Iris Chang — Studio C

“Author relives, writes ‘Rape of Nanking’,” The Daily Cardinal, November 2, 1998

Iris Chang knew when she began writing the book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Penguin) that it would not be a pleasant experience. Chronicling one of the most savage episodes in modern history, Chang had anticipated the almost numbing torrent of depredation that she encountered in photographs, news accounts, diary entries and other archival source material.

“But it never ceased to amaze me,” Chang said in a recent interview. “The creativity of the human mind when it comes to torture and murder and rape, how people were killed. There were people who were destroyed in ways that I would have never dreamt that people could think of such things.”

Chang persevered, emerging finally with the first English-language narrative of this neglected chapter in world history in which an estimated 260,000 Chinese were massacred by the Japanese occupying army during a six-week period that began on December 12, 1937.

The Rape of Nanking offers an unflinching account of the slaughter; but Chang was determined to expand her study beyond a “blow-by-blow” account of the atrocities. “I didn’t feel that it was really necessary to bludgeon the readers with these descriptions,” said Chang, who lost weight and even patches of hair from the burden of researching and recapitulating these events. “I wanted to also reserve some space for analysis and also focus on the suppression or neglect of this event after it happened.”

That suppression and neglect ensued even as the carnage continued in early 1938. In America, President Roosevelt was mindful of public sentiment and willfully censored facts of the incident in an effort to stay out of world war.

“After the Japanese had attacked the USS Panay, which was an American gunboat off of the banks of the Yangtze River close to Nanking, President Roosevelt actually wanted to keep some of this news from the American people,” Chang recounts. “There were two newsreel men on board who filmed the attack. When that film reached Roosevelt, he asked the newsreel men to delete or cut out 30 feet of the most damning footage which showed the pilots intentionally firing on passengers. The Japanese had apologized and claimed that they didn’t know it was an American gunboat, but, of course, this footage would have disproved that.”

After the war, the anxieties of the Cold War and efforts to contain communism further relegated the Rape of Nanking to obscurity.

“There were many political forces that went into play to really downplay Japanese atrocities of World War II and to depict Japan as an ally and not as an enemy,” said Chang. “And this contributed to a climate both within Japan and throughout the world of not really paying attention to the Rape of Nanking. I really do think the Cold War is the greatest culprit of the neglect of this subject from world history.”

Only in the last few years has their been a concerted attempt by scholars, historians, authors of both nonfiction and fiction books, documentary filmmakers, and human rights activists to recover the troubling history of the Rape of Nanking. Iris Chang occupies a critical place in that effort.

“I think that it’s important,” Chang says, “that accounts of the Rape of Nanking based on primary sources will be in the libraries where they will be available to anybody who wants to read them in the future. And I want this story to be preserved for future generations so that people can be made aware of what people can do to other people. We don’t want an atrocity like the Rape of Nanking to happen again.”