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Chang writes, "Ironically, attempts to disprove the Nanking massacre backfired when the revisionists themselves began to probe into the subject for ammunition against the "massacre faction." For instance, in the 1980s Kaikosha, a fraternity of army cadet school graduates, asked its eighteen thousand members to come forward with eyewitness accounts to discredit the Nanking massacre. "We were more prepared for the excesses from the fleeing Chinese, particularly troops from Hsiakwan, but never, never from the Japanese. Chang offers several possible explanations. Chang begins with, "Strangely, because of an incident in Nanking a decade earlier, most expected to have more trouble with the Chinese than the Japanese.
After that having been laid out: the need to take control of East and Southeast Asia, the Racialization, the massacre and then revisionism -- as opposed to Nazis, one is compelled to ask: How did the Japanese get away with it. [.]. The answer, Chang argues lies with the US.With the advent of the Cold War, US relations vis-à-vis Japan changed dramatically. Chang stops short of any conspiracy theory. [.]. A third factor was religion.
A second factor in the atrocities, scholars believe, is the virulent contempt that many Japanese military reserved for Chinese people - a contempt cultivated by decades of propaganda, education, and social indoctrination. The most basic question is, Why. The US left the prewar bureaucracy in Japan virtually intact, permitting many of its wartime perpetrators to go unpunished. Chang's Rape of Nanking is a testament to the courage of a handful of individuals who saw themselves as humans rather than as German, American or Chinese. But in fact they did set out to conquer Asia -- the whole narrative of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to this legacy.
Imbuing violence with holy meaning, the Japanese imperial army made violence a cultural imperative every bit as powerful as that which propelled Europeans during the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition." What this leads into is a sense of the totalizing effect of Racialization. As much as she does not really tackle the issue of the bomb, my sense is that she has fallen into the trap of alluding that it was necessary -- finding a sense of relief in it when she writes: "The end of Nanking's ordeal came at last in the summer of 1945. Not to reduce the war to engagement of pure racial animosity, this book not just teases out it stands as confirmation of the racial tensions explained by Dower in War without Mercy.Chang then proceeds to place the problematic of Japanese as empire builders at the center of this discourse. Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is an indictment not just of the horror of the six weeks that followed the fall of Nanking but like Perilous Memories seeks to recover (or recapture) lost suffering and marginalized narratives and bodies. From enemy to ally -- the Japanese and the Americans collaborated to fend of communism by protecting the kokutai and rigging the Tokyo War Trials. Chang writes, "Washington decided to maintain a stable government in Japan in order to challenge communism in Asia. Therefore, while the Nazi regime was overhauled and replaced and numerous Nazi war criminals were hunted down and brought to trial, many high-ranking wartime Japanese officials returned to power and prospered." Chang calls the silence/denial of the events and the lack of restitution the "second rape." Chang writes: "[.].
many leading officials in Japan continue to believe (or pretend to believe) that their country did nothing that requires compensation, or even apologies, and contend that many of the worst misdeeds their government has been accused of perpetrating never happened and that evidence that they did happen was fabricated by the Chinese and other Japan bashers." However, somehow truth wins out. On August 6, 1945, the US dropped an untested uranium bomb on Hiroshima, Japan's eight-largest city, killing 100,000 of its 245,000 people on the first day. She writes, "Some Japanese scholars believe that the horrors of the Rape of Nanking and other outrages of the Sino-Japanese War were caused by a phenomenon called "the transfer of oppression." [.]. When a Japanese surrender was not forthcoming, the Americans dropped, on August 9, a second, plutonium type bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. On the contrary, we had expected that with the appearance of the Japanese the return of peace, quiet and prosperity would occur." The liminality of race is evident. Invited to the banquet and fearing being served up as the meal, the Meiji Japanese set out to create an empire at par with the other players in the imperialism game. To the dismay of the "illusion faction," many Kaikosha members confirmed the details of the Rape of Nanking and described atrocities that horrified even hard-core "Japanese conservatives."Did we need to drop the bomb.
Less than a week later, on August 14, the Japanese made the final decision to surrender." The final statement is philosophical, "The Rape of Nanking should be perceived as a cautionary tale -- an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." Rape of Nanking as text is a testament to resistance to a form of military hegemony.
The pictures included in the text are some of the most afwul images of violence and barbarism I have ever seen - not for the faint of heart. Iris Chang has written a very readable book that never gets bogged down like many dry history books do. This is a very well written book about a horrifying chapter in humanity's history. Chang is quite frank and open in her disbelief that the Rape of Nanking has been largely forgotten, and that Japan has (for the most part) never had to truly answer for its unspeakable acts its military committed at Nanking and abroad (especially the top leaership). The narrative comes alive with the many first person accounts she includes, mostly from the diaries of the Westerners who were there trying to help, but also from many Chinese citizens who survived. I particularly liked the chapter where Chang tries her best to dissect the psychology of the Japanese soldiers to figure out WHY and HOW they were able to shed their humanity and commit such unspeakable acts upon helpless civilians. After reading this graphic book, and looking at all the evidence the author presents, it is appalling that so many Japanese citizens to this day refuse to admit this happened, much like the idiots who believe the Holocaust in Europe never happened. Highly recommended.
Upon completion of the book, my wife and I visited the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall where a bronze statue stands in Iris Chang's honor. Although some of those mistakes have been corrected in the updated edition, the book has still been a source of controversy.
Within weeks, (hundreds of). thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered.
In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into Nanjing. Unfortunately many historians have found numerous mistakes in Iris Chang's book.
As a history teacher who is half Japanese and living in China, I felt it was essential to better educate myself on this brutal massacre. The Rape of Nanking is at times a very gruesome read, and the pictures are absolutely shocking, but it's an account that is of fundamental importance.
Despite that, I have been made aware of an tragic event that I before knew very little about. She passed away in 2004.
Therein lies part of the problem. The greatest flaw is the distinctly one-sided account of the massacre. The information that Chang presents is derived from contemporary news reports, personal diaries and letters, and eyewitness accounts (some corroborated, others not). So much has been said about this book by other reviewers already - so there is not much more that I can add. The end result reads as a profoundly depressing litany of man's inhumanity to (wo)man. There is little attempt at a sobre chronological account of events or to determine the historical/military antecedents of the Nanking campaign.
Chang's book, however, is essentially a catalogue of inhumanity.
Doubtless newspaper editors and reporters were as prone to bias then as they obviously are today.
This is where the input from a trained historian would have been invaluable.
This is an important book but it is flawed.
There is almost no Japanese perspective offered, which effectively eliminates the academic value of this work.
Eyewitness evidence is notoriously unreliable (unless backed up by independent corroboration - ask anyone in law enforcement).
Clearly, however, something horrific happened in Nanking yet the extent of the carnage and the motives and culpability of those responsible remain shrouded in mystery and secrecy.
The most surprising aspect of this book is that it needed a journalist rather than an historian to write a mainstream account in the first place.
It is now up to the Japanese historians to produce a definitive account of their actions using official records.
The Battle of Nanking took place in December, 1937 just after the fall of Shanghai. Then to complete the telling, Chang offers the rest of the story: she traced forward each of the heroes and told their tales after the war and their saint-like efforts. The author reached back to find where the philosophies of Japanese warriors and then State driven military psyche began and how they affected the individual soldiers. Chang is excellent as an historian finding and digging through facts and interviews and then documenting them in fine detail. Iris Chang has taken a relatively unknown event (at least it was before her bestselling history of this battle of Nanking) and made an international expose of these events. The Chinese owe a debt of gratitude to Chang for pulling together this book, translating the information and then writing a landmark book. Rabe stood up to the rampaging Japanese as he attempted to save thousands of Chinese civilians trying to escape their own version of the Holocaust. She tells of a German Nazi, John Rabe and calls him the Oskar Schindler of China.
The burying of this event in the annals of Japanese history is also brought to light by Chang. Author Iris Chang gives a credible version of the military plans and how the Chinese were simply overrun by a more technologically advanced and more mentally prepared Japanese army even though the Chinese army in this area outnumbered the Japanese by at least a 5:1 ratio. Chang has every reason to be extremely biased in her telling of this event, but she has taken the proverbial "high road" and remained detached from the cruelty in her telling of this story. These are not pretty stories. The Japanese were extended their imperial reach into China proving that Chiang Kai-Shek and his army were inadequately prepared for this type of battle. In addition to providing a fairly graphic portrayal of the events as Nanking fell, Chang beautifully digs deep for personal stories of heroism. She finds the individuals responsible for hiding the atrocities and then highlights the efforts of those that have struggled to bring out the facts in a Japan that was trying to sweep this under the carpet.Iris Chang is superb in her telling of this story. I highly recommend this book.
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