Read this book many years ago and the account of the Japanese occupation of Nanking was pretty horrifying. Later on I had heard that the lady that wrote it was pretty heavily discredited and ended upmkilling herself as a result. Things like japanese soldiers stabbing babies with bayonets and throwing them in boiling pots of water while they still cried stick out to me.
So what’s the SD? how much was true?
I don’t know specifically but Wikipedia has a whole Criticism section.
But I don’t think anyone has suggested that she killed herself over a book. She had a mental illness and killed herself because of that.
Going mostly from memory:
The book was not well-regarded by academics or specialists on the topic. Chang wasn’t a historian, didn’t know Chinese or Japanese, had an amateurish grasp of the event’s historical context, and wasn’t familiar with up-to-date scholarship (in fact, IIRC, she based the book primarily on a single, discredited source). These factors led to a book riddled with factual errors and pop psychological analysis.
But that’s mostly big picture stuff. Regarding your question, about specific atrocities? A lot of that stuff was accurate. I believe the bit about the competition between two officers to behead 100 Chinese likely never happened, but there’s no doubt that horrific acts occurred. Scholarly debate on the massacre focus on it’s scale and causes, not the details like that.
My understanding is that most of the criticism directed at Chang was over her interpretation of events not over factual issues. Historians seem to agree with her on what happened but some disagree with her on why it happened: was it because of something distinctive in Japanese society or due to a more general attribute present in all societies?
It’s not as if this is the only book on the topic (I read it years ago, but didn’t know about the controversy). Decades earlier I had read David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy devotes its opening section to the Rape of Nanking. It’s well footnoted and references.
There are lots of good books on the massacre, but I don’t know that I’d go to a 40-year book for it, especially when the author’s “conclusions have not generally been accepted and his data and sources have been questioned.”
C-Span recently re-aired an interview she did with Brian Lamb. Based on the date stamp, it was mere weeks before her suicide.
I’m not suggesting that you do. I;'m just saying that I read it when it came out, so the OP’s book was no surprise to me.
Japanese atrocities were all to real. The British were unable to defend Singapore. The Japanese gave it the same treatment as Nanking. A lot of British women were raped along with Chinese.
Rape fantasy videos & interactive games are popular porn in Japan. They have some very bizarre fantasy porn. The rape & submission material is the most troubling.
Japanese Rape Fantasy Video Games Under Fire, Calls To Ban Them (VIDEO) | HuffPost The World Post
“Most troubling Japanese porn” is a title I’d bestow with great caution. There are just too many contenders.
I’m less skeptical of the actual killing than I am of the horror movie style of it all in the book. Like the example I gave earlier. I’m sure the Japanese killed the people, I just don’t know about the method of killing.
If you are at all skeptical watch this video which uses first hand accounts. The Chinese were brutally massacred, sometimes cut in half with swords, often in front of family members. It was hell on earth. It makes the nazis look humane.
There are quite a lot of eyewitness accounts, including filmed documentation of some of the atrocities, primarily from Western missionaries. I find it difficult to imagine any need to sensationalize what are some of the most stomach-churning atrocities of modern war. As **blood63 **said, Nanking made the Nazis look humane.
Iris Chang wrote a sensationalist book that vastly over exaggerated the Rape of Nanking. Now, let me state categorically that the Rape of Nanking occured, and it was very bad. I took my mother, who remembered the newsreels and reports of the Rape of Nanking when it occured, to the memorial around 2002. The memorial has a partially excavated mass grave with human bones sticking out. The momorial also has photos, victim and eye witness accounts. Hence, no need for cheap sensationalism.
Iris Chang, who didn’t really speak Chinese nor was any kind of academic/historian, did a huge disservice of blowing out of proportion the events that transpired. Japanese “nationalists” were able to pick apart different aspects of the book and did their best to discredit the entire book and actually point to the inaccuracies to “prove” that the Rape of Nanking never occured.
Acclaimed Sinologist Simon Leys addresses the Rape of Nanking very well in one of his books. IIRC it was Chinese Shadows. This was pre-internet days so you won’t find it on line (or if you do please post a link). He posited, with evidence, that the Rape of Nanking was inflated for propoganda purposes by both the Communists and the Nationalists. If you actually review the Nationalists accounts at the time it was an order of magnitude less than Iris Chang’s “version.”
Let’s not go down which atrocity was worse, the Nazis or Nanking.
Link isn’t working for me. Anyone else have this problem?
underlining mine. So do a lot of the details about Unit 731. The Japanese have a brutal 20th century war history.
It was evidently 7 YEARS before she took her own life.
More about that: Hundred man killing contest - Wikipedia
I knew a survivor of the Bataan Death March, and have read a lot about World War II in the Pacific. I have a rebuttable presumption that any halfway-credible tale of Japanese brutality is probably true. On the other hand, my family had a wonderful Japanese exchange student in the early 1970s, born well after 1945, and it pained us to see her snubbed by those with long memories of the war.
Do you know of any survivor of Nanking who believes this?
Well, yes, actually I do. They don’t want this forgotten nor do they want it fictionalized. It was a nasty brutal time within the nasty brutal Sino-Japanese war.
I hope I’m not being misconstrued. Iris Chang sensationalized an atrocity that needed no sensationalization. It’s undisputable that tens of thousands of Chinese died in the immediate aftermath of Nanking. Records of the KMT, Communists, foreign observers, etc all more or less agree. Iris exaggerated, took hearsay as fact, redefined the Rape of Nanking to span all direct, indirect and potentially indirect vitims and did anything she could to make it hundreds of thousands of dead. This makes it easy for the Rape of Nanking deniers/ultranationalists in Japan to pick her most outrageous and probably fictional claims, debunk them, and by extension make the case the Rape of Nanking never happend.