The Rape of Nanking

Rating:
Summary: Historiography? Or, Historionics and Hysteria?
Review: Recently, I came across a very interesting book titled "War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937-1945" by Chang-tai Hung which provides you a wide range of propaganda sources and the structure of the Chinese propaganda machine.
BY reading this book, you can get a good picture of how the propaganda schemes worked in wartime China, as well as how the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang (KMT) / Chinese Nationalist Party fought each other fiercely in verbal/visual war of propaganda while from time to time they pretended to fight together for the resistance against Japan so that they could blame Japan for everything they wanted to.

According to Hung, in September 1937, the Nationalists and the Communists entered into their second alliance, gtemporarily submerging their enmity in the face of an invasion.h And, Guo Moruo, one of leading Communist intellectuals, was grecruited into the Political Department in the Military Affairs Commission (responsible for coordinating the war effort), in charge of crucial propaganda work.h
Guo Moruo explains in his memoirs that the second separated unit of the combined propaganda department led by Tang Tse was actively working in Nanking at the time of the cityfs capture and occupation.

On 4 January 1938, The New York Times reported:
gEx-Chinese Officers among U.S. Refugees: Colonel and His Aides Admit Blaming the Japanese for Crimes in Nankingh
gAmerican professors remaining at Ginling College in Nanking as foreign members of the Refugee Welfare Committee were seriously embarrassed to discover that they had been harboring a deserted Chinese Army colonel and six of his subordinate officers. The professors had, in fact, made the colonel second in authority at the refugee camp. The officers, who had doffed their uniforms during the Chinese retreat from Nanking, were discovered living in one of the college buildings. They confessed their identity after Japanese Army searchers found they had hidden six rifles, five revolvers, a dismounted machine gun and ammunition in the building.h
gThe ex-Chinese officers in the presence of Americans and other foreigners confessed looting in Nanking and also that one night they dragged girls from the refugee camp into the darkness and the next day blamed Japanese soldiers for the attacks. The officers were arrested and will be punished under martial law and probably executed.h

Those foreigners were, however, not completely innocent for this incident because, as the chief of the KMT propaganda department, Zeng Xubai admitted in his auto-biography, the KMT actually hired some of those Americans such as M.S. Bates, the professor of Nanking university and Dr. Smythe, who did the gWar Damage Survey in Nanking Areah which was precisely the Chinese propagandists wanted him to write. As for the ggood Germanh John Rabe, I do not think he was hired by the KMT as well, but, as he wrote in his diary, Rabe indeed helped some Chinese officers by hiding them in his own house. He even smuggled one of those Chinese officers, Capt. Huang pretending he was his servant to Hong Kong en route of his return to Germany in February 1938.

So, it was natural that the International Committee completely ignored and omitted this incident from their gDocuments of the Nanking Safety Zoneh and kept in silence until 3 days after the report appeared in the N.Y. Times, then resumed their gprotesth against the Japanese Army for their gexcessesh which was just a bunch of second-hand hearsays from the Chinese as German chancellor Scharffenberg criticised in his memorandum to the German Embassy.

What Iris Chang and other gNanking Massacreh advocates call ghistoriographyh is, in reality, all histrionics without proper, concrete evidences.
We all know very well how dangerous it is if the mass become driven into a state of hysteria and demonise another group of people to exterminate them.
I am only pleading everyone a fair justice for Japan. It is up to you: do you choose to be a fair-minded examiner, or to be one of mobs agitating ugly words?

Rating:
Summary: Tell the truth of the Wold War
Review: This is one of the best books about what Janpan did during Wold Ward II. Very informative and comes with a lot of pictures. What they did at that time is unforgetable, not only to asian counties but also American. Histry is something people can't deny and even you don't face it but it's still there.

Rating:
Summary: Extremely Interesting
Review: What was written in the history book? What really happened there? What is history anyway?

At one side: 10 years investigation; photoes; eye witnesses from Japan, German, China, US, and other countries; the facts of statistics published back in 30's and 40's.

At the other side: "I heard it never happened." "It was written in my history book." "This is not what I was told."

Take your judgement.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in history, especially WWII history regarding Japanese, Japanese army, and Japanese goverment.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely True!!!
Review: I really do not understand why most of the Japanese are still trying to lie after nearly 60 years....
What Japanese did during WW2 was horrible....
Launch a war without declaration, killing civilians and POWs...
Dammmn, I would treat Japanese as animals...

Rating:
Summary: Rape of Nanjing Deniers Please Address the Following
Review: As this so-called book review section has turned into a forum of inflammatory anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-American sentiment, I will ask that the deniers of the Rape of Nanjing please address the three issues that I will post below rather than continue to post the same innane drivel.

1. Why do some of your most respected historians all agree that the Imperial Army had committed many atrocities in China and the rest of the Pacific Rim? The late Saburo Ienaga almost won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to try and stop Japanese rightists from whitewashing the histroy books.

2. The Imperial Army committed atrocities in more countries than just China: Vietnam, Korea, Thailand, Malaysia, etc. There are many accounts of this. How do you explain this? Let me guess...they were all lying too.

3. The reports of international journalists all attest to the cruelty of the occupying Japanese forces with little variation.

Rating:
Summary: An Independent View
Review: This book by Iris Chang is indeed mostly chinese propaganda. The Chinese have a vested interest in blaming the Japanese of atrocities so as to 1) hide the atrocities committed during their own civil war and "Cultural Revolution", and 2) extracting monetary payments from the Japanese government, as they in fact have been doing for the last 30 years.
Note that it is easy to see that the photographs in this book have all clearly been doctored (I have seen the original versions of these photos in war books with different captions, and you can see where they have been edited here).
Now, that does not mean that a massacre did not take place in Nanking in 1937 (although it seems that not only the Japanese but the chinese nationalists were also involved). But if you want the truth, this book is not the best way to find it.

Rating:
Summary: Did the Chinese Authority Claim "Nanking Massacre"?
Review: Just after the People's Republic of China was brought into existence by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the C.C.P. built a memorial park in Yuhuatai (Rain Flower Terrace), Nanking, where the famous "the Nanking Great Slaughter Memorial Musium" was built in 1985.

This former version of the memorial is, however, not for the victims of "Nanking Massacre", but the communist/revolutionary victims of slaughters (executions) by the Chinese Nationalist Party since 1927.

In the memorial park, tower some gigantic statues of the brave revolutionaries and a stone monument on which engraved: "Once the Nationalist government captured 300,000 heroic communists and sent them to Nanking, then they slaughtered all of them in here, Yuhuatai. We build this memorial park in the memories of the heroes."

Let us note here: this is about the massacres of communist since 1927. The alleged "Nanking Massacre" happened in 1937/38. Having been accused of committing and ordering the Massacre, three Japanese Imperial Army officers were executed in here, Yuhuatai, and it was just a few years before the memorial park built.
Furthermore, according to Iris Chang, Yuhuatai itself is one of numerous massacre sites of Nanking city.
Why on earth did the Communist Party authority fail to commemorate the most gravest deaths of the Chinese people?

The answer is simple. The Chinese Communist authority did not recognise the "Nanking Massacre" as such.

Mao Tse-tung, who also engraved a memorial in the Yuhuatai Memorial Park: "The died communist heroes, forever!", delivered a lecture titled "On Protracted War" in May 1938.
Mao pointed out in the lecture that the Japanese Army made many mistakes in strategy and tactics. One of those mistakes that would cause grave consequences to the Japanese was made at the previous year's capture of Nanking.
The Japanese Army, Mao says, failed "to grasp strategic opportunities" and exercised "encirclement of large, but annihilation of small". And "many Chinese troops were routed but few were taken prisoner, which shows the stupidity of the enemy command."
This analysis substantiates the wartime reports of the Japanese Army that show some blunders they committed at the time of the capture of Nanking. Many Japanese soldiers admitted that they at one point captured large number of the Chinese soldiers, that were in general cases hugely outnumbered the Japanese, but many of the captured were soon found their way to escape because the Japanese soldiers were not so strict-minded to keep the peasants-turn-into-soldiers of the Chinese Army.
Nevertheless, those captures of the Chinese soldiers were wrongly assumed and publicly protested as if they were all executed by the foreigners of Nanking some of whom were actually hired by the Chinese Nationalist Party to propagate anti-Japanese sentiment.

In Chinese school textbooks, there had been very little, if not none, mention to "Nanking Massacre" until 1979, after when Deng Xiaoping came to power.
Having had the fact that the "Nanking Great Slaughter Memorial Musium" is assumed by the Chinese people as "Patriotic Education Centre" and organised by the authorities of the "United Front", it is clear that this memorial has been used for the propaganda purpose mainly for the Taiwanese and the Japanese.

It is very interesting that, according to Kou Bun-yu, the Taiwanese vice-chairman of Nanking Society in Japan, which members research to debunk the alleged "Nanking Massacre", most of the Taiwanese, who have lived in Taiwan under Japan's authority before the Nationalists came from the continent China and therefore long for the independence from the Communist China, believe that the "Nanking Massacre" is a gross fabrication.

Hence the necessity of the musium.
Most dreadful thing the Communist China does not want to happen at the moment is the independence of Taiwan.
So, to unite those Taiwanese to the Communist China, they desperately need to educate the Taiwanese as anti-Japanese because so many old Taiwanese such as Mr. Kou are, on the contrary to the knowledge of the Western world, mostly pro-Japanese.

Believe it or not, it is a matter of fact that the Chinese authority brought out the old "massacre" story that they themselves did not believe at one time just because of nothing but propaganda.

Rating:
Summary: Absolutely True!
Review: The book tells the real truths and images of the dirty Japs did to Chineses. Not only the cruelity towards humanity in China, it did happen in other parts of Asia (Korea & Taiwan) and South-East-Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam and etc). Of course, the dirty Japs have been trying to whitewash. Those pictures appear were taken by famous western journalists. You have chance to contact their relatives/widows. How cruelity about the dirty Japs.....

Rating:
Summary: Ignorance is guilty.
Review: A reader from CA, USA may not know the American history textbook on WW2 is different from the rest of the world. Also this person may not know every nation's history textbook is different from the rest of the world and Japanese history textbook on WW2 is very similar to American's because America had overwritten Japanese history and censored every media. Even private letters had been censored.
How can we know what we believe is the truth is really truth? Freedom of speech requires skepticism and criticism for keeping ourselves from being deceived.

Rating:
Summary: please face the truth
Review: Hey if you think that the author is lying then I believe you can ask any people from Korea, Malaysia, Thailand, Philipines, Vietnam, Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, Manchuria, Taiwan who had experienced the war. Or you can even ask old Japanese soldiers, who have human conscience, about what REALLY happened there. It may be easy to make one or two or even a group of people to lie. But I think it's impossible to make the entire world to lie. Also to all those japaese who think the rape of Nanking is a lie: if you have any common sense or you are not completely brain-dead you should ask WHY YOUR HISTORY TEXTBOOK ON WW2 IS DIFFERENT FROM THE REST OF THE WORLD?!