“Japan’s atrocity in Nanking gets new attention,” published in The Carletonian, Northfield, MN, October 29, 1998 and The Capital Times, Madison, WI, October 30, 1998

“What I am about to relate is anything but a pleasant story,” wrote George Fitch of the Rape of Nanking. “For it is a story of such crime and horror as to be almost unbelievable; the story of the depredations of a horde of degraded criminals of incredible bestiality, on a peaceful, law-abiding people.… I believe it has no parallel in modern history.”

Fitch was more than simply a witness to the fierce brutality that marked the Rape of Nanking, a six-week massacre in late 1937 and early 1938 in which an estimated 260,000 Chinese perished at the hands of the Japanese occupying army. He, along with a courageous group of foreign émigrés, most of them German and American, established the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, which accommodated another 200,000 to 300,000 Chinese refugees during the crisis.

Nanjing Datusha — the Rape of Nanking — initially rated front-page coverage in newspapers around the world. But soon, accounts of the carnage ebbed and finally vanished, leaving behind a disturbing chapter in world history in the drift toward world war.

Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Penguin), is just one individual involved in a growing campaign being waged by scholars, historians, authors of non-fiction and fiction, documentary filmmakers, and human rights activists to recover the Rape of Nanking from obscurity. But Chang occupies a critical place in that effort, authoring the first English-language narrative of the episode, lecturing widely on the subject, touring in support of the book and granting numerous interviews.

(Author’s note: An audio recording of the full interview is available via the audio player at this bottom of this page.)

Q: How dramatically was your perception and your knowledge of the Rape of Nanking altered from the time that you first learned about the massacre as a child and now after this research?

A: Well, I knew when I was a child that it was certainly a horrible, horrible atrocity because my parents told me about this when I was growing up in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. I guess I had no idea just how horrible it was. Even they did not know the treatment that was meted out to the women and children in the city. There were people who were tortured to death in the most brutal ways, in fact, so brutal that I don’t even feel comfortable discussing this on the air.

But in that way, my perception changed radically because before it was more abstract for me, the horror. And then after I did my research and looked through all the diaries and letters on the subject, I had really hundreds and thousands of details to confirm the crimes.

Q: You write in the book that at one point you forgot about this event until many years later when you were reminded of it. 

A: I never really forgot it; it’s just that it was not a top priority for me to research it.  I mean, as I was growing up and as I went to school, it lingered in the back of my mind, but it wasn’t something that occupied my thoughts every day.  So later, when I went to this conference on the Rape of Nanking, that’s when I saw some of the photographs of the atrocity for the first time, and it was even worse than I had even suspected.  But I never doubted it because my parents had told me many stories about China when I was growing up, and often when I went to the world history textbooks there was not very much information, or the published material, the source material in English got the facts wrong.  So at an early age I came to distrust often what was written down in print without verification from primary sources.   

Q: What new things were you able to learn about the plight of your grandparents and other family members in this research?

A: What I learned was that my grandparents barely escaped the massacre themselves during those days of chaotic evacuations from Nanking. And I really never knew the details about that until I interviewed my grandmother and until my mother and I started poring over my grandfather’s autobiography in Chinese.

Really, the plight of many people like my grandparents really did not drive home for me until I would actually interview them on videotape and hear their stories unfold. I mean, every story could have been the subject of an epic movie. This was the most exciting thing, watching history come alive from the mouths of these people.

Q: In the book you offer an unflinchingly blunt account of the facts of the Rape [of Nanking]. Were there things that you found in your research that simply were unspeakable and unprintable or that you simply can’t confront?

A: There were some stories that were so horrible that I did not put them in my book in depth. In other words, there’s a section in my book which summarizes some of the worst atrocities. There I am just stating some of the things that went on. But I did not go into some of these atrocities blow by blow when I could have actually, because often there was a great deal of gruesome detail in the diaries and letters that I was looking at. I didn’t feel that it was really necessary to bludgeon the readers with these descriptions. I didn’t want to fill my book with one atrocity story after another. I wanted to also reserve some space for analysis and also focus on the suppression or neglect of this event after it happened. So the atrocities are only one part of my book.

Yes, there were some things that were too horrible to really go into detail, but I think for the most part, I did mention them in the book.

Q: Were you conscious in writing the book of young students who might be reading the book, since this is the first English narrative of the event?

A: I was conscious of that and that’s why actually some of the most horrible photographs never made it into the book.  We had very long discussions at the publishing house as to which pictures should go in and which pictures should be left out.  And my editor at the time was unwilling to look at these pictures.  She is very sensitive in that way, and even when I had a meeting with the art director, I remember she literally held up a piece of paper between herself and the photograph so that she would not even catch a glimpse of them, by accident, if they were across from her on the table. 

So a lot of people have a hard time looking at these pictures, even if they’re adults.  And it’s hard enough for adults to look at this. 

Q: After being reported as front-page news around the world, reportage of the Rape of Nanking seems to have dwindled and finally vanished. Why did that happen?

A: I think largely because of the Cold War, the fact that there were many political forces that went into play to really downplay Japanese atrocities of World War II and to depict Japan really as an ally and not as an enemy.

For example, after 1949 after the civil war in China, there were two Chinas, the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, both of which wanted political recognition and economic support from other countries. So neither Chinese government really wanted to antagonize the Japanese after the war because they both needed Japan’s help for recognition of their own regimes. So neither one of those Chinas really pushed for reparations for victims or demanded an apology.

And even the United States, too, downplayed the atrocities committed against their own POWs, let alone those of another country, because they saw Japan as a stable base from which we could counter the forces of Communism in the Soviet Union and China. So the entire royal family in Japan was exonerated, and many of the leading wartime officials were permitted to stay in power after the war.

And this all 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.

Q: What about during the war? What was, say, the Roosevelt administration’s reaction to the news?

A: Well, the Roosevelt administration actually censored some of this information from the American public. They did not want to feel compelled into declaring war with Japan. One of the most stunning parts of my research that I discovered was that after the Japanese had attacked the USS Panay, which was an American gunboat off the banks of the Yangtze River close to Nanking, after the Japanese had bombed that gunboat, President Roosevelt actually wanted to keep some of this news from the American people. There were two newsreel men on board who filmed the attack and they got close enough to the scene so that pictures of the Japanese pilots swooping down at almost deck level to shoot at the passengers was all captured on film, which they then buried in the mud on the river banks before retrieving it, because really, all the people on board thought that they were going to be murdered and they actually had to hide from the Japanese behind reeds as aviators circled overhead.

When that film reached Roosevelt, before he permitted the footage to be released to American theaters, he asked the newsreel men to delete or cut out 30 feet of the most damning footage that showed the pilots intentionally firing on passengers, the footage of the planes firing almost at deck level, because they were negotiating with the Japanese a reparations package. 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. It was clear to the pilots that this was an American gunboat, there were flags painted on deck and anyone in the movie theater could have seen that, if that footage had remained. What was shocking to me was that Roosevelt actually asked for this film to be – some of it to be suppressed.

Q: Why was Nanking the site of the worst of the Japanese atrocities?  They occupied other cities before and after the massacre of Nanking.

A: Well, some people would argue it really wasn’t the site of some of the worst atrocities; it was one of the worst atrocities that we know of, but some cities and villages were destroyed so completely that no survivors were left to tell the story.

Nanking, please keep in mind, is just the tip of the iceberg.  The Japanese imperial army massacred millions of people through China and Asia.  The Japanese killed an estimated 19 million to 35 million Chinese people during its invasion of China, and there are many more millions, of course, of Asians that were killed, such as Filipinos and Koreans.  There was a horrible Korean comfort women system.  Again, it’s just a very small part of the Pacific war; it’s just one little aspect of the entire story.  

Q: There are numerous parallels between the European Holocaust and the Rape of Nanking, one being that revisionists have attempted to discredit and disprove the history of the events. That effort seems to have been given more credence regarding the Japanese campaign.

A: Well, you see, what’s fortunate about the situation in Germany now is that Holocaust deniers have been relegated to the fringes of society where they should remain; I mean, they’re not leading members of the German government. But in Japan the situation is quite the opposite. There have been numerous leading politicians who have openly denied the Rape of Nanking; some, of course, were asked to step down, but some were not. There’s a great deal of government complicity in trying to whitewash textbooks on the subject of the Rape of Nanking and the Korean comfort women and the biological warfare medical experimentation that was inflicted upon Americans and Chinese during the Pacific war.

When you look at the differences between how both countries have dealt with their wartime past, there are enormous differences. For instance, in Germany, the government has apologized profusely, several times, for the crimes that it committed against humanity. But the Japanese government has yet to deliver a sincere apology directly to the Rape of Nanking victims. Now, they have made a very important step in the last few days by offering a written apology to the South Korean government. They have promised to make a similar apology to the PRC next month.

Also, the Germans have made it illegal in the country to openly deny the history of the Holocaust. If you go out into the street and say that the Holocaust never happened, I mean, you could face repercussions, legal repercussions. But in Japan, the situation is quite the opposite. It’s not just a matter of many people denying what has happened, including top officials, but leading Japanese war criminals are actually worshiped in the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which many consider to be like the political and moral equivalent of moving statues of Hitler and his cronies into the biggest cathedral in Berlin and honoring them as gods. I mean, Japanese Class A war criminals are being worshiped as deities in this shrine. It’s a practice that continues to this day.

And also, it’s illegal in Germany not to teach the Holocaust. Any teacher who doesn’t do this can face severe consequences. But that’s not the situation in Japan where the Ministry of Education has really screened textbooks. They have a screening process, and they have whitewashed many accounts of the Sino-Japanese War. And this has been the foundation of a three-decade-long lawsuit between Ienaga Saburo, a textbook author and historian, and the Ministry of Education, which has never really quite been resolved because even though government gave Ienaga Saburo some damages because they kind of conceded through the Supreme Court ruling that they were wrong in censoring his particular textbook, they still upheld the entire censorship process as constitutional. So it was a partial victory.

Q: The Rape of Nanking had its Oskar Schindler [John Rabe, a German Nazi who was chairman of the Nanking Safety Zone and who, alone, is credited with saving countless Chinese lives], but it doesn’t seem to have its Simon Weisenthal. How would you characterize the effort to bring perpetrators of these atrocities to justice?

A: What’s exciting now is that there are efforts among human right activists worldwide to actually do precisely what you had mentioned, [to] try to bring some of these perpetrators to justice and try to actually create a Simon Weisenthal-like center. In fact, Rabbi Cooper of the Simon Weisenthal Center has been extremely supportive of the human rights activist movement to raise awareness of Japanese crimes against humanity. He has held a transcontinental video conference so that Japanese war criminals could speak openly about their crimes. Also, he has really written a lot of scathing letters to the Japanese government every time they attack me or try to deny the existence of the Rape of Nanking entirely.

I just returned from a conference in Toronto to discuss what the human rights community can do to publicize the Rape of Nanking and other war crimes. And I’m glad to report that there are efforts now to build Chinese holocaust museums, using the Jewish Holocaust Museum as a model. There’s talk of creating a global oral history videotape project, which is something I personally would like to see happen as well, that would videotape the testimonies of many of the surviving victims of the Japanese in Asia – I mean, there aren’t as many of them left as before; they are dying every year; this is something that needs to be done immediately – something that would be similar to the efforts of the Shoah foundation under Steven Spielberg to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors. And these efforts are under way. There are already documentaries on the subject which didn’t exist before; there are more books coming out, more dissertations. So  I think that within the next few years we are going to see a flood of scholarship and activism on the subject. I’m confident that that’s going to happen.

Q: How did those contemporary events unfolding while you were doing this research change the scope of your work, and what would this book have been like, say, 10 years ago?

A: Well, the book 10 years ago I think would have been in many ways similar in content to the book that was published just last year, because the basic facts of the Rape of Nanking have been preserved in archives, numerous archives, worldwide, regardless.  The archival material, for large part, would still be available. 

I’m confident it probably would have also been well-received, but a lot of the activism wouldn’t have been in place.  I was really goaded into writing this book by my own conscience when I saw the exhibit.  And that exhibit really changed many lives, because after I saw it in December of 1994 I was determined to write this book, and I devoted the next two years to researching the Rape of Nanking so that it could be published in time for the 60th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking, which is December 1997.  And I really do think that it was because of some of this activism that it really kind of reached out and inspired authors to write about the Rape of Nanking.  So the time was right.   

Q: How difficult was it to continue working on the project in the face of relentless accounts of brutality and in discovering the fate of so many involved, including that of the Safety Zone heroes?

A: Well, it was very difficult. I knew, of course, that I was not in for a pleasant experience when I began this project. But, you know, it never ceased to amaze me — the creativity of the human mind when it comes to torture and murder and rape, just 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. So this is what I had to endure, night after night, all these shocks to my spirit. There were times when I felt very cynical about the whole future of the human race after looking at this. I felt that after looking at all the records, this is what people are capable of doing and what they are still doing worldwide. And I remember often having a lot of bad feeling towards humanity for a while. Then, I think that perception changed once I saw the heroism of the Safety Zone members — those people who risked their own lives to save Chinese lives and create kind of a refugee camp in the Nanking Safety Zone area.

But for the most part, it was a harrowing experience for me, and I lost a lot of weight, and also patches of hair, from the stress of writing the book. There were evenings when I was sitting in front of my computer that I would just start shaking uncontrollably, and I wouldn’t be able to stop. It was a physical reaction. It was a horrible feeling, one which – you know, you really want to cry, but you can’t.  There’s all this pent-up emotion and I remember just convulsively shaking and trembling and not being able to stop. It was a terrible feeling.

Q: Were you ever scared for your own safety?  Because I know that some of the reactions in Japan have been harsh.

A: Yeah, I think that actually there are much more risks for those Japanese human rights activists who have been working towards promoting awareness of the Rape of Nanking, actually for years.  There’s more risk to their lives than there is for me, precisely because they are in Japan and they’re within striking range of these revisionists and right-wing extremists.  So I think that actually in the United States there’s been so much support for this book and so many favorable reviews that I really think that there isn’t going to be any kind of problem.  In Japan, however, there have been journalists, and a historian, who have received death threats for writing on such things.  There are publishing houses and newspapers who are routinely harassed by Japanese extremists who will drive around the block with trucks, mounted loudspeakers, and there have been instances in which editors at newspapers have been held at gunpoint and even shot.  This is not a laughing matter.  In fact, the mayor of Nagasaki was shot in the chest merely for making a public statement which he said that Emperor Hirohito, emperor of Japan, bore some responsibility for World War II.    

So, I mean, I really think that in Japan you don’t really have a society in which you could discuss these things as openly as the United States.  It’s very hard for intellectuals and human rights activists to promote the truth.  Very difficult.

Q: Finally, how important is your book?

A: Well, I think that if this book changes just one life it would have been well worth it, for me. I’m really happy that I’ve written this book and I think that it’s important in 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. 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.