ource: “The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking,” Japan Echo 27.1 (February 2000),
■ S55–57;
reprinted in An Overview of the Nanjing Debate (Japan Echo, Inc., 2008), 100–7.
The Controversy over Iris Chang’s Rape of Nanking
In 1997 when Iris Chang, an independent journalist, published her book on
the Nanjing Massacre of 1937–38, many people felt that an important story
from World War II in East Asia would now be told for the first time in English.
That is, until they actually read the book.
The book, entitled The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World
War II (New York: Basic Books), appeared with gushing proclamations on the
back cover from an assortment of China scholars and journalists (Frederic
Wakeman, Beatrice Bartlett, and Ross Terrill among them) lauding the merits
of the book and carried a preface by a Harvard University professor of modern
Chinese history (William Kirby). The early reviews in such esteemed places as
the New York Times continued to gush praise. Yet, anyone who has ever studied modern Sino-Japanese relations should be able to clearly discern that the
book is grievously flawed in many ways. And, sadly, it plays right into the hands
of the right-wing extremists in Japan who still deny or strongly downplay the
massacre itself.
In her opening chapters Chang attempts to depict the entire history of Japan
up to the point of the massacre, and she ultimately reduces it all to bushidō leading to mass murder in the twentieth century. The fact, for instance, that only a
tiny fraction of the population was of the samurai class does not enter into her
calculations. There are numerous other errors of fact and interpretation in this
introduction. The most irritating quirk of this section of the book, though, is
Chang’s relentless psychologizing of “the Japanese,” despite her statement that
she would offer no “commentary on the Japanese character or on the genetic
makeup of a people who would commit such acts” (p. 13). Nevertheless, she
relentlessly does comment on the “Japanese psyche,” without questioning if
such a thing actually ever existed.
The main body of Chang’s book is divided into three parts: the Japanese
assault on the city, the mass murders and rapes; the efforts of the International
Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone to protect Chinese residents; and
what she dubs a “second rape” by which postwar Japanese allegedly have been
attempting to ignore or cover up the massacres of 1937–38. Her description
of the Japanese attack on Nanjing, although occasionally blemished by wild
or inaccurate claims, is generally good. Professor Hata Ikuhiko has already
pointed out a number of inaccuracies in his essay in Japan Echo (“Nanking
© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���5 | doi ��.��63/9789004285309_025
The Controversy over Iris Chang ’ s Rape of Nanking
395
Atrocities: Fact and Fable,” vol. 25, no. 4 [August 1998]). There is no point in
repeating his critique, except to say that, while I am not sure if I agree completely with his understanding of the Nanjing Massacre, virtually all his points
are well taken.
Chang believes wholeheartedly that the Japanese military developed a master plan for the murder of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians and prisoners
of war in and around Nanjing when it realized that it could not feed them all
during a long military confrontation. A statement like that would, it seems to
me, require a great deal of proof. To indict any group of mass butchery of this
sort demands the highest standards of historical analysis and scrutiny. Chang’s
evidence is paltry, based on a discredited source: David Bergamini’s Japan’s
Imperial Conspiracy: How Emperor Hirohito Led Japan into War Against the West
(New York: Morrow, 1971). There is evidence of organized executions of POW s,
though not on the scale claimed by Chang. The same is true for her argument
about victims of gang rape in the city. I will not get into the question of numbers
murdered and raped, but Chang spends much time establishing an extraordinarily high figure, again with little evidence. Furthermore, Hata Ikuhiko and
other Japanese scholars have recently discovered that many of the photographs that appear in her book are either fabrications or misconstructions.
The Chinese in this book are all depicted as victims, people without agency;
the Japanese are depicted solely as aggressors. As she adds a work to the growing body of victim studies, Chang never asks some of the most serious questions of all: How could so many hundreds of thousands of people have been
slaughtered by so many fewer Japanese troops? This is by no means to blame
the victims for what happened to them, but just to try to understand what
transpired in Nanjing. While Chang offers third-rate pop psychology to analyze
“the Japanese,” she is curiously silent on “the Chinese.”
Comparative Victimology
To me, the most offensive argument in the book is her claim that the Nanjing
Massacre was a “forgotten holocaust,” even worse than Hitler’s war against the
Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. She employs a peculiar mathematics to
come to this conclusion, but this is not scholarship. It is not informed by any of
the massive scholarship in European languages on the Holocaust or comparative genocide; it is pure emotionalism on the part of Ms. Chang. For example,
how can we compare the situation in which Jews were murdered en masse in
countries in which they were a tiny minority to China, where the Chinese were
always in the vast majority vis-à-vis the Japanese aggressors?