The Nanking Massacre: Iris Chang on the Controversy, Causes, Casualties, Denial (1998)
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 describes the events leading up to the Nanking Massacre and the atrocities that were committed. The book 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 was received with both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. It has been praised as a work that "shows more clearly than any previous account" the extent and brutality of the episode, while at the same time it was criticized as "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations". 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 Nanking Massacre.
The book prompted
AOL executive
Ted Leonsis to fund and produce
Nanking, a
2007 documentary film about the Nanking Massacre.
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. One 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 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. 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
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 by Hua-ling Hu for a biography of Vautrin and her role during the Nanking Massacre, entitled American
Goddess at the
Rape of Nanking:
The Courage of Minnie Vautrin.
The Rape of Nanking is structured into three main parts. The first 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 concerns the postwar reaction to the massacre, especially that 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 public consciousness decades after the war.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_Nanking_%28book%29