A review of Iris Chang’s “The Rape of Nanking”.
The “Rape of Nanking” by Iris Chang, first published in 1997, remains a pertinent and disturbing read to this day. Researched for over two years, Chang recounts the devastating Nanjing massacre (1937-1938) by the Imperial Japanese army, during the Sino-Japanese war between the Republic of China and Imperial Japan. Nanjing was the capital of the Republic of China during this period.
This was an incredibly painful and dark time in Japanese history – one they had only started to address when Iris Chang published “The Rape of Nanking” (Murayama Statement, 1995). The pervasive silence is what drew Iris Chang to research and eventually write “The Rape of Nanking”, as well as her own parents exile from China – their route took them through Taiwan to America.
Little research had been done until that point, at least not anything remarkable that would hit mainstream media and Chang was acutely aware that survivors were growing old and dying. So, she began to research and devoted the next two years of her life to learning everything she could about the mass murder of Chinese civilians at Nanjing.
The “Rape of Nanking” is divided into three main sections: The first narrates the mass murder of Chinese civilians from multiple viewpoints (the Japanese military, the Chinese victims, and the Westerners who desperately tried to help civilians), the second part covers postwar reaction to the massacre, and the third examines the factors Chang believes led to the massacre.
Chang writes with a strong and precise voice – her own personal horror is evident as she provides factgual accounts that are unsettling in their ordinariness. It was as though the soldiers murdered by rote, their movements methodical as they cut down civillians and exacted devastating amounts of sexual violence. Criticism at the time of its publication pointed to Chang’s evident personal bias, her limited research experience as she wasn’t a trained historian; and I wonder how much of that criticism was heightened by her 2004 suicide. Her husband, Bretton Lee Douglas, address Chang’s deteriorating mental health and suicide in a newly added section for the new edition and he addresses both her experience as a researcher and a family history of mental illness. Reading this book so long after any contemporary criticism, it feels macabre to comment but also naive to think one wouldn’t be impacted by researching the evil actions of fellow human beings. There’s only so much objective reporting one can do when writing about an elderly woman raped to death.
In the epilogue, Change writes of a contemporary conflict, “the international response to the Nanking atrocities was eerily akin to the more recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda: While thousands have died almost unbelievably cruel deaths, the entire world has watched CNN and wrung its hands.” (Chang, 2014, p. 364). Except now we watch Instagram reels and TikToks of Palestinian parents carrying their dead children.
This isn’t a political blog in so much as I don’t write about politics, but the personal is always political because we are people living and existing in a political system. Human beings don’t change very much, history will tell you that, no matter how much time passes, there will be people who do awful things, and people like Minnie Vautrin who try to save people from awful things, and there will be people like Iris Chang who seek to retell these stories so they are not forgotten.
I read this while staying at a cabin on the south shore of Nova Scotia with my youngest child. There is some safety in reading about the atrocities of the human condition while surrounded by nature’s beauty. “The Rape of Nanking” is a good (English language) read to have a broad understanding of the events that led to the massacre and remains relevant to this day. Readers interested in World War II history (as this is adjacent), history, and China would find this a valuable read.
Joy Reads Books 