But nothing satisfied my yearning to hear how to stop such atrocities from appearing. I was deeply informed by her arguments that both religion and claims to racial superiority contributed to Japan's view that they should control Asia. She further argues for social status as a source of power, but this did not successfully convince me that she, or anyone else for that matter, knows why there is such violence, so carefully organized, and so completely accepted by so many at one time. Iris Chang succinctly depicts what occurred, as well as how the Japanese advance on the Chinese city of Nanking manifested itself over the course of three weeks, but I am not convinced that she successfully argues deeply enough about the reasons why this atrocity of Herculean proportion occurred.Ĭiting the phenomena of "transfer of oppression", she points out that the Japanese army possessed great potential for brutality from its very inception because of the brutality that Japanese officers exacted on their own soldiers, in an attempt to harden them. To review this book is to grapple with the piercingly harsh questions of why such an egregious event not only happened, but continues to happen around the world. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army’s horrific acts of 60 years ago." (text taken from Amazon) Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand-no one is sure just how many-Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia.
"China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s.
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