THE RAPE OF NANKING: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II
By Iris Chung
Basic Books, 290 pages, $25
There was war in Asia years before Pearl Harbor. The Japanese were the aggres-sors; Manchuria was their first victim, China next. By summer 1937, the Japanese army had the forces of Nationalist China on the run. After capturing Shanghai, which took longer and cost more casualties than anticipated, the Japanese turned inland, to attack China’s capital, the ancient city of Nanking. A Chinese army de-fended Nanking, but early in the Japanese attack, Chiang Kai-shek, China’s generalissimo, ordered it to break off contact with the Japanese and retreat. Nanking, a city of more than 1 million, lay open to the Japanese. What they did there is the subject of a power-ful new work of history and moral inquiry, “The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,” by Iris Chang, a 29-year-old Chinese-American.
Some scholars hold Japanese Emperor Hirohito directly respon-sible for the invasion of Nanking and even claim he knew of the mas-sacres there as they were happen-ing. For their part, the Japanese commanders on the ground sought vengeance against Nanking for their losses at Shanghai. More-over, there was a reservoir of resentment in the Japanese army ready to break loose in violence: Soldiers were routinely brutalized by their officers, who in turn were so imbued with the military ethic of bushido, which included a pref-erence for death over dishonor, that they were often near the point of committing suicide for trivial lapses in performance. Tensions were high-and com-bustible.
The first Japanese soldiers to arrive in Nanking gave it a taste of what was to come as they rode up and down the streets on motorcycles, shooting pedestrians in the head. At this point, Chang’s narrative becomes a contribution to the literature of atrocity in warfare. In a barbarous frenzy, the Japanese held beheading contests among themselves with hundreds of Chinese as the victims; used Chinese as targets for bayonet practice; in one long massacre machine-gunned rough-ly 14,000 Chinese soldiers they had taken prisoner; burned many Chinese alive; threw gasoline on others and then shot them, ig-niting them into human torches; and beheaded Chinese men and boys in waves of carnage that lasted for days, with each group that was about to be decapitated forced to throw the bodies of the previous group into the Yangtze River. They broke into apart-ments and homes, killing every-one except young girls, whom they carried off to un-speakable service in their brothels. Pregnant women were thrown down on the pavement and raped by whole military units; afterwards, many of the wo-men killed them-selves.
“The Japanese,” Chang notes, “drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest-fathers to rape their own daughters, broth-ers their sisters, sons their mothers.” An American mission-ary estimated that there were 1,000 rapes every night. The only defense available to Nanking women was to stop washing and otherwise make themselves re-pulsive to the soldiers.
Chang takes great care to establish an accurate accounting of the dimensions of the violence. She estimates that 80,000 women and young girls were raped, most in the first six weeks of the occupation, and says that most were killed immediately after being raped. Her total of all Chinese killed is 350,000, nearly all in the first six weeks. Of those, nearly 150,000 died individually by the sword: beheaded, stabbed, mutilated, cut into pieces and fed to dogs. And Nanking was not an aberration, but merely a gro-tesque concentration of atrocity in a war by the Japanese that took an estimated 19 million Chinese lives.
Chang includes a heartening chapter on the heroics of the handful of Europeans and Americans left in Nanking who set up a 1-mile-square safety zone for as many Chinese as could squeeze into it. “If half of the population of Nanking fled into the Safety Zone during the worst of the massacre,” Chang writes, “then the other half-almost every-one who did not make it to the zone-probably died at the hands of the Japanese.” The leader of these Westerners, German businessman John Rabe, would drive across the city pulling soldiers off women and stopping casual massa-cres. Ironically, he had been head of the Nazi Party in Nanking and in that capacity wrote Hitler, beseeching him to intercede with the Japanese. He never got a reply. His 1,000-page diary, newly discovered, provides the fullest account available of the Japanese assault on Nanking. After the war, he was de-Nazified-in effect, pardoned-by the Allies for his humanitar-ianism.
You would think the Japanese government would long since have apologized for the Nanking atrocities and somehow com-pensated its survivors-but you would be wrong. To this day, as Chang shows in a concluding chapter, Japanese history text-books either ignore the rape of Nanking or whitewash it un-recognizably. “Sad to say,” she writes, “the world is still acting as a passive spectator to the second Japanese rape-the refusal of the Japanese to apologize for or even acknowledge their crimes in Nanking.”
How could people have done such things? Chang wrestles with that question, aware of its con-temporary applicability to such places as Bosnia, Rwanda and Algeria. Japanese racism toward the Chinese, whom the Japanese regarded as subhuman, played a large part. ” `Perhaps when we were raping (a woman), we looked at her as a woman,’ ” one former Japanese soldier wrote to Chang, ” `but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.’ ” There was also some of what some Japanese scholars call “the transfer of oppression”-brutalized Japanese soldiers brutalizing others. Chang quotes from the diary of one young officer who at first tried to stop his men from the savagery, but soon grew inured to it. Evil be-came routine.
It’s tempting to ascribe the hor-rors of Nanking to the Japanese national character, but the ubi-quity of mass murder across the peoples of this planet implicates the human character. To use a distinction philosopher Karl Jaspers made about German war guilt, Nanking showed the human essence in the Japanese form. We all didn’t do it, but the hecatombs of this century, when 60 million to 100 million people were killed by their own governments, cry out to us that we could.
