It's as if a curtain of amnesia has been drawn across the former empire.
Commonly accepted numbers today include 340,000 killed, 80,000 women raped, a cultural heritage burned to the ground or stolen and shipped to Japan. As many as 30 million Chinese died during the 14-year war.
The "Rape of Nanking" was not a secret. It was widely reported at the time and was considered representative of the Japanese military presence in China. It also helps explain the anger the Western world felt toward Japan as war broke out. Among historians, Nanking ranks with horrors like the Holocaust and the Turkish slaughter of Armenians.
Info BoxBut bookshelves are filled with Holocaust studies and relatively little is devoted to Nanking or China. The exception is Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking," which has spent months on the New York Times' bestseller list.
There is hunger to know more -- whether the curiosity is about Nanking or about mankind's darker impulses remains to be seen -- and Chang has become a kind of historian-touchstone, crossing the country to speak about the subject. She will give a free talk 7:30 p.m. Tuesday at the University of Hawai'i Campus Center Ballroom.
Chang's own grandparents barely escaped the area. "Even if it's played out in our living rooms on CNN, Americans have a hard time caring about atrocities that place far away from us," said Chang, speaking from her home in Sunnyvale, Calif. "While there may be a bit of racism involved, what's happening in the former Yugoslavia these days is between Caucasians, and Americans don't care about them either."
Research wasn't that hard. "There are thousands of pages of primary source documents on the subject in four different languages -- English, German, Chinese and Japanese -- that were either published contemporaneously or afterwards."
As she dug deeper, Chang found herself appalled and horrified. The facts were so much worse than she imagined. Women raped until they bled to death. Babies killed by being tossed from bayonet to bayonet. Men used to fill ditches under the Imperial tanks. Contests between soldiers to see how quickly they could lop off heads of bound prisoners. The Japanese also took snapshots of their victims as souvenirs, and their deeds were reported glowingly in Japanese newspapers, as if slaughter had become a kind of national sport.
"We're still seeing these kinds of atrocities in places like Rwanda or Bosnia or Indonesia. And we might be even in a worse situation today because of nuclear weapons. We still have in the human species the same dark impulses that launched the Rape of Nanking," Chang said.
Even so, a kind of numbness crept in. Photographs of Nanking horrors that once upset Chang simply became part of the research landscape, and then it was upsetting to realize that as well. She speculated that immersion in such events leads to a psychological deadening, a defense mechanism, and helps explain why so many went to their deaths without fighting back.
"The pain of writing the book would frighten me at moments when I'd least expect it," said Chang. "I was trying very hard not to let these atrocities poison the other aspects of my life. I'd find myself taking a walk around the park, or shopping, or doing something on my own, and gruesome images would pop into my brain when I'd least expect it. Put me in a foul mood for the whole afternoon. So -- as I thought I was becoming desensitized, I really wasn't."
And she found herself becoming tolerant of little things "that would have really bothered me months earlier. I felt extraordinarily lucky for the life that I have. Perspective."
-- Burl Burlingame, Honolulu Star Bulletin, November 20, 1998
