[An] unflinching re-examination of one of the most horrifying chapters of the Second World War.

A powerful new work of history and moral inquiry.

Denial is an integral part of atrocity, and it's a natural part after a society has committed genocide. First you kill, and then the memory of killing is killed....I want the Japanese people to know the truth....I want them to know a side of history that isn't properly taught in school. Like it or not, this is a part of their history.
—The New York Times

Colonial Williamsburg, the meticulous restoration of a Virginia village of several centuries ago, was built in the 1930s. For several decades, tens of millions of tourists enjoyed the spinning wheels, the working blacksmith's and cobbler's shops, the guides in period costumes. But it was not until after 1970 that a visitor could easily learn a crucial fact: Half the population of the original Williamsburg were slaves. Today you can see slave quarters and other exhibits showing what the daily life of slaves was like.

Some horrendous outbursts of cruelty, like slavery, endure for centuries; some are over in a few hours or weeks. But all of them raise two questions. First, what makes human beings capable of mass savagery? Second, what makes great acts of violence remembered or forgotten -- or, as in Williamsburg, officially forgotten for a long time and then abruptly remembered?

Both questions are raised by Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking. The 29-year-old Chang published the book in late 1997, then unexpectedly saw it give birth to a storm of praise, denunciations and controversy that still continues. A paperback edition of the book has just appeared.

In brief, the book is the story of the almost unbelievable orgy of violence unleashed over several months by the Japanese army after it occupied Nanking, the capital of Nationalist China, in December 1937. There is dispute about the death toll, but most serious scholars place it in the hundreds of thousands. Chinese men were forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers and daughters. Japanese soldiers gang-raped women by the tens of thousands. They nailed women to trees. They drove stakes through their vaginas. They bound the hands of Chinese men, lined them up in long rows, and machine-gunned them into huge burial ditches. They bayoneted babies in front of their mothers. They buried people alive. Soldiers had "killing contests" and boasted to Japanese reporters of their scores. Some of the carnage was recorded on film. An American missionary (the United States was not yet at war with Japan) took movies, and a colleague smuggled the footage out of the country sewn in his coat lining. Japanese soldiers took still photos, then brought their film for developing to Chinese photo shops where horrified employees, at great risk, surreptitiously made extra prints.

Chang vividly, methodically, records what happened, piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror. Driven mainly by an understandable outrage, she does not do such a good job of analyzing why the Japanese acted with such extraordinary sadism -- not just in Nanking, incidentally, but in so many other places they conquered as well. Although, in fairness, perhaps not even the greatest of philosophers can fully explain the gas chambers at Auschwitz or the spectacle of a Japanese soldier tying a man to a tree and using him for bayonet practice, while other soldiers watch, laugh and take pictures.

The Nanking atrocities were well publicized throughout the world at the time, and are usually mentioned in the standard Western histories of World War II. But along with wartime Japan's other vast, wanton sprees of murder, rape and looting, it has drawn far less attention in recent years than the Holocaust, Stalin's gulag and other mass murders of our day. The Rape of Nanking is the first book on the subject in English in more than 50 years. Many Japanese still deny that so much blood was shed. Six conservative historians held a Tokyo press conference to denounce Chang, and the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Kunihiko Saito, criticized the book as "full of errors, biased and a one-sided view." Imagine the uproar if a German ambassador had denounced Schindler's List as "one-sided."

The most unexpected part of Chang's story, and the reaction to it, has to do with the curious politics of memory and forgetting. In contrast to the extensive war crimes trials in Europe, begun by the Allies and later continued by the Germans themselves, trials in Japan were few and finished very quickly. Confiscated Japanese military records, a potential gold mine of information for war crimes and much else, were returned to Japan by the United States in the 1950s without even being fully copied. The U.S. saw the economic powerhouse of Japan as its key anti-Communist ally in Asia, and, throughout the Cold War, made no effort to force Japan to come to terms with its actions during World War II.

Furthermore, both Nationalist and Communist China, competing for Japanese trade and favor, have been reluctant to press the issue of Nanking and war crimes. Japan is the largest aid donor in the world. Most of that aid goes to Asia; Japan has loaned Beijing many billions of dollars on favorable terms. Although the memory of the rape of Nanking remains very much alive in the city (today known as Nanjing), it was not until 1985 that the government permitted a museum of the atrocities to be built there, and it has repeatedly prohibited demonstrations against visiting Japanese.

Not only did Chang's book become a bestseller, it has been the inspiration for several conferences, a TV documentary, a museum now on the drawing boards in Los Angeles and a planned Hollywood film. If she had written it 20 or 30 years ago, most likely none of this would have happened. What made the difference? Two things above all: the end of the Cold War, and the rising influence, and number, of Americans of Chinese descent. Many of them, like Iris Chang, grew up hearing the stories of events like Nanking, and want to see that history on paper at last.

Publicly remembering painful parts of the past is always a political act, and almost always takes place against enormous obstacles. Those obstacles do not just concern distant places like China and Japan. If Rosa Parks had not sat down in the front of the bus, if Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others had not marched and endured beatings and jail, Colonial Williamsburg would still display no slave quarters today.
— Salon

Even though the Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge the massacre of at least 250,000 Chinese civilians by invading Japanese troops in 1937, freelance writer Chang (the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Associated Press) has exposed in detail the full, terrible account of what happened to the war-torn capital of Nanking. Chang, whose grandparents survived the brutality, first establishes Japan's social hierarchy by martial competition, then shows how the city of Nanking fell, the six weeks of horror following, and the Nanking safety zone created by Americans and Europeans. The book goes on to depict the city's occupation, the judgment day for Japanese war criminals, the cover-up perpetrated by Japanese textbooks, and Japan's self-imposed censorship. -- Steven Lin, American Samoa Community College Library

The events in this book are horribly off-putting, which, paradoxically, is why they must be remembered. Chang tells of the Sino-Japanese War atrocities perpetrated by the invading Japanese army in Nanking in December 1937, in which roughly 350,000 soldiers and civilians were slaughtered in an eight-week period, many of them having been raped and/or tortured first. Not only are readers given many of the gory details with pictures but they are also told of the heroism of some members of a small foreign contingent, particularly of a Nazi businessman who resided in China for 30 years.

The story of his bravery lends the ironic touch of someone with evil credentials doing good. Once the author finishes with the atrocities, she proceeds with the equally absorbing and much easier-to-take story of what happened to the Nazi businessman when he returned to Germany and the war ended....The author tells why the Japanese government not only allowed the atrocities to occur but also refused, and continues to refuse, to acknowledge that they happened. She is quite evenhanded in reminding readers that every culture has some episode like this in its history; what makes this one important is the number of people killed and tortured, the sadism, and the ongoing Japanese denial of responsibility. Mature readers will look beyond the sensational acts of cruelty to ponder the horror of man's inhumanity to man and the examples of heroism in the midst of savagery. -- Judy McAloon, Potomac Library, Prince William County, Viriginia

Iris Chang offers the first comprehensive examination of the destruction of this Chinese imperial city...Ms. Chang has skillfully excavated from oblivion the terrible events that took place during the Sino-Japanese War that preceded World War II itself.
— The Wall Street Journal

Iris Chang, whose own gransparents were survivors, recounts the grisly massacre with understandable outrage.
— The New York Times Book Review

"The first comprehensive examination of the destruction of this Chinese imperial city...Ms. Chang, whose grandparents narrowly escaped the carnage, has skillfully excavated from oblivion the terrible events that took place." —The Wall Street Journal

"In her important new book ... Iris Chang, whose own grandparents were survivors, recounts the grisly massacre with understandable outrage."—Orville Schell, The New York Times Book Review

"A powerful new work of history and moral inquiry. Chang takes great care to establish an accurate accounting of the dimensions of the violence."—Chicago Tribune

"Chang vividly, methodically, records what happened, piecing together the abundant eyewitness reports into an undeniable tapestry of horror."—Adam Hochschild, Salon

"The story that Chang tells is almost to appalling for words...a carefully documented cry of moral outrage."—Houston Chronicle

"Chang reminds us that however blinding the atrocities in Nanking may be, they are not forgettable—at least without peril to civilization itself."—The Detroit News

"A compelling piece of history that speaks volumes about humankind's inhumanity in the atrocities that have been documented and offers some vestiges of hope in the individual acts of heroism that also have been uncovered."—San Jose Mercury News

"A very readable, well-organized account...Chang has rescued this episode from its undeserved obscurity."—Russell Jenkins, National Review

"Meticulously Researched...A gripping account that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end." —Nien Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai

"Iris Chang's research on the Nanking holocaust yields a new and expanded telling of this World War II atrocity and reflects thorough research. The book is excellent; its story deserves to be heard."—Beatrice S. Bartlett, professor of history, Yale University

"Heartbreaking.... An utterly compelling book. The descriptions of the atrocities raise fundamental questions not only about imperial Japanese militarism but the psychology of the torturers, rapists, and murderers."—Frederic Wakeman, director of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley

"Something beautiful, an act of justice, is occurring in America today concerning something ugly that happened long ago.... Because of Chang s book, the second rape of Nanking is ending."—George F. Will, syndicated columnist

"Anyone interested in the relation between war, self-righteousness, and the human spirit will find The Rape of Nanking of fundamental importance. It is scholarly, an exciting investigation, and a work of passion. In places it is almost unbearable to read, but it should be readonly if the past is understood can the future be navigated."—Ross Terrill, author of Mao, China in Our Time, and Madame Mao

"A powerful, landmark book, riveting in its horror." —Richard Rhodes

"One of the most important books of the twentieth century, Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking wil endure as a classic among the world's histories of war."—Nancy Tong, producer and co-director of In the Name of the Emperor