The Rape of Nanking (book)

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: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." == Contents ==

The Rape of Nanking is divided into three main parts. The first part uses a technique—what Chang calls the "Rashomon perspective"—to narrate the events of the massacre from three different perspectives: that of the Japanese military, that of the Chinese victims, and that of the Westerners who tried to help Chinese civilians. The second part describes the postwar reaction to the massacre, especially the reactions of the American and European governments. The third part of the book examines the circumstances that, Chang believed, have kept knowledge of the massacre out of the public's consciousness for decades after the war. 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: • 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 Akira Fujiwara mentioned at least 200,000; • John Rabe, who "never conducted a systematic count and left Nanking in February," estimated 50,000 to 60,000; and • Japanese historian Ikuhiko Hata argued the number killed was between 38,000 and 42,000. The book discusses the research of Sun Zhaiwei, a historian at the Jiangsu Academy of Social Sciences. In his 1990 paper, "The Nanking Massacre and the Nanking Population", Sun estimated that the total number of people who were killed in the massacre was 377,400. By using Chinese burial records, he calculated that the number of dead exceeded the figure of 227,400. He then added estimates which totaled 150,000 based on estimates which were given by Japanese Imperial Army Major Ohta Hisao in a confessional report about the Japanese army's efforts to dispose 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 Kōki Hirota 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." == Reception ==

Acclaim More than half a million copies of The Rape of Nanking were sold when it was first published in the US, and according to The New York Times, it generally received critical acclaim. 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: "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:“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. Vautrin exhausted herself trying to protect women and children during the Nanjing Massacre and subsequently during the Japanese occupation of Nanjing, finally suffering a nervous breakdown in 1940. She returned to the US for medical treatment and committed suicide a year later. == Editions ==

; English • 1997. • 1998. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, with a foreword by William C. Kirby. USA: Penguin. . ; French • 2010. Le viol de Nankin – 1937 : un des plus grands massacres du XXe siècle. Payot. . ; Chinese (under Iris Chang's Chinese name: "Zhang Chunru", ) • 2005. '''', translated by Ma Zhixing (), Tian Huaibin (), and Cui Naiying (). Oriental Publishing House (). 382 pp. . • 2015. ''''. Beijing: CITIC Press. 308 pp. . ; Japanese • 2007. '''', . Dojinsha. . • 2007 (Corrected version). '''', . Dojinsha. . == See also ==