The facts are really indisputable, which has not prevented many Japanese (including government officials) from disputing them, which is the source of the author's palpable rage towards the end of the book. There are thousands of pages of documentation and photographs. While the Japanese tried to cover up the massacre as it became a PR nightmare, Westerners in the city took a lot of photographs and even movie reels. These are not the worst images available. In the typical manner of Japanese politicians speaking about Japan's wartime record, the ambassador said, "There were perhaps some unfortunate incidents." In 1998 she confronted the Japanese ambassador to the United States on television.
It's clear from reading her words that she had some feelings about the Japanese. Her grandparents had narrowly escaped Nanking during the war. She wrote The Rape of Nanking in 1997 after learning that, although the event was well documented, there had never been an English-language book written about it. Iris Chang is not neutral on this subject. This is a grim fucking book, and I've read books about genocides and serial killers without flinching. It was Iris Chang who discovered the diaries of the German leader of this rescue effort, John Rabe, whom she calls the "Oskar Schindler of China." A loyal supporter of Adolf Hitler, but far from the terror planned in his Nazi-controlled homeland, he worked tirelessly to save the innocent from slaughter. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: that of the Japanese soldiers who performed it of the Chinese civilians who endured it and finally of a group of Europeans and Americans who refused to abandon the city and were able to create a safety zone that saved almost 300,000 Chinese.
Amazingly, the story of this atrocity- one of the worst in world history- continues to be denied by the Japanese government. The Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking and within weeks not only looted and burned the defenseless city but systematically raped, tortured and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese civilians. In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred.
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