial competitions, samurai ethics, and the fearsome warriors' code of bushido", making the inference that "'the path to Nanking' runs through the very marrow of Japanese culture." Kennedy also suggested that "accusation and outrage, rather than analysis and understanding, are this book's dominant motifs, and although outrage is a morally necessary response to Nanjing, it is an intellectually insufficient one." Roger B. Jeans, professor of history at Washington and Lee University, refers to Chang's book as "half-baked history", and criticizes her lack of experience with the subject matter:
In writing about this horrific event, Chang strives to portray it as an unexamined Asian holocaust. Unfortunately, she undermines her argument—she is not a trained historian—by neglecting the wealth of sources in English and Japanese on this event. This leads her into errors such as greatly inflating the population of Nanjing (Nanking) at that time and uncritically accepting the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and contemporary Chinese figures for the numbers of Chinese civilians and soldiers killed. What particularly struck me about her argument was her attempt to charge all Japanese with refusing to accept the fact of the 'Rape of Nanking' and her condemnation of the 'persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with its past.'
Jeans continued what he calls "giving the lie to Iris Chang's generalizations about 'the Japanese'" by discussing the clashing interest groups within Japanese society over such things as museums, textbooks, and war memory.
Robert Entenmann, professor of history at St. Olaf College, criticized the work on the grounds that the "Japanese historical background Chang presents is clichéd, simplistic, stereotyped, and often inaccurate." On Chang's treatment of modern Japanese reaction to the massacre, he writes that Chang seemed "unable to differentiate between some members of the ultranationalist fringe and other Japanese", and that "her own ethnic prejudice implicitly pervades her book." Stating that Chang's description of the massacre is "open to criticism", Entenmann further commented that Chang "does not adequately explain why the massacre occurred".
Journalist Timothy M. Kelly described Chang's work as exhibiting "simple carelessness, sheer sloppiness, historical inaccuracies, and shameless plagiarism." Kelly further criticized Chang for her "lack of attention to detail".[note 1] Finally, Kelly charged that Chang also had plagiarized passages and an illustration from Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini.
Kennedy criticized Chang's accusation of "Western indifference" and "Japanese denial" of the massacre as being "exaggerated", commenting that "the Western world in fact neither then nor later ignored the Rape of Nanking" and that "nor is Chang entirely correct that Japan has obstinately refused to acknowledge its wartime crimes, let alone express regret for them." Chang argues that Japan "remains to this day a renegade nation," having "managed to avoid the moral judgment of the civilized world that the Germans were made to accept for their actions in this nightmare time." However, according to Kennedy, this accusation has already become a cliché of Western criticism of Japan, most notably exemplified by Ian Buruma's The Wages of Guilt (1994), whose general thesis might be summarized as "Germany remembers too much, Japan too little." Kennedy pointed out that a vocal Japanese left has long kept the memory of Nanking alive, noting the 1995 resolution of Japan's House of Councillors that expressed "deep remorse" (fukai hansei) for the suffering that Japan inflicted on other peoples during World War II and clear apologies (owabi) for Imperial Japan's offenses against other nations from two Japanese Prime Ministers.
Sonni Efron of Los Angeles Times warned 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. Fogel also writes: "Dozens of Japanese scholars are now actively engaged in research on every aspect of the war.... Indeed, we know many details of the Nanjing massacre, Japanese sexual exploitation of 'comfort women,' and biological and chemical warfare used in China because of the trailblazing research" of Japanese scholars.
[edit]Responding to criticism
The original version of a photograph used by Chang—the accuracy of the caption in the book is disputed
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer Charles Burress wrote that Chang's quote of a secret telegram sent by Japan's foreign minister in 1938 was incorrectly cited as "compelling evidence" that Japanese troops killed at least 300,000 Chinese civilians in Nanjing. According to Burress, the figure of 300,000 Chinese civilians killed actually came from a message sent by a British reporter, concerning deaths not only in Nanjing but in other places as well. Additionally, Burress questioned her motivation for writing the book on whether she wrote it as an activist or as a historian, citing that the book "draws its emotional impetus" from her conviction to not let the Nanking Massacre be forgotten to the world. Burress also cited Ikuhiko Hata, a Japanese history professor at Nihon University, who argued that 11 photos in the book were misrepresented or fake. One particular photo shows women and children walking across a bridge with Japanese soldiers, and captioned as "The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution." Hata stated that the photo originally appeared in 1937 in a Japanese newspaper as part of a series of photos that showed peaceful scenes of Chinese villagers under Japanese occupation.
Chang attempted to respond to Burress' criticism in a letter written to the San Francisco Chronicle, but the letter was not published by the newspaper. In the letter, she offered criticism of her own concerning Burress' article. Chang found that it was a "disturbing tendency" that Burress quoted right-wing Japanese critics "without demanding evidence to back up their allegations". Furthermore, she argued that Ikuhiko Hata, a source cited by Burress, was not "regarded as a serious scholar" either in Japan or in the US, because he was a regular contributor to "ultra right-wing" Japanese publications. One such publication had published an article from a Holocaust denier which argued that no gas chambers were used in Germany to kill Jews. This has caused the parent publisher to shut down the publication. On Burress' criticism of her inaccurate photo captioning, Chang disputed the contention that the caption was wrong. She wrote that her book dealt with the "horror of the Japanese invasion of China", and that the caption reading "The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution" contained two statements of indisputable facts.
Chang also issued a rejoinder against Burress' argument that she incorrectly cited a telegram sent by Japan's foreign minister. She wrote that while the original figure of 300,000 Chinese civilian deaths in Nanjing was reported by a British reporter, this figure was cited in a message that Japan's foreign minister sent to his contacts in Washington, DC. Being a figure used by a high-ranking Japanese government official, Chang argued that this was evidence that the Japanese government recognized 300,000 as the number of Chinese civilian deaths. Finally, she criticized Burress for his "nitpick" of small details in order to draw attention away from the scope and magnitude of the Nanking Massacre, writing that such was a "common tactic" of Holocaust deniers.
[edit]Reaction in Japan
Japanese translation of the book, published in December 2007
The Rape of Nanking has caused controversy in Japan. Los Angeles Times staff writer Sonni Efron reported that in addition to receiving criticism by Japanese "ultranationalists" who believe that the massacre in Nanjing never took place, Chang was also criticized by Japanese liberals, who "insist the massacre happened but allege that Chang's flawed scholarship damages their cause". Associate Professor David Askew of Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University stated that Chang's work dealt a "severe blow" to the "Great Massacre School" of thought, which advocates for the validity of the findings at the Tokyo Trials, the tribunal that was convened to try the leaders of the Empire of Japan for crimes committed during World War II. Askew further argued that "the Great Massacre School has thus been forced into the (unusual) position of criticising a work that argues for a larger death toll."
Following the publication of The Rape of Nanking, Japanese critic Masaaki Tanaka decided to have his 1987 book on Nanking translated into English. Entitled What Really Happened in Nanking: the Refutation of a Common Myth, Tanaka states in his introduction "I am convinced that [American researchers] will arrive at the realization that violations of international law of the magnitude alleged by Iris Chang in The Rape of Nanking (more than 300,000 murders and 80,000 rapes) never took place."
Chang's book was not published in a translated Japanese language edition until December 2007. Problems with translation efforts surfaced immediately after a contract was signed for the Japanese publishing of the book. A Japanese literary agency informed Chang that several Japanese historians declined to review the translation, and that one professor backed out due to pressure placed on his family from "an unknown organization". According to Japan scholar Ivan P. Hall, revisionist historians in Japan organized a committee of right-wing scholars to condemn the book with repeated appearances at the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Tokyo and throughout Japan. They prevailed on Kashiwa Shobo, the contracted Japanese publisher of the book, to insist that Chang edit the book for "corrections" they wanted made, to delete photographs and alter maps, and to publish a rebuttal to Chang's book. Chang disagreed with the changes and, as a result, withdrew the Japanese publishing of the book. The rebuttal piece was nonetheless published in the form of a 288-page book, titled A study of The Rape of Nanking, written by Nobukatsu Fujioka and Shudo Higashinakano.
Shudo Higashinakano, a professor of Intellectual History at Asia University of Japan, argued in an opinion column that appeared in Sankei Shimbun that the book was "pure baloney", that there was "no witness of illegal executions or murders", and that "there existed no 'Rape of Nanking' as alleged by the Tokyo Trial." He pointed out 90 historical factual errors in the first 64 pages of The Rape of Nanking, some of which were corrected in the 1998 Penguin Books edition of the book.
