Rating: 
Summary: This was a brave and stirring book.
Review: Hey Yukizi. Read up you fool. Your father, uncle, grandfather, etc. and their contemporaries went abroad and killed millions and millions of defenseless people throughout Asia. Whenever you and idiots like you admit this and admit that your people were very, very evil in this point in history you can be respected by the rest of the human race. Until then you can live in denial and get NO respect for the rest of the planet. By the way, I live in Japan and am happy to MEET you anytime, anywhere. You S.O.B.Sorry, had to get that out of the way. Now to the intelligent readers out there. This book is a must read for anyone who wants to know the truth about this horrifying period and event in human history. But it is not just a non-fiction horror story which makes the Nazis look like Boy Scouts. It is a tale of courage, the will to survive, and unselfish bravery which the world NEEDS to learn of. Truly a remarkable story. Japanese right-wing politicians, Yakuza, and idiots like Yukizi have been tirelessly trying to bury this story for years. Take the time to learn the truth. Maybe your interests will carry over to more current issues and cover-ups.
Rating:
Summary: Japan needs to confront and atone for its hideous sins
Review: I am appalled that whilst the Holocaust is so well known, the bruality of the Japanese in China remains relatively unknown to the western world. However, this frustration pales in comparison to how appalled I am at the utterly unapologetic attitude of the Japanese government and many of its people. While not all Japanese are to blame, and many are willing to confront their dark past, others (like some of the reviewers for this book) go to such absurdity as to argue that the Nanking Massacre is a hoax created by the Americans to divert attention from American "atrocities" against the Japanese. Ask any of the elder residents of Nanking. Hundreds and thousands of people are lying? These people who deny the massacres are no different from neo-Nazis who deny the occurance of the holocaust. Many Japanese "scholars" argue that the actual number of people killed at Nanking is much lower, perhaps in the 10,000's range. Even if this were true (which I don't believe), I ask this: how many people do you have to kill before it's an atrocity? 100? 1,000? 100,000? 1 million? And here's a wakeup call: it wasn't just Nanking! The Japanese raped and slaughtered all over China wherever they went. My grandfather saw with his own eyes whilst hiding in a crawlspace how the Japanese slaughtered all the men and raped all the women of his village; don't tell HIM it never happened. What about Unit 731, where they performed horrific medical experiments on live Chinese subjects? Many of these doctors under Shiro Ishii still live! The best estimates I've seen report over 20 million Chinese died under Japanese hands; most of them civilian. Many Japanese continue to worship shrines of war criminals, which is no different than if Germans built a giant shrine to Hitler and his henchmen. Is there truly justice in the world? If Japan can get away with the one of the cruelest, most inhuman atrocities of history, then perhaps not. I guess you really can get away with murder. I have read Iris Chang's book, and found it to be a well-written and gripping piece of work. It's a good read for the general public; not a dry history book but a sad recounting of the worst side of humanity. Anyone interested in learning about one of the forgotten tragedies of history should read this book. Particularly if you are Chinese, it is your duty to teach your children never forget what was done to us. They can try to erase the past and forget, but we will not. It's true that this is Chang's personal interpretation of the event, but the basic facts of the massacre (and numerous other massacres) are not disputable. The question of WHETHER Japan has committed gruesome atrocities in China is NOT under serious acadmeic debate outside of Japan. I know of no professor outside of Japan who would argue such heartless absurdity.
Rating: 
Summary: Fallacy in the Name of Hitory
Review: This American (if this human being is an American) has not been taught the truth. The world is full of fads and fallacies and doesn't know it. The Rape of Nanking is your new clothes. You do not know your own Holocaust and frown on other nation's crime even if it is a fabricated one.
Chinese Nationalist Party started co-operation with Chinese Communist Party on anti-Japanese propaganda in 1937. They recruited eye-witnesses of "Nanking Masscre" for the preparation of International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), but very few applicants appeared and many people were quiet or even denied the massacre.
I was taught a lie? No, this article appears in Chinese documentation reported to the court of IMTFE.
Rating:
Summary: interesting book with a "human" appeal.
Review: To the Japanese that posted here. You have been taught a lie. And unfortunately for you and those who will not beleive evidence, whatever their motivation, the world knows it. In today's touchy racial enviroment in the US it is unfortuate that truths as addressed by this book get written off as racist toward Japanese (or maybe even asians in a pan-national sense). What if Germans denied the Holocaust? They would be called on it. And I'm calling it the denying of Nanking. Not to punish Japanese for the "sins of the fathers," but because it IS the truth. This book has a more "human" appeal rather than a bland book of dates and statistics.
Rating:
Summary: Now I understand ,,,
Review: Reading Miguel B. Llora's review, now I understand the reason why America accused this China's forged crime and took it into the court of Tokyo Trial. America intended to offset her crime of dropping atomic bombs by producing "Nanking Massacre". Americans, do you know 100,000 civilians were killed by US air raid on Tokyo Mar10 1945? 100,000 civilians were killed in 2 and half hours!
America has made the air raids on over 100 Japanese cities and continued killing civilians up to 500,000. The most famous ones happened in August. The US atomic bombs killed 140,000 civilians in Hiroshima and 70,000 civilians in Nagasaki. Do you know 200,000 Japanese women were raped by Americans in their occupation of Japan after WW2? Don't forget, never!
Rating:
Summary: Can you have heros without horror?
Review: Iris Chang's "Rape of Nanking" is many things. It is an indictment not just of the horror of the six weeks that followed the fall but of the subsequent Japanese cover. Moreover, it is a testament to the courage of a handful of individuals who saw themselves as humans rather than as German, American or Chinese. The most basic question we need it ask is: Why? Chang offers several possible explanations. 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." [...] 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. [...] A third factor was religion. 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. 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. [...] "We were more prepared for the excesses from the fleeing Chinese, particularly troops from Hsiakwan, but never, never from the Japanese. 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. Chang then proceeds to place the problematic of Japanese as empire builders at the center of this discourse. 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. Chang stops short of any conspiracy theory: "Currently, no reputable historian of Japan believes that there was a preplanned conspiracy by Japan to conquer the world." But in fact they did set out to conquer Asia - the whole myth of the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere speaks to this legacy. 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. From enemy to ally - the Japanese and the Americans partnered to fend of communism. Chang writes: "Washington decided to maintain a stable government in Japan in order to challenge communism in Asia. The US left the prewar bureaucracy in Japan virtually intact, permitting many of its wartime perpetrators to go unpunished. 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. 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. 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? 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 a 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. 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. When a Japanese surrender was not forthcoming, the Americans dropped, on August 9, a second, plutonium type bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. Less than a week later, on August 14, the Japanese made the final decision to surrender." She needs to meditate on her final own statement - of which I agree: "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." The Rape of Nanking as text is a testament to resistance to a form of hegemony. Nonetheless, I am richer for having read it and suggested everyone to do the same. Read it not as an end in itself but as a start of an investigation into the horrors of war and our constant need to justify it. Miguel Llora
Rating: 
Summary: A good venture, but flawed
Review: Iris Chang's book attempts to tell the background and events of the story of the Japanese attack on Nanking. However, while I was of course touched by the stories of the people affected, I couldn't help but notice some things that struck me while reading this. One, for example, is Miss Chang's understanding of Japanese culture and society. She claims in one chapter that the Japanese gave their pilots samurai swords instead of parachutes. I really don't know if I can believe this - I knew a Korean veteran forced to fight for the Japanese who was given a parachute, and I think the Japanese might have held their own soldiers' lives in higher regards than those of the Koreans. Any way, can you imagine trying to stab yourself with a sword in a tight cockpit while plummeting to the ground? It's a bit far fetched. Perhaps the biggest thing I noticed was Miss Chang's absolute failure to conclude on what made the Japanese commit these atrocities. Her biggest mistake, in examining early Japanese history, was totally going over the Russo-Japanese War! It's perhaps the biggest hole in the book: during this war the Russian POW's were sent back to Japan and treated like kings, and international newspapers proclaimed the Japanese were indeed a civilized and humane society. The other fact is in the book itself - Miss Chang describes reporters from Japan watching the atrocities occur...and then writing bad things about it back in Japan to a dismayed public. This makes it seem like the atrocities were not committed by a Japanese society so bent on Imperialism as Miss Chang attempts to claim, but instead by twisted individuals in high positions. The best explanation for why the Japanese did these things was actually from a Japanese historian who said the leaders of the time gradually twisted ancient Japanese history the same way the Nazis twisted German history in the 30's. Bushido suddenly became an excuse for mass genocide. I would use this to perhaps introduce yourself to the historical events or maybe get a biased, Chinese opinion (Miss Chang admits, in the book, that her parents were involved in the massacre). Otherwise, I would not use this for any real sound historical data.
Rating:
Summary: Full of Flaws
Review: Over 90 incorrect, or at least nonsense, descriptions are found in this book. This is proving Iris Chang has written this book based not on her own research but on materials provided by some (probably malicious) persons or parties (they must be sponsored by Chinese Communist Party). One more possibility is she was simply incapable of writing history.
Rating:
Summary: Judge for yourself!
Review: Japanese men are infamous on victimizing, bounding up women severly and in practicing 'bukkake' in pornography. After reading sections of the book, I think I have just made the connection, comparing to that, to incidents where daughters and mothers and grandmothers and grand-daughters in Nanking were savagely raped, tortued, then disposed of mercilessly!! May all the Chinese people who perished in Nanking rest their souls.
Rating:
Summary: Well documented tale of war crimes
Review: This is a well-written expose of Japanese war crimes
in Nanking China in the 1930s. The event itself is
widely accepted outside of Japan and has been documented
in academia, journalism, even The History Channel. It is suspicious that a host of "readers" with Japanese
surnames have deluged Amazon with 1-star ratings of this
book. This does not reflect the sales or press reviews
of the book. Amazon should not be used as an outlet for extremists who submit bogus reviews.
| 
