What do You think about The Rape Of Nanking (1998)?
I picked this up after reading Unbroken in which this period of history was mentioned. I, like I think a lot of people, did not know anything about this aspect of WWII history. In Unbroken it is referenced as being so bad that it terrified the American soldiers greatly and they were deathly afraid to be captured by the Japanese. My interest peaked and I decided to learn more.I seem to be specializing in little known holocausts as I am also reading Sandcastle Girls which deals with the Armenian genocide. Reader beware, Iris Chang spared no details in relating the Rape of Nanking. The horrific descriptions were so awful that they gave me nightmares and there were pictures to boot. Weak stomached people should stick to the Wikipedia summary.In any case what happened is during WWII the Japanese who live on a teeny tiny island dubbed themselves the master race and in order to branch out decided to take over China. They conquered Shanghai, the New York of the east and moved on to Nanking where they met no resistance. It turns out that the Chinese weren't too interested in fighting the Japanese after all and surrendered without pretty much any resistance. Thousands of Chinese soldiers were laying down their weapons for the relatively few Japanese. This caused quite the problem for the Japanese who could not feed thousands upon thousands of prisoners. Their solution? kill them all. Hague Convention out the window. As if that was not disturbing enough what happened next could hardly be described as the acts of a human being. Due in part to the sadistic way Japanese soldiers were trained all sense of decency was obliterated.Sexual depravity, mass rape, and killing innocent civilians in ever inventive ways. It got so bad it even sickened the Nazi's. Some foreigners tried to intervene but it was a drop in a waterfall. It took the dropping of the atomic bomb to finally expel the Chinese from Japan.The author took her work very personally. My times she interjects the word I into the narrative. As a Chinese American she had more than a passing interest in the terrible treatment of her people. She became consumed by Japan's minimizing the holocaust. Where the Nazi's were punished after WWII and had to make reparations the Japanese for a variety of reasons were never held accountable. Many of the Japanese involved in the atrocities were holding prominent positions in society. The Japanese tried to white wash in their textbooks and any Japanese citizens who were involved that tried to speak out and offer apologies was ostracized. Chang tried to confront Japanese officials about their treatment of Chinese citizens during the holocaust but she was rebuffed and the validity of her work was called into question. While working on a book about the Bataan Death March, another shameful chapter in Japanese history, she suffered a nervous breakdown and killed herself. She is regarded as another victim of the Rape of Nanking.This book should be read so that light can be shed on this little known chapter of world history and so that it will never forgotten. I am not sure if all of Iris Changs information is accurate as some would claim but if only a portion is true than it is bad enough. It is a shame that Iris Chang was never able to deliver to the Chinese people the apology from Japan that she so desperately wanted to hear.
—Ariel
The Rape of Nanking was an experience. I’d finished this book several weeks ago but couldn’t write about it for some time because of the emotional toll reading this took on me. Reading this book I felt profound emotion, the most surprising of them was shame. I felt shame for not having realized this massacre for my entire 36 years of life. I felt shame for the human race - that something could cause us to behave so sadistically, so heartlessly. And finally shame for not having seen genocide as the horrendous tool that it has been used as. This book literally had me sobbing. I would read it and have to put it down from the surging emotions that were conjured up. It is a tale of the lowest and the greatest of humankind simultaneously – those that savagely raped and killed hundreds of defenseless men, women and children and the small band of heroes that fought for the abused. The author, Iris Chang, tells the story respectfully but with a gut-wrenching honesty that surpasses all reasoning. I marvel at her bravery. It was painful to read but I could not stop once I got started because of the way that the book was written. It was unputdownable from the very first page to even the end notes. I wanted to take in every page of the book and made many personal notations throughout. I enjoyed the reference guide in the back of the book and the brevity of the book itself. When you’re reading the types of things that this book contains you really want it to end as quickly as possible after getting the facts out. Chang got right to the point and never let up. Her descriptions of the atrocities that were perpetuated by Japan against the Chinese were hard and tough to read. But I knew that these terrible descriptions were needed to truly give life to the hundreds of thousands of the people silenced in a genocide that is still denied to this day. I was grateful that Chang tried to give the mindset of the Japanese soldier that committed the genocide since I found myself wondering aloud why they were so sex-starved and so savage. I wanted those answers that she tried to give. I am so glad that I read this book. It is my goal to continue to remind myself and my family of the crimes that were so easily committed and of the fact that no one should ever turn a blind eye to evil no matter what country’s name it comes disguised under. Great book!!!
—Juanita
First of all, this is an extremely difficult book to stomach. I had no clue what rating to give this one. Five stars makes it sound like I "liked" the book. I hated it. I hated that such a book has a reason to exist. I did however appreciate that an entire historical event that has largely been swept under the rug has become accessible in this book, first published in 1997--six decades after the events described. So, I wouldn't necessarily "recommend" this book to anyone, as the cruelest, most inhumane acts you've never thought of are described in depressingly horrifying eye witness accounts and survivor accounts, leaving you likely to feel hopelessly sad. In fact, the author (a Chinese-American) took her own young life only six years after publishing this book, as she was in the midst of researching for a book she was writing on the Bataan Death March. If the Nazis took civilian death-tolls to a new scale, the Japanese Imperial Army took torture and cruelty to an equal scale (if not in numbers of deaths). This is the story of another WW2 tragedy, the Japanese invasion and conquering of the Chinese capital of Nanjing (then Nanking), and the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were cruelly tortured, raped, murdered, and exposed to acts of depravity that defy fully accurate description.Now, it is important to note that this is not a book about an alleged moral superiority of one nationality, culture, or people--or the moral inferiority of another. It is not a book that casts blame on a people as a whole while pretending another people is guilt-free. In fact what the book does is show, with grotesque realism, the danger of such collectivism which is instilled in a group (here, the Japanese army) through the ideologies into which the group is brainwashed (here, the worship of the Japanese emperor and a mindless obedience to his imperialist goals). Rather than believing that Japanese are evil, the takeaway from this book is that enforced ideology (Japanese imperialism, Naziism, and I daresay American manifest destiny and expansionism) has a tendency to dehumanize entire groups of people and count as worthless the destruction of cultures and the deaths of entire populations that stand in the way of the ideology. No people is innately evil: not the Japanese, not the Germans, not the Chinese, not the Jews, not the Americans, etc. But when a people become filled with and fueled by an all-pervasive, no-holds-barred political ideology, they tend to lose the desire or ability to think for themselves, which leads to the sorts of atrocities described in horrific detail in The Rape of Nanking. The lesson is one of individualism over collectivism, individual thinking over trusting one's "leaders", and the reality that the brother/sisterhood of all humanity can only exist when we see each others as individuals, not as members of this or that class/nation/culture/people/&c. When soldiers are not force-fed psychological training that tells them the only life that matters is [choose one: the emperor, the fuhrer, the master race, etc.] and that their own lives are best spent dying for [the emperor, &c.], and that if their own lives are so worthless, then the lives of the "enemy" (including civilians) must be less than worthless, it is true that most soldiers would not dream of committing atrocities as the Japanese army did in Nanking. When individuals think for themselves, and are permitted to pursue their own goals, dreams, and desires, seldom does a Nanking or a Dachau or a Trail of Tears materialize: millions of people don't tend to dream up ways to torture fellow human beings on their own.The value of this book is in helping us to not forget the atrocities that have been permitted to occur by nations/cultures/peoples who have been swept up into dangerous ideologies to the point that all reason and humanity are tossed aside. There is a reason why the Jewish Holocaust is required in most history education curricula. The Rape of Nanking ought to be, as well, as should the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, and Mao's many evil deeds, and countless other acts of inhumanity in the name of political ideology. Don't let some "leader" (president, talk show host, political party, politician, religious leader, &c.) do your thinking for you. The good people of early 20th century Germany and Japan (and, at other times, China and America and Britain and on and on) didn't tend to harbor evil feelings toward entire other classes/races/nations/cultures on their own, but were led into such by so-called leaders who know how to lead populations into ideologically-grouned groupthink.
—Ronald Schoedel
