Story Of Atrocities Told In ‘Rape Of Nanking’

When she was a young girl growing up in Illinois, Iris Chang’s parents told her of a World War II massacre so horrific in scope it didn’t seem real. But she could find nothing in public libraries to document the tales of Japan’s pillaging of Nanking, China’s then-capital city. Eventually, her curiosity faded.

Two decades passed.

In 1994, Chang attended a conference in Cupertino, Calif., sponsored by the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia, where she learned, in grisly detail, that the stories passed down from her parents were more than folk myth. Poster-sized photos of the carnage provoked shock, anger and then panic as she realized that the butchering of hundreds of thousands of people had become little more than a footnote in history.

She is changing that with her book, “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” which just hit the New York Times best-seller list. Chang, 29, has appeared on “Nightline” and on “Good Morning America” and is overwhelmed by the attention.

Her research is remarkable, not only in content but for how readily available it turned out to be - in newspaper and military accounts, interviews with survivors, diaries kept by foreigners who staffed the “international safety zone” that became the only refuge for the city’s terrified inhabitants.

An estimated 19 million people were killed during the Japanese invasion of China. Nanking was just one place. But its systematic annihilation arouses passion from Chang, who is intent on mainstreaming an apocalyptic event that has somehow eluded public consciousness. She regularly compares those who helped save Chinese from certain death to Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank and chides Hollywood and American novelists for not immortalizing the incident in film or words.

“The Chinese community has been waiting for this book for the last 60 years,” Chang said.

For Asia, the war had begun with Japan’s occupation of Manchuria in 1931, its first step toward military domination of East Asia.

War with nearby China was seen as inevitable. Japan finally prodded China into combat in 1937, but defeating its foe proved harder than imagined, which only made the Japanese angrier. By the time they finally conquered Chiang Kai-shek’s forces at Shanghai, they craved revenge.

Nanking was a city of 1.4 million, about half of whom fled before the Japanese stormed in. Eventually, half of those who remained - about 350,000 - would be slaughtered.

Thousands of Chinese troops surrendered, expecting fair treatment. Instead, they were taken to remote areas and gunned down, beheaded or used for bayonet practice. The rationale was that the prisoners, too numerous to feed, had to be killed to defuse rebellion.

When the ditches filled with bodies and the Japanese ran out of gasoline to burn them, corpses were dumped into the Yangtze River.

The aggressors then turned on civilians. Streets, alleyways and city squares teemed with the dead. The Japanese hunted down any able-bodied male who might be a soldier.

Thousands of women were gang-raped and killed by day, while others were captured in nightly raids that people cynically began to call “the lottery.”

Nagatomi Hakudo, a Japanese doctor who, Chang writes, has built a “shrine of remorse” in his waiting room, whose patients can watch tapes of his war crime confessions, recounted memories in disturbingly graphic detail: “Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them alive into pots of boiling water ….

“I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them and buried them alive, over 200 in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil.”

How could such an event, frontpage news at the time despite Japanese whitewashing efforts, be forgotten? How could so few Japanese military leaders - seven were hanged - pay for their actions?

Chang’s theories are largely political. In 1949, Mao Tse-tung’s Communist forces won control of China and isolated itself from the West. Japan, victimized by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, emerged as a U.S. strategic ally in the Cold War.

The People’s Republic of China, with civil-rights problems of its own, has never sought the reparations Chang believes victims of the Japanese invasion deserve.

Meanwhile, Germany has atoned on a global stage for Nazi war crimes. Individuals have been prosecuted and sentenced for actions that killed 6 million Jews. German schoolchildren are required to learn about the Holocaust.

“It’s against the law not to teach the Holocaust,” Chang said. “In Japan, not only do they not have a similar law, but they’ve openly impeded the efforts of Japanese historians to write about this.”

Prominent Japanese conservatives have dismissed accounts of the event as fabrications, while the event remains mostly unknown to Americans, glossed over in historical accounts, as Chang discovered as a curious young girl.

“This is not just a story about Japanese people killing Chinese people,” Chang said. “It’s about what human beings are capable of doing in wartime situations. People have to understand how these atrocities happen in the first place to prevent them from happening again.”