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Iris Chang The Rape of Nanking
INTRODUCTION
THE CHRONICLE of humankind's cruelty
to fellow humans is a long and sorry
tale. But if it is true that even in such
horror tales there are degrees of ruthlessness,
then few atrocities in world history compare
in intensity and scale to the Rape of Nanking
during World War II.
Americans think of World War II as begin-
ning on December 7, 1941, when Japanese
carrier-based airplanes attacked Pearl Harbor.
Europeans date it from September 1, l939,
and the blitzkrieg assault on Poland by
Hitler's Luftwaffe and Panzer divisions.
Africans see an even earlier beginning, the in-
vasion of Abyssinia by Mussolini in 1935, Yet
Asians must trace the war's beginnings all the
way back to Japan's first steps toward the mil-
itary domination of East Asia---the occupa-
tion of Manchuria in 1931.
Just as Hitler's Germany would do half a
decade later, Japan used a highly developed
military machine and a master-race mentality
to set about establishing its right to rule its neighbors.
Manchuria fell quickly to the Japanese, who established their
government of Manchukuo, ostensibly under their puppet, the
deposed emperor of China, but in fact run by the Japanese mil-
itary. Four years later, in 1935, parts of Chahar and Hopeh
were occupied, in 1937 Peking, Tientsin, Shanghai, and finally
Nanking fell. The decade of the thirties was a hard one for
China; indeed, the last Japanese would not be routed from
Chinese soil until the end of World War II in 1945.
No doubt, those fourteen years of domination by the Japan-
ese military were marked by countless incidents of almost in-
describable ruthlessness. We will never know everything that
happened in the many cities and small villages that found
themselves prostrate beneath the boot of this conquering
force. Ironically, we do know the story of Nanking because the
some foreigners witnessed the horror and sent word to the
outside world at the time, and some Chinese survived as eye-
witnesses. If one event can be held up as an example of the un-
mitigated evil lying just below, the surface of unbridled military
adventurism, that moment is the Rape of Nanking. This book
is its story.
The broad details of the Rape are, except among the Japan-
ese, not in dispute. In November 1937, after their successful in-
vasion of Shanghai, the Japanese launched a massive attack on
the newly established capital of the Republic of China. When
the city fell on December 13, 1937, Japanese soldiers began an
orgy of cruelty seldom if ever matched in world history. Tens of
thousands of young men were rounded up and herded to the
outer areas of the city, where they were mowed down by ma-
chine guns, used for bayonet practice, or soaked with gasoline
and burned alive. For months the streets of the city were
heaped with corpses and reeked with the stench of rotting hu-
man flesh. Years later experts at the lnternational
Military Tri-
bunal of the Far East (IMTFE) estimated that more than
260,000 noncombatants died at the hands of Japanese soldiers
at Nanking in late 1937 and early 1938, though some experts
have placed the figure at well over 350,000.
This book provides only the barest summary of the cruel
and barbaric acts committed by the Japanese in the city, for its
aim is not to establish a quantitative record to qualify the event
as one of the great evil deeds of history, but to understand the
event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.
Differences in degree, however, often reflect differences in
kind, and so a few statistics must be used to give the reader an
idea of the scale of the massacre that took place sixty years ago
in a city named Nanking.
One historian has estimated that if
the dead from Nanking
were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the
city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred
miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons, and their
bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars. Stacked on
top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a sev-
enty-four-story building.
Using numbers killed alone, the Rape of Nanking surpasses
much of the worst barbarism of the ages. The Japanese outdid
the Romans at Carthage (only 150,000 died in that slaughter),
the Christian armies during the Spanish Inquisition, and even
some of the monstrosities of Timur Lenk, who killed
100,000
prisoners at Delhi in 1398 and built two towers of skulls in
Syria in 1400 and 1401.
It is certainly true that in this century, when the tools
of
mass murder were fully refined, Hitler killed about 6 million
Jews, and Stalin more than 40 million Russians, but these
deaths were brought about over some few years. In the Rape of
Nanking the killing was concentrated within a few weeks.
Indeed, even by the standards of history's
most destructive
war, the Rape of Nanking represents one of the worst instances
of mass extermination. To imagine its comparative size, we
must brace ourselves for a few more statistics. The death toll of
Nanking---one Chinese city alone---exceeds the number of
civilian casualties of some European countries for the entire
war. (Great Britain lost a total of 61,000 civilians, France lost
108,000, Belgium 101,000, and the Netherlands 242,000.) Air
bombing is considered by those who reflect on these things
one of the most awesome instruments of mass destruction. Yet
even the worst air attacks of the war did not exceed the ravages
of Nanking. It is likely that more people died in Nanking than
in the British raids on Dresden and the fire Storm that fol-
lowed. (The figure 225,000 was accepted internationally at the
time, but more objective accounts now place the number of
Dresden casualties at 60,000 dead and at least 30,000 injured.)
Indeed, whether we use the most conservative number---
260,000---or the highest---350,000---it is shocking to contem-
plate that the deaths at Nanking far exceeded the deaths from
the American raids on Tokyo (an estimated 80,000-120,000
deaths) and even the combined death toll of the two atomic
blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the end of 1945 (esti-
mated at 140,000 and 70,000, respectively).
The Rape of Nanking should be remembered not only for
the number of people slaughtered but for the cruel manner in
which many met their deaths. Chinese men were used for bay-
onet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated
20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped. Many soldiers
went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their
breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape
their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family mem-
bers watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving
of organs, and the roasting of people become routine, but
more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging peo-
ple by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their
waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.
So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city
were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of
"bestial machinery. "
Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident. Un-
like the atomic explosions in Japan or the Jewish holocaust in
Europe, the horrors of the massacre at Nanking remain vir-
tually unknown to people outside Asia. The massacre remains
neglected in most of the historical literature published in the
United States. A thorough examination of secondary-school
history textbooks in the United States revealed that only a few
even mention the Rape of Nanking. And almost none of the
comprehensive, or "definitive," histories of World War II read
by the American public discusses the Nanking massacre in
great detail. For instance, no photograph on the event, not
even one word, appears in The American Heritage Picture History
of World War II (1966), which for many years was the best-
selling single-volume pictorial history of the war ever pub-
lished. Nor can a word of the massacre be found in Winston
Churchill's famous Memoirs of the Second World War (1959)
(1,065 pages) or in Henri Michel's classic Second World War
(1975) (947 pages). The Rape of Nanking is mentioned only
twice in Gerhard Weinberg's massive A World at Arms (1974)
(1,178 pages). Only in Robert Leckie's Delivered from Evil: The
Saga of World War II (1987) (998 pages) did I find a single
paragraph about the massacre: "Nothing the Nazis under
Hitler would do to disgrace their own victories could rival the
atrocities of Japanese soldiers under Gen. Iwane Matsui. "
I first learned about the Rape of Nanking when I was a little
girl. The stories came from my parents, who had survived years
of war and revolution before finding a serene home as profe-
ssors in a midwestern American college town. They had grown
up in China in the midst of World War II and after the war fled
with their families, first to Taiwan and finally to the United
States to study at Harvard and pursue academic careers in sci-
ence. For three decades they lived peacefully in the academic
community of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, conducting re-
search in physics and microbiology.
?But they never forgot the
horrors of the Sino-Japanese War,
nor did they want me to forget. They particularly did not want
-----------------------footnote------------------------------------
Throughout the book I use either pinyin or Wade-Giles for
Chinese names,
depending on the preference of the individual (as specified by business
cards or correspondence) or the popularity of one name's transliteration
over the other (for instance, "Chiang Kai-shek" instead of "JiangJieshi").
For Chinese and Japanese names of people, I use the traditional system
of listing the surname before the given name. For cities and landmarks,
I typi-
cally (but not always) use the form of romanization most commonly em-
ployed by Westerners during the era of the narrative, such as "Nanking"
instead of the present-day name "Nanjing. "
me to forget the Rape of Nanking. Neither of my parents wit-
nessed it, but as young children they had heard the stories, and
these were passed down to me. The Japanese, I leaned, sliced
babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths, they said; the
Yangtze River ran red with blood for days. Their voices quive-
ring with outrage, my parents characterized the Great Nanking
Massacre, or Nanjing Datusha, as the single most diabolical
in-
cident committed by the Japanese in a war that killed more
than 10 million Chinese people.
Throughout my childhood Nanjing Datusha remained
buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable
evil. But the event lacked human details and human dimen-
sions. It was also difficult to find the line between myth and
history. While still in grade school I searched the local public
libraries to see what I could learn about the massacre, but
nothing turned up. That struck me as odd. If the Rape of
Nanking was truly so gory, one of the worst episodes of human
barbarism in world history, as my parents insisted, then why
hadn't someone written a book about it? It did not occur to
me, as a child, to pursue my research using the mammoth Uni-
versity of Illinois library system, and my curiosity about the
matter soon slipped away.
Almost two decades elapsed before the Rape of Nanking
in-
truded upon my life again. By this time I was married and liv-
ing a quiet life as a professional author in Santa Barbara,
California, when I heard from a filmmaker friend that a couple
of producers on the East Coast had recently completed a docu-
mentary on the Rape of Nanking but faced trouble getting
funds to distribute the film properly.
His story rekindled my interest. Soon I was on the phone
tal-
king to not just one but two producers of documentaries on the
subject. The first was Shao Tzuping, a Chinese-American activist
who had worked for the United Nations in New York, served as a
past president of the Alliance in Memory of Victims of the Nan-
jing Massacre, and helped produce the videotape Magee's Testa-
ment. Another was Nancy Tong, an independent filmmaker who
had produced and codirected with Christine Choy the docu-
mentary In the Name of the Emperor. Shao Tzuping and Nancy
Tong helped plug me into a network of activists, many of
them first-generation Chinese Americans and Chinese Canadians
who, like me, felt the need to bear witness to the event, to doc-
ument and publicize it, and even to seek restitution for the
atrocities of Nanking before all the surviving victims passed
away. Others wanted to pass their wartime memories down to
their children and grandchildren, fearful that their assimilation
into North American culture might cause them to forget this
important part of their historical heritage.
What strengthened much of this newly emerging activism
was the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, which prodded
Chinese communities all over the world to form networks to
protest the actions of the People's Republic of China. The pro-
democracy movement left behind vast, intricate webs of Inter-
net relationships; out of this network a grassroots movement
emerged to promote the truth about Nanking. In urban cen-
ters with high concentrations of Chinese---such as the San
Francisco Bay Area, New York City, Los Angeles, Toronto, and
Vancouver---Chinese activists organized conferences and edu-
cational campaigns to disseminate information about Japan-
ese crimes during World War II. They exhibited films, videos,
and photographs of the Nanking massacre in museums and
schools, posted facts and photographs on the Internet, and
even placed full-page advertisements on the subject in newspa-
pers like the New York Times. Some of the activist groups were
so technologically sophisticated that they could at the push of
a button send messages to more than a quarter-million readers
worldwide.
That the Nanking massacre of my childhood memories was
not merely folk myth but accurate oral history hit me in De-
cember 1994, when I attended a conference sponsored by the
Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in
Asia, which commemorated the victims of the Nanking atroci-
ties. The conference was held in Cupertino, California, a San
Jose suburb in the heart of Silicon Valley. In the conference hall
the organizers had prepared poster-sized photographs of the
Rape of Nanking---some of the most gruesome photographs I
had ever seen in my life. Though I had heard so much about
the Nanking massacre as a child, nothing prepared me for
these pictures--stark black-and-white images of decapitated
heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their
rapists into various pornographic poses, their faces contorted
into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame.
In a single blinding moment I recognized the fragility
of not
just life but the human experience itself. We all learn about
death while young. We know that any one of us could be
struck by the proverbial truck or bus and be deprived of life in
an instant. And unless we have certain religious beliefs, we see
such a death as a senseless and unfair deprivation of life. But
we also know of the respect for life and the dying process that
most humans share. If you are struck by a bus, someone may
steal your purse or wallet while you lie injured, but many more
will come to your aid, trying to save your precious life. One
person will call 911, and another will race down the street to
alert a police officer on his or her beat. Someone else will take
off his coat, fold it, and place it under your head, so that if
these are indeed your last moments of life you will die in the
small but real comfort of knowing that someone cared about
you. The pictures up on that wall in Cupertino illustrated that
not just one person but hundreds of thousands could have
their lives extinguished, die at the whim of others, and the next
day their deaths would be meaningless. But even more telling
was that those who had brought about these deaths (the most
terror-fllled, even if inevitable, tragedy of the human experi-
ence) could also degrade the victims and force them to expire
in maximum pain and humiliation. I was suddenly in a panic
that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this rever-
sion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a foot-
note of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer
program that might or might not again cause a problem, un-
less someone forced the world to remember it.
During the conference I leaned that two
novels about the
Nanking massacre were already in the works (Tree of Heaven
and Tent of Orange Mist, both published in 1995), as well as
a
pictorial book about the massacre (The Rape of Nanking: An
Undeniable History in Photographs, published in 1996). But at
the time no one had yet written a full-length, narrative nonfic-
tion book on the Rape of Nanking in English. Delving deeper
into the history of the massacre, I leaned that the raw source
material for such a book had always existed and was available
in the United States. American missionaries, journalists, and
military officers had all recorded for posterity in diaries, films,
and photographs their own views of the event. Why had no
other American author or scholar exploited this rich lode of
primary source material to write a nonfiction book or even a
dissertation exclusively devoted to the massacre?
I soon had at least part of an answer to the strange riddle of
why the massacre had remained relatively untreated in world
history. The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world con-
sciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima
because the victims themselves had remained silent.
But every answer suggests a new question, and I now won-
dered why the victims of this crime had not screamed out for
justice. Or if they had indeed cried out, why had their anguish
not been recognized? It soon became clear to me that the cus-
todian of the curtain of silence was politics. The People's Re-
public of China, the Republic of China, and even the United
States had all contributed to the historical neglect of this event
for reasons deeply rooted in the cold war. After the 1949 Com-
munist revolution in China, neither the People's Republic of
China nor the Republic of China demanded wartime repara-
tions from Japan (as Israel had from Germany) because the
two governments were competing for Japanese trade and polit-
ical recognition. And even the United States, faced with the
threat of communism in the Soviet Union and mainland
China, sought to ensure the friendship and loyalty of its for-
mer enemy, Japan. In this manner, cold war tensions permitted
Japan to escape much of the intense critical examination that
its wartime ally was forced to undergo.
Moreover, an atmosphere of intimidation in Japan stifled
open and scholarly discussion of the Rape of Nanking, further
suppressing knowledge of the event. In Japan, to express one's
true opinions about the Sino-Japanese War could be---and
continues to be---career-threatening, and even life-threatening.
(In 1990 a gunman shot Motoshima Hitoshi, mayor of Na-
gasaki, in the chest for saying that Emperor Hirohito bore
some responsibility for World War II.) This pervasive sense of
danger has discouraged many serious scholars from visiting
Japanese archives to conduct their research on the subject; in-
deed, I was told in Nanking that the People's Republic of
China rarely permits its scholars to journey to Japan for fear of
jeopardizing their physical safety. Under such circumstances,
gaining access to Japanese archival source materials about the
Rape of Nanking has been exceedingly difficult for people out-
side the island nation. In addition, most Japanese veterans
who participated in the Rape of Nanking are for the most part
unwilling to give interviews about their experiences, although
in recent years a few have braved ostracism and even death
threats to go public with their stories.
What baffled and saddened me during the writing of this
book was the persistent Japanese refusal to come to terms with
its own past. It is not just that Japan has doled out less than 1
percent of the amount that Germany has paid in war repara-
tions to its victims. It is not just that, unlike most Nazis, who,
if not incarcerated for their crimes were at least forced from
public life, many Japanese war criminals continued to occupy
powerful positions in industry and government after the war.
And it is not just the fact that while Germans have made re-
peated apologies to their Holocaust, victims, the Japanese have
enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo---an act that one Ame-
rican wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically
equivalent to "erecting a cathedral for Hitler in
the middle of
Berlin."
Strongly motivating me throughout this long and difficult
labor was the stubborn refusal of many prominent Japanese
politicians, academies, and industrial leaders to admit, despite
overwhelming evidence, that the Nanking massacre had even
happened. In contrast to Germany, where it is illegal for teach-
ers to delete the Holocaust from their history curricula, the
Japanese have for decades systematically purged references to
the Nanking massacre from their textbooks. They have re-
moved photographs of the Nanking massacre from museums,
tampered with original source material, and excised from pop-
ular culture any mention of the massacre. Even respected his-
tory professors in Japan have joined right-wing forces to do
what they perceive to be their national duty: discredit reports
of a Nanking massacre. In the documentary In the Name of the
Emperor, One Japanese historian dismisses the entire Rape of
Nanking with these words: "Even if twenty or thirty people had
been killed, it would have been a great shock to Japan. Until
that time, the Japanese troops had been exemplary." It is this
deliberate attempt by certain Japanese to distort history that
most strongly confirmed in me the need for this book.
As powerful as this one factor has been, however, the
book
is also a response to something quite different. In recent years
sincere attempts to have Japan face up to the consequences of
its actions have been labeled "Japan bashing." It is important
to establish that I will not be arguing that Japan was the sole
imperialist force in the world, or even in Asia, during the first
third of this century. China itself tried to extend its influence
over its neighbors and even entered into an agreement with
Japan to delineate areas of influence on the Korean peninsula,
much as the European powers divided up the commercial
rights to China in the last century.
Even more important, it does a disservice not only to
the
men, women, and children whose lives were taken at Nanking
but to the Japanese people as well to say that any criticism of
Japanese behavior at a certain time and place is criticism of the
Japanese as people. This book is not intended as a commentary
on the Japanese character or on the genetic makeup of a peo-
ple who would commit such acts. It is about the power of cul-
tural forces either to make devils of us all, to strip away that
thin veneer of social restraint that makes humans humane, or
to reinforce it. Germany is today a better place because Jews
have not allowed that country to forget what it did nearly sixty
years ago. The American South is a better place for its acknowl-
edgment of the evil of slavery and the one hundred years of
Jim Crowism that followed emancipation. Japanese culture
will not move forward until it too admits not only to the
world but to itself how improper were its actions of just half
a century ago. Indeed, I was surprised and pleased by the
number of overseas Japanese who attend conferences on the
Rape of Nanking. As one suggested, "We want to know as
much as you do."
This book describes two related but discrete atrocities. One is
the Rape of Nanking itself, the story of how the Japanese wiped
out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in its enemy's
capital.
Another is the cover-up, the story of how the Japanese,
em-
boldened by the silence of the Chinese and Americans, tried to
erase the entire massacre from public consciousness, thereby
depriving its victims of their proper place in history.
The structure of the first Part of my book---the history
of the
massacre---is largely influenced by Rashomon, a famous movie
based on a short story ("Yabunonaka," or "In the Grove") by
the
Japanese novelist Aktagawa Ryunosuke about a rape-and-
murder case in tenth-century Kyoto. On the surface, the story
appears simple: a bandit waylays a traveling samurai and his
wife; the wife is raped and the samurai is found dead. But the
story grows more complex when it is told from the perspective
of each of the characters. The bandit, the wife, the dead samu-
rai, and an eyewitness of the crime provide different versions
of what happened. It is for the reader to pull all the recollec-
tions together, to credit or discredit parts or all of each account,
and through this process to create out of subjective and often
self-serving perceptions a more objective picture of what might
have occurred. This story should be included in the curriculum
of any course treating criminal justice. Its point goes to the
heart of history.
The Rape of Nanking is told from three different
perspec-
tives. The first is the Japanese perspective. It is the story of a
planned invasion---what the Japanese military was told to do,
how to do it, and why. The second perspective is that of the
Chinese, the victims; this is the story of the fate of a city when
the government is no longer capable of protecting its citizens
against outside invaders. This section includes individual sto-
ries from the Chinese themselves, stories of defeat, despair, be-
trayal, and survival. The third is the American and European
perspective. These outsiders were, for one mo-ment at least in
Chinese history, heroes. The handful of Westerners on the
scene risked their lives to help Chinese civilians during the
massacre and to warn the rest of the world about the atrocities
being carried out before their very eyes. It is only in the next
part of the book, treating the postwar period, that we deal with
the convenient indifference of Americans and Europeans to
what their own nationals on the scene told them.
The last part of my book examines the forces that conspired
to keep the Rape of Nanking out of public consciousness for
more than half a century. I also treat the recent efforts to ensure
that this distortion of history does not go unchallenged.
Any attempt to set the record straight must shed light on
how the Japanese, as a people, manage, nurture, and sustain
their collective amnesia---even denial---when confronted with
the record of their behavior through this period. Their re-
sponse has been more than a matter of leaving blank spaces in
the history books where the record would have been too
painful. The ugliest aspects of Japanese military behavior dur-
ing the Sino-Japanese War have indeed been left out of the ed-
ucation of Japanese schoolchildren. But they have also
camouflaged the nation's role in initiating the war within the
carefully cultivated myth that the Japanese were the victims,
not the instigators, of World War II. The horror visited on the
Japanese people during the atomic bombings of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki helped this myth replace history.
When it comes to expressing remorse for its own wartime
actions before the bar of world opinion, Japan remains to this
day a renegade nation. Even in the period directly after the war,
and despite the war crimes trials that found a few of its leaders
guilty, the Japanese managed to avoid the moral judgment of
the civilized world that the Germans were made to accept for
their actions in this nightmare time. In continuing to avoid
judgment, the Japanese have become the ringleaders of an-
other criminal act. As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned
years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.
My greatest hope is that this book will inspire other
authors
and historians to investigate the stories of the Nanking sur-
vivors before the last of the voices from the past, dwindling in
number every year, are extinguished forever. Possibly even
more important, I hope it will stir the conscience of Japan to
accept responsibility for this incident.
This book was written with George Santayana's immortal
warning in mind: Those who cannot remember the past are con-
demned to repeat it.
A Chinese-language edition of this book is available to those inter-
ested in obtaining the Chinese character names of people and places
mentioned in the text. Write to Commonwealth Publishing Com-
pany Ltd., 87 Sung-Chiang Road, 4F, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of
China, or E-mail the publisher, Charles Kao, at ckao@cw.com.tw.
INTRODUCTION
page 4. Years later experts at the... IMFTE:
"Table: Estimated Num-
ber of Victims of Japanese Massacre in Nanking," document
no. 1702, Records of the lnternational Military Tribunal for
the Far East, court exhibits, 1948, World War II War Crimes
Records Collection, box 134, entry 14, record group 238,
National Archives.
5. One
historian has estimated: estimates by Wu Zhikeng,
cited
in San Jose Mercury News, January 3, 1988.
5. Romans
at Carthage: Prank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The
History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies
(New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 76.
5. The
monstrosities of Timur Lenk: Arnold Toynbee, 1947, p.
347, cited
in Leo Kuper, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twen-
tieth
Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
1981),
p. 12.
5. Indeed,
even by the standards of history's most destructive war: For
European numbers, see R.J. Rummel, China's Bloody Century:
Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (New Brunswick, N.I.:
Transaction, 1991), p. 138. .
6. It
is likely that more People died in Nanking: Statistics from the
Bombing of Dresden come from Louis L. Snyder, Louis Sny-
der's Historical Guide to World War II (Westport, Conn,: Green-
wood Press, 1982), pp. 198-99.
6. Indeed,
whether we use the most conservative number: Brigadier
Peter Young, ed., The World Almanac Book of World War II (En-
glewood Cliffs, N.J.: World Almanac Publications/Prentice-
Hall, 1981), p. 330. For numbers on the blasts at Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, see Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic
Bomb (New York: Simon A Schuster, 1996), pp. 734, 740.
Rhodes claims that by the end of 1945 some 110,000 people
had died in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki from the nu-
clear explosions. The dying continued, and after five years a
total of some 200,000 in Hiroshima and 140,000 in Nagasaki
had perished from causes related to the bombing. But it is sig-
nificant to note that even after five years the combined death
toll in both cities is still less than the highest casualty esti-
mates for the Rape of Nanking.
6. An
estimated 20,000-80,000 Chinese women were raped: Cather-
ine Rosair "For One Veteran, Emperor Visit Should Be Atone-
ment " Reuters, October 15, 1992; George Fitch, "Nanking
Outrages," January 10, 1938, George Fitch Collection, Yale Di-
vinity School Library;Li En-han, a historian in the Republic of
China, estimates that 80,000 women were raped or mutilated.
("The Great Nanking Massacre, Committed by the Japanese
Army as Related to lnternational Law on War Crimes, " Journal
of Studies of Japanese Aggression Against China [May 1991]:74).
6. Many
soldiers went beyond rape: Author's interviews with survivors.
6. "bestial
machinery": Christian Kröger, "Days of Fate in
Nanking," unpublished diary in the collection of Peter
Kröger; also in the IMTFE judgment, National Archives.
7."Nothing
the Nazis under Hitler would do": Robert Leckie, Deliv-
ered from Evil: The Saga of World War II (New York: Harper &
Row, 1987), p. 303.
10. During
the conference I learned of two novels: R. C. Binstock, Tree
of Heaven (New York: Soho Press,1995); Paul West, Tent of Or-
ange Mist(New York: Scribners, 1995); James Yin and Shi
Young, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Pho-
tographs (Chicago: Innovative Publishing Group, 1 996).
12. "erecting
a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin": Gilbert
Hair, telephone interview with the author.