The Rape of Nanking

Early on, the author makes clear that her book is as much a work of history as it is an exercise in historiography. Broadly speaking, historiography is the study of how scholars approach certain eras and events in history. The Rape of Nanking stands out because of the way historians have largely ignored the massacre compared to other World War II atrocities. While countless films and books are produced about the Holocaust, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, Pearl Harbor, and the London Blitz, very little was written on the Nanking massacre when the author began researching her book. This erasure is particularly galling given that aside from the Holocaust, more civilians died in Nanking than in any of the aforementioned tragedies. While the author by no means intends to minimize the appalling suffering of the Holocaust, she also points out that the Holocaust took place across an entire continent over the course of many years, while the slaughter of Nanking occurred in a single city over just six weeks.

Given the Nanking massacre’s curious absence from the historical record, the author’s dual objective is both to correct this erasure and to explain how it came about. Throughout the narrative, the author poses a number of theories behind why the massacre isn’t more well-known, chief among them the silence of both the victims and the perpetrators involved. According to the author, the victims’ silence is largely attributable to the period of political instability in China that directly followed World War II. China’s incumbent ruling party, the Kuomintang (KMT), became embroiled in a bloody civil war against the ascendant Communist Party of China. As the author points out, “Neither the People’s Republic of China nor the Republic of China demanded wartime reparations from Japan (as Israel had from Germany) because the two governments were competing for Japanese trade and political recognition” (11).

This argument finds a great deal of support in more recent scholarship, in particular British historian Rana Mitter’s 2013 book, Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945. In an interview with Pacific Standard magazine, Mitter states that after the Communists defeated the KMT, their leader Mao Zedong sought to deliberately obscure the historical record surrounding the war effort to minimize the achievements of Chiang Kai-shek, China’s wartime leader and Mao’s political opponent. Mitter says, “On the Chinese side, after 1949 when the civil war was over, the Nationalists had been exiled to Taiwan, and Mao was victorious on the mainland, you had essentially a virgin history in the mainland of China.” (Todd, Michael. “China Lost 14 Million People in World War II. Why Is This Forgotten?” Pacific Standard. 17 Sep. 2013.)

As for the silence on the part of the Japanese perpetrators, the answer to that question is relatively straightforward: because the rest of the world failed to hold them unaccountable. In its fight against global communism, the United States viewed Japan as a valuable ally against China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union. Moreover, the undeniable horrors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings—and, to a lesser extent, the forced internment of Japanese-Americans on US soil—allowed Japan to view itself as a victim of World War II rather than one of its chief aggressors. In comparing postwar attitudes in Japan to those in Germany, the author writes, “The Japanese have enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo—an act that one American wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically equivalent to ‘erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin’” (12).

The more intractable question the author introduces here is how the perpetrators of the Nanking massacre could have possibly been reduced to such unthinkable brutality. To be sure, the Japanese were hardly alone in committing appalling acts of violence, as extensive scholarship on the Holocaust and the Eastern Front clearly shows. That said, the cruelty and sadism the author depicts later in the book is enough to shock even the most hardened experts on wartime atrocities. Understandably, the author treads lightly so as to not stereotype or discriminate against the Japanese people as a whole. She writes:

This book is not intended as a commentary on the Japanese character or on the genetic makeup of a people who would commit such acts. It is about the power of cultural 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 (13).

Readers would do well to remember this statement of purpose as the author exposes a flood of incomprehensibly violent acts perpetrated by Japanese soldiers. While the severity of the crimes can often make the book feel like an indictment of the Japanese people and their culture, the author makes it clear that The Rape of Nanking is intended to be a case study on how power, indoctrination, and cultural forces beyond the control of any individual soldier can create an atmosphere that engenders such extraordinary brutality.

Finally, the author introduces the symbol of Rashomon as a narrative device. Based on a 1922 short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and directed by acclaimed Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa, the 1950 film tells the story of a rape and murder from the perspectives of three different observers who all have very different takes on the incident. The author’s book mirrors this device by presenting the Nanking massacre first from the Japanese perspective, next from the Chinese perspective, and lastly from the perspective of the Americans and Europeans who saved hundreds of thousands of lives. To the Japanese, the massacre is a triumph of military adventurism and dominance; to the Chinese, it is a hellish nightmare from which there is no escape; and to the Westerners, it is a harrowing display of madness that nevertheless activates deep wells of bravery and heroism.