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The Rape of Nanking (book)

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The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (ISBN 0-465-06835-9) is a 1997 non-fiction book by Iris Chang, which presents a popular history of the 1937-1938 Nanking Massacre. It is one of the first major books to introduce the Nanking Massacre to Western and Eastern audiences alike as it has been translated in several languages.

Inspiration

When Iris Chang was a child, she heard from her immigrant parents, who had escaped from China via Taiwan to the US during the Second World War, how the Japanese “sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths”. As she wrote in the introduction to her book: “Throughout my childhood Nanjing Datusha (Nanking Massacre) remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.” But when she searched the local public libraries in her grade school and found nothing, she wondered if these terrible things had ever happened, since there wasn't a single book about it in the US. As she said, “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.”

Response

Retail success

The book sold more than half a million copies when it was first published, and Chang became an instant celebrity in America. It landed 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, and US historian Stephen Ambrose described her as “maybe the best young historian we’ve got”.[citation needed]

The book received much media praise[1]:

  • 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."

This book is the main source of fame for Iris Chang, who is deeply respected in China and among overseas Chinese for raising awareness of the Nanjing Massacre in the Western world. 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 victim memorial hall in Nanjing will add a wing dedicated to her in 2005.[citation needed]

Acclaim and criticism

The original version of a photograph used by Chang - the accuracy of the caption in the book is disputed

Chang's book provoked widespread response from readers and critics alike. Various scholars considered this book, especially Chang's discovery of John Rabe's diary, an important contribution to history. According to William C. Kirby, Professor of History at Harvard University, "Ms. Chang shows more clearly than any previous account just what (the Japanese) did."

Other academics have argued that the book was seriously flawed, claiming "it is full of misinformation and harebrained explanations." Scholar Joshua Fogel considered this book as "seriously flawed". While admiting that "[Chang] successfully recounts the work of the International Committee. Chang's discovery of John Rabe's lengthy diary may be her most important contribution", and "(h)er description of the Japanese assault on Nanjing is generally good, though flawed by occasional wild assertions". Fogel further stated that "the book begins to fall apart when she tries to explain why such a horror took place.... The most disturbing element of Chang's work is her insistence that postwar Japan continues to hide its past", which he found "unnecessarily unnuanced and, indeed, inaccurate and unfair."[1]。

Timothy M. Kelly described the book as "simple carelessness, sheer sloppiness, historical inaccuracies, and shameless plagiarism" and presented a case that Chang had plagiarised passages and an illustration from Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini. [2]

Chang was also rebuked by "liberals, who insist the massacre happened but allege that Chang's flawed scholarship damages their cause." (Los Angeles Times, June 6 1999). In Japan, many regard her book as a significant blow to the "Great Massacre" school, which advocate the case for massacre. "Rather than concentrating on those who argue for a smaller death toll than what it sees as acceptable, the Great Massacre School has thus been forced into the (unusual) position of criticising a work that argues for a larger death toll". [3]

Chang attempted to respond to criticisms of the book in a 1998 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, but it was not published by the newspaper.[4] In the letter, she said there was no evidence that photographs in the book had been fabricated; that the photographs were properly captioned; that the Japanese Foreign Minister at the time, Koki Hirota, had given a figure of 300,000 civilians killed; and that her critics in Japan were right-wingers who denied the existence of the massacre.

Chang's claim regarding Hirota comes from a telegram from the Manchester Guardian's correspondent in China which Japanese censors seized. The telegram told of 300,000 civilian deaths, more than the current Chinese government figure.[citation needed] Hirota subsequently relayed the telegraph. Chang cited this relayed telegraph as proof the Japanese government acknowledged the higher death toll.

Response in Japan

The book has resulted in much controversy in Japan. Various scholars (both from inside and outside Japan) argue that only a small portion of the Japanese people refused to admit the atrocities committed by the Japanese soldiers in the Second World War. Robert Grey said that "some of the best scholarly research on the Rape of Nanking has been done in Japan by dedicated Japanese scholars", [5], in contrast to the view of Chang (who cannot read or write Japanese) that Japanese scholars are too afraid of the subject to deal with it. This view has been shared by Chinese professor and writer Hu Ping, in his book about the Second World War and Sino-Japanese relations.[citation needed]

A Japanese translation of the book was halted following disagreement between Chang and Kashiwa Shobo, the publisher. As a result of the controversy surrounding the book, Kashiwa Shobo had planned to publish a critical commentary about an alleged "90 factual errors" in the same volume. In a best-selling book published in Japan in 1999, "Za Reipu obu Nankin no Kenkyu" (Study of "The Rape of Nanking"), co-written by Fujioka Nobukatsu and Higashinakano Shudo, the photographs contained in Chang's book were subjected to intense criticism, with the authors concluding that none of the photographs constitute evidence of the incident.[6] The book was subject to heavy criticism.

References

  1. ^ Fogel, JA, "The rape of Nanking: The forgotten Holocaust of World War II." The Journal of Asian studies, AUG 1998; v.57, no.3, p.818-820.

External links

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