The Rape of Nanking: the Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Iris Chang

The dis-oriented author is only sort of Asian. I am 1/4 Chinese, 1/4 African (via Jamaica), and half Chamoru (from Guam). So my interest in Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking was largley academic. Growing up I always thought of myself as being just like my peers who were almost exclusively white and middle class. My parents were university professors so I was raised in a family where learning was highly valued.

Looking back, I do remember being called Ching, Chung, Chinaman but it seemed to me no more insidious than the teasing that others received. But as I have shared on these pages before, World War II did have an impact on my family. My mother was a young girl on Guam during the Japanese occupation. She has related some of the trials they went through on Guam but none of them quite prepared me for what I read about in Iris Chang's book.

I have read a wide variety of books on the Pacific War starting with Ted Lawson's, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (about the Doolittle Raid) in the third grade. I had to get special permission to use the big side of the library in the K-12 school I attended.

After I read James Bradley's excellent Flyboys, I was moved to read this difficult book.

For most Americans, World War II started on December 7th, 1941 with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. For Asians, the war had been going on for almost a decade. Japan's militaristic efforts began in Manchuria as early as 1931. In 1937 after the fall of Shanghai, Japanese troops attacked the Chinese Capitol of Nanking.

During the weeks that followed, Japanese troops committed wholesale atrocities against the Chinese people. These incidents of torture, beheadings, mass murder and rape have become known collectively as the Rape of Nanking. Chang's book is meant to be a testament to the world of the horrors of that time and a cautionary tale to remind us that the pillars of civilization are planted in shaky ground. During the days of the rape, some 250-350,000 Chinese killed.

Chang is also a modern day activist, writing to right the wrongs of the past. In a famous televised interview, she challenged the Japanese foreign minister over Japan's lack of a formal apology for war atrocities. Chang notes that Germany apologized for her crimes and today all Germans are required by law to learn about the holocaust. Denying the holocaust is a crime in Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Switzerland. While Germany has paid billions in reparations, Japan has hardly paid anything.

In Japan however, there is still an ultra-nationalist faction that adamantly denies Japan's atrocities from Word War II. Ask any one you meet today and while they are likely to know about the holocaust — few if any while have heard of Nanking. Chang even writes of a young Chinese-American lawyer who did not know anything about Nanking.

Chang also writes of the heroes of Nanking a group of westerners who rose to the occasion and risked their lives to rescue hundreds of thousands of Chinese in a free zone within the city walls. The unlikely hero of the international zone is a Nazi official named John Rabe. Rabe was president of the international zone and used his tenuous position as representative of a foreign government and personal force of moral outrage to  intervene and save the lives of innumerable Chinese. There were others, Germans and Americans, professors, doctors and missionaries who formed a thin line between the Japanese invaders and the Chinese civilians.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. I am reluctant to share the details on this site.

After writing this book and battling with depression, Chang committed suicide in November 2004 at age 36.

The Rape of Nanking gets 4 of 5 dis-oriented smileys

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