The Rape of Nanking

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Summary: (...)Japanese please (...) face the truth
Review: It has been well known that Japanese inhumane army has brought an unprecedented catastrophe to the world, especially to the rest of Asian countries during the WWII. Nanking massacre is particularly a disastrous tragedy in the history of the human being. During Japanese army's occupancy of Nanking, more than 300,000 civilian and Chinese P.O.W.s were brutally slaughtered and thousands of Chinese women were killed after gang rape. Unfortunately, in Japan there are still quite a few right-wing politicians and ignorant people insisting to deny these crimes and are trying to distort history by claiming that Japan liberated Asian nations and Nanking massacre is being faked. How ridiculous! If you really want to know what barbaric Japanese army did in Nanking during that hellish six weeks, please make every effort to get this book. The brutality shown in the book is far beyond any human imagination. (...)

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Summary: The truth which "igonorant Japanese" cannot accept!
Review: Isn't it annoying once you know that all the negative reviews for this book are posted by the same group of people, the ignorant "Japanese"?

The book is a really good book. The evidences and testimony are very valid. The Japanese soldiers really conducted brutal acts against the civilians. The pictures actually show the truth for itself. Pictures of Japanese soldiers cutting off the heads of Chinese civilians and Buddhist monks. Two Japanese generals competed on who would cut the most Chinese's heads.

If you are an Asian, you would undoubtedly agree with Ms. Chang. The Japanese soldiers really did commit this act of atrocity in Asia (in China, Korea, Manchuria, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam).

To all ignorant Japanese, it does not matter how many were killed. What does matter is the way a person is being killed. Japanese soldiers during WW2 should be put on war crime and Koisumi should give apology to the Chinese, Koreans, and other Asians.

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Summary: What about the Human Rights of the Falsely Accused?
Review: Yes, this IS about the human rights of ALL kind of people including those who falsely accused and sentenced with unjust guilty verdicts.

If you have closely read those refutations on this so-called gRape of Nanking / Nanking Massacreh with fair-mind, you can find there are so many hard, objective evidences that suggest the gmassacreh never happened.

For example, the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone witnessed the civilian population of Nanking, 200,000, that was estimated by the Chinese authority of the city just before the city was captured, never decreased.
On the contrary, the Committee clearly wrote in the Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone, which was later prepared and published under the auspices of the [Chinese] Council of International Affairs in Chungking, that based on the numbers of the lian-min-cheng, gGood Citizen Card", which issued by the Japanese Army for the civilian and the ex-soldiers, who were given the ID because the Japanese accepted that they were not hostile, as the guarantee of their protection by the Japanese Army, the number of the population in Nanking increased to 250,000.
In November 1938, M.S. Bates stated in his letter to the American Christians that: gThe population of Nanking has increased to 400,000 because lots of refugees from other countryside have been coming into the city seeking much safer places as their home towns had become no-go areas with dangerous Chinese guerrillas.h
Everyone can read can find those facts in the documents abovementioned. I just donft understand why many decent scholars in the world never bother to check themselves. Should it not be called a sloppy research?

Or, I wonder if they have been so prejudiced by this so-called gTokyo Trial view of historyh, that is based on the unjust verdicts of the trial in which the gNanking Massacreh was assumed as the Japanese equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust. Hence the subtitle of Iris Changfs gRape of Nankingh.
I think that is the answer to the question why those people who refuse to reassess the gincidenth properly and fairly often say that denying the Nanking Massacre is the same as the denial of the Nazi Holocaust and they really sound disgusted. I presume they fear that if they even show some interest in those refutations they will be labeled as Neo Nazi along with those gdeniersh.

But, it is obvious that the gNanking Massacreh is not a holocaust. If you know what really happened in Nanking in 1937 to 1938, you never think those two are resemble.

Let us see this issue from another point of view.
Had the Jewish people been at war with the Germans and killed many German soldiers at the camps where the Holocaust happened and counted the war-dead as victims of the Holocaust? Had the Jews been active in massive propaganda campaigns against the German involving large number of gobjectiveh foreign nationals to co-operate them? Had the Jews been killing innocent German people as well as the German soldiers sometimes in deceiving methods such as disguising themselves as innocent civilian to put the Germans off their guard, then, attack them with lethal weapons like Dum-Dum bullets which use was abstained in First Hague Conference in 1899? Had the Jews even robbed, raped, injured or killed innocent Jewish people and burnt their houses and afterwards very often blamed the Germans for all those atrocities for propaganda purposes? And, most crucially, had there happened to be many documents written by objective foreigners and for some even by the Jews themselves that suggest the Holocaust story was, in fact, only products of hearsay and rumours from the Jews, those who had been, in fact, proved by their own authority to be members of the propaganda department of the Jewish authority and otherwise no annihilations of the Jewish people other than the war-dead, if the Jews had been fighting a war with the Germans, was actually eye-witnessed even at the camps the Jews were confined?

If any of those questions turns to be true, then you should be sceptical about the Holocaust, but, I believe that they are all false for the biggest tragedy of the century. However, I am afraid, they are all true if you changed the words gthe Jewsh or gthe Jewish peopleh to gChinah or gthe Chineseh and gGermanyh or gthe Germansh to gJapanh or gthe Japaneseh. Again, you can find evidences that support those facts in various locations.

It is really a sad but salient fact that the Chinese Army of both the Nationalist and the Communist were not fighting for their people but for the hegemony over China. Many documented evidences such as the Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone and the letters and diaries of the International Committee show that the Chinese civilians were very often victimised by the Chinese soldiers and the Japanese Army did protect those gGood Citizensh. At least they always tried to.

Evidences are there, if you really look at.
I believe that, if this is not a society of fascism or totalism, everyone who has been falsely accused has the right to refute and the refutation should be heard. We are only asking a fair justice. Because the ones the Allied gave us were shamelessly unjust.
Some Japanese, including myself, are taking this matter very seriously because they have been felt as if they were ex-convicts and think it is themselves who are still accused of those terrible crimes, falsely.

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Summary: Blame Tojo- Not Japan
Review: Japanese Americans and those who live in Japan are sensitive about this topic. But there is no reason to be. A single atrocity says nothing about the Japanese way of life. In World War I, the Japanese were actually very humane toward POWS, etc. So why should we remember it?

The Rape of Nanking doesn't demonstrate that the Japanese are "evil." It is a reminder of how harsh times leave a country susceptible to dangerous ideas. In Japan of the 1930s, the country was facing problems from a worldwide depression. It had difficulty feeding its people. If you study history, you'll see that economic hardship provides the perfect climate for a dictatorship. It happened in Germany, Russia, Itlaly, and Spain. It has happened in countless other countries.

The horrors of WWII in Asia were largely the handiwork of people like Hideki Tojo, Matsui Iwani, and the Army top brass. Why were people so happy to follow these guys? It's hard to say, but I once read a quote that said "In desparate times, people favor action over ideas . . . and they will anyone who

Like most books about atrocities, Chang describes what happened in great detail. But its important to understand the root causes as well. Root causes are not "excuses," mind you. They are simply necessary to understand, if atrocities are to be prevented.

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Summary: A good buy, a good read, and true history......
Review: The Rape of Nanking is a very well written book. It uses first hand reports in a journalistic style that is very informative. Take a little care in reading the above reviews. Some of the reviews above were written by individuals who are the equivalent of Holocaust deniers. The research done for this book is without question, and even relies upon eye witness reports from the Nazi ambassador, a Japanese ally, who used his political position to help establish a free zone to protect the Chinese civilians from Japanese aggression and atrocities. Certain individuals continue to deny this history, but arming yourself with the truth is the only way of combating such activities, and this book is an excellent start for understanding certain less publicized aspects of World War II.

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Summary: Who Were the Chinese Informants in Nanking?
Review: Most of the historians and journalists all over the world who make arguments on this "Rape of Nanking" issue, particularly ones who, without doubt, assert that the "Nanking Massacre" did happen in December 1937, rely heavily on the accounts stated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, a.k.a., Tokyo Trial.

According to several judges who took part in the trial, however, perjury was never applied to the prosecutorfs witnesses whereas majority of the defendantsf refutations and requests for cross-examination of the witnesses were always simply dismissed. It might lead to an inevitable assumption: the Tokyo Trial might have reached the verdicts being based on a bunch of hearsay and hung the 7 Japanese wartime leaders for the gpresumed guilth.

As for the gRape of Nankingh, only one seemingly-gobjectiveh evidence for the accusation that was presented in the trial is the gDocuments of the Nanking Safety Zoneh reported by the foreigners who remained in Nanking at the time of the capture of the city to help the 200,000 Chinese refugees. But, these documents were a bunch of hearsay, too, with only one exception of true eyewitness by the members of the International Committee, Kroeger and Hatz, of a glegitimate executionh of a struggler (case #185). As the committee admitted in the Documents, those hearsay reports were mostly even gsecond-handh hearsay that they never bothered to verify.

As a matter of fact, you can see in the Document that the number of the refugee, 200,000, that was estimated by the Chinese authority just before the city fell in hands of the Japanese, actually never decreased. On the contrary, it increased up to 250,000 within a few weeks after the date of capture. This naturally means that the International Committee was in recognition that the civilian population of Nanking was intact.

Still, the foreigners continued to gprotesth against the Japanese Armyfs excesses, which were criticized by the German Chancellor Schalffenberg as: gccone hears only one side of it, after all.h (gThe Diaries of John Rabeh pp.189-191)
Indeed, the Documents and other letters of the members of the committee, such as Dr. Robert Wilson and so on, clearly stated that the information of the Japanese Armyfs atrocities was being brought into the committee office by some Chinese men.

Tokuyasu Fukuda, then Attache to the Japanese Embassy, to whom many letters from the committee were addressed, recalls; gAlmost everyday I visited the committee office to do my part of job. I saw there many young Chinese men streaming in one after another to tell the foreigners about those wrong-doing, like; eSome Japanese soldiers are gang-raping a young girl !f or eA large number of the Japanese Army is ransacking !f, etc.cc. Rev. John G. Magee and Fitch and a few others were just typing those ereportsf in front of me. I warned them that the ereportsf should be substantiated before protesting the Japanese Army with those hearsay or rumours. From time to time, I even went to see the scenes of the alleged atrocities like rape or looting with the members of the committee only to find out there were nothing going on there. Even no one lived. No hint of living at all. There were many cases like that.h

After the war ended, Nanking Criminal Court conducted a survey to gather evidences of the Japanese Armyfs atrocities. However, they only got silent responses from the genuine Chinese residents of Nanking. Some people even accused the Chinese Army of being responsible to those atrocities happened in Nanking.

So, who were those Chinese informants to the International Committee, then?

According to Guo Moruo, the chief of the third sector of the joint propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang/Chinese Nationalist Party at that time, their second unit led by Kang Tse ( Sorry, I mistyped his surname as eTang'in my previous review of April 8), who was from the notorious semi-fascist Blue Shirt society, and his subordinates were rigorously working in Nanking.

Furthermore, Aoyama Kazuo, the Japanese who were recruited to the propaganda department by Guo Moruo himself with another Japanese communist Kaji Wataru, who was an old acquaintance of Guofs, to produce propaganda material in Japanese language (the Japanese version of gWhat War Meansh by H. Timperley, who was also hired by the KMT, was translated and prefaced by them) admitted to a journalist that the Chinese informants to the Committee in question were, indeed, members of Kang Tsefs second unit.

They were, however, not only spreading the rumours of the atrocities of the Japanese Army, at the same time, gathering many photographs of the dead and the injured (whose perpetrators are unknown, by the way) taken by those Americans in Nanking who were, again, hired by the Kuomintang (stated in the autobiography of Zeng Xubai, the chief of the KMT propaganda department) and with them produced some books such as gTrue Story of Atrocities of the Enemy Bandits (i.e. Japan)h.

So, what historians worldwide believe about gRape of Nanking/ Nanking Massacreh is, evidently, all products of the Chinese propaganda departments. The U.S.-oriented Tokyo Trial just collaborated with them to use their anti-Japanese propaganda for themselves to avert peoplefs attention set on their own war atrocities.

They might have been marvellously successful to make the whole world believe that their propaganda is true history, but as Guo Moruo said in his memoirs; gIf [their] works fail, then [they] should be criticised by the history.h

A patriotic intellectual, Guo Moruofs true intention was, in fact, not fighting an ugly propaganda war. He says; gThe inconsistency in our words and deeds would only make the enemy sneer at us. [cc] We should have actually no time to spend in denunciation match if we are really fighting a true resistance war. h

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Summary: Faked pictures with misleading captions
Review:
Pictures in the book are faked and associated with the captions misleading readers. Every picture is not an evidence of the massacre. On the contrary, many pictures are no related to Nanking battle.

Let's see the picture with a caption "The severed heads of Nanking Victims (New China News Agency)".

This picture had been for sale at photo shops in 1925, more than 10 years before the Nanking battle. They are the robbers in Mancuria, excuted by the Chinese police.

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Summary: Some are mixing up things to blur the picture
Review: This review thing is getting ugly.
A book is a book, and it has more in-depth telling of the events and other materials from extensive research. Why are many reviewers, mostly from Japan, just trying to associate this book with the Communist, the Nationalist, or any other imaginable entities? Or they even try to connect this with the atomic bombs? They are trying to smear the picture here. I think over the last many decades, many Japanese are doing just that. Remember that they have repeatedly attempted to "revise" their history textbooks about the WWII.
To my knowledge, this book also contains quotes from those who deny that the event ever happened. We treat this book as the result of Iris Chang's extensive research. By citing some little flaws (if there are) and then discrediting the entire book, those reviewers are just attackers in heart.
History would be a good teacher if people learn from it. Obviously, some Japanese do not want to learn at all. These people are the ones who should not be in power and will not, for they will bring the Japanese people and nation much misery and misfortune.

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Summary: I can't believe that this book is not getting 5 stars
Review: It seems that most of the readers who do not like this book do so because they believe that this is complete fabrication. Well...is Nazi Holocaust a complete fabrication? Those Japanese generals... (or should i say savages) did commit atrocous crimes OTHER than rape of Nanking, too... these include mass murder in Kwandong, the comfort woman, Maruta experiments... and those who committed such crimes are actually worshipped in Japanese shrines..what whould you say if Hitler was worshipped and revered as "the great leader who benefitted all of Europe by exterminating inferious races of people and tried to bring the true prosperity in the world..." and all those German people say "alas! if only he suceeded.." you know what? if you change the word "Nazi" with "Japanese imperialist... (they themselves would say great leaders)" some of the people in 21st century actually believe those lies!! May be that's not their fault...because their government is trying desperately to shut up the mouthes of people who really know the truth..

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Summary: Difficult subject covered well
Review: A well written narrative that is sometimes hard to stomach - definitely not for the squeemish. Some very hard facts to face about the terrible things that human beings can do to each other in times of war. 300,000 killed in only a few weeks! Appalling atrocities committed! It's time for the Rape of Nanking and the terrible things that happened during the Japanese occupation of China during World War II to be seen as a tragedy on par with the Holocaust in Europe. How anyone can deny these terrible things happened is beyond my comprehension.