Books : The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II ('The rape of nanking', in traditional Chinese, NOT in English)
Binding: Paperback
EAN: 9789576214226
ISBN: 957621422X
Label: Tian Xia
Manufacturer: Tian Xia
Publication Date: December 01, 1997
Publisher: Tian Xia
Sales Rank: 2296398
Studio: Tian Xia
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking. Within weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered--a death toll exceeding that of the atomic blasts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Using extensive interviews with survivors and newly discovered documents, Iris Chang has written what will surely be the definitive history of this horrifying episode. The Rape of Nanking tells the story from three perspectives: of the Japanese soldiers who performed it, of the Chinese civilians who endured it, and 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. Among these was the Nazi John Rabe, an unlikely hero whom Chang calls the "Oskar Schindler of China" and who worked tirelessly to protect the innocent and publicize the horror. More than just narrating the details of an orgy of violence, The Rape of Nanking analyzes the militaristic culture that fostered in the Japanese soldiers a total disregard for human life. Finally, it tells the appalling story: about how the advent of the Cold War led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to stifle open discussion of this atrocity. Indeed, Chang characterizes this conspiracy of silence, that persists to this day, as "a second rape."
Amazon.com Review:
China has endured much hardship in its history, as Iris Chang shows in her ably researched The Rape of Nanking, a book that recounts the horrible events in that eastern Chinese city under Japanese occupation in the late 1930s. Nanking, she writes, served as a kind of laboratory in which Japanese soldiers were taught to slaughter unarmed, unresisting civilians, as they would later do throughout Asia. Likening their victims to insects and animals, the Japanese commanders orchestrated a campaign in which several hundred thousand--no one is sure just how many--Chinese soldiers and noncombatants alike were killed. Chang turns up an unlikely hero in German businessman John Rabe, a devoted member of the Nazi party who importuned Adolf Hitler to intervene and stop the slaughter, and who personally saved the lives of countless residents of Nanking. She also suggests that the Japanese government pay reparations and apologize for its army's horrific acts of 60 years ago.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
From Kenneth Ellman, ke@kennethellman.com
Well what can be said. I have read this book more times than I remember over a period of many years. Published in 1997 perhaps it is no longer necessary to give another review. But some books form a bond with your mind and the author and the story become part of you. Iris Chang's story "The Rape of Nanking" is just this kind of book. What it did to the author who later committed suicide we can only imagine. You reread and reread it over many years because it is easy to read (very well written), very well factually supported (so you know it is true) and most important because it is such an extraordinary story the truth of which tells so much about the Japanese but perhaps most significantly about human beings and ourselves.
Importantly it again discusses the well established extraordinary German Nazi hero John H.D. Rabe. You could not make Rabe up in your imagination if you tried. You don't have to though because he, Rabe, is real and true and what he did was saintly. Perhaps this book, this story like other genuine historical facts, truly meets the phrase "the truth is stranger than fiction". Ironically remember while Rabe the German Nazi, saved Chinese from the Japanese, Sugihara a Japanese diplomat (of whom many books have also been written), not much later on, was saving Jews from Germans.
We want to think we are not like the Japanese of that time and place the same as we want to think we are not ... Read More
Rating: -
This is one of those oh-my-god books. I was shocked to find out at the time that I read this book, that the Japanese had been following the Nazi handbook. I don't know if it was the Nazis or the Japanese who first thought up these extermination and human experimentation techniques. They also seem to have been into the Super Race Syndrome. The Imperial Japanese Navy took on a new meaning for me. That the Japanese had treated the Chinese people in this manner is mind boggling. It does seem that as the Jew was to the Nazis so was the Chinese to the Japanese. The author of this book even documented this horrible Rape and other atrocities with pictures - pictures taken by the Japanese soldiers to send home or keep as mementoes of their stay. This is a real-life horror story. It is a difficult book to read. I put it down several times just because I could not take any more of the horrible details. Sometimes I would let it sit idle for weeks before picking it up again. I had to force myself to continue to read it. But I wanted to finish, because these are the things about mankind and war that we can not afford to ever forget!
Books written by Richard Noble - The Hobo Philosopher:
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"A Summer with Charlie"
"A Little Something: Poetry and Prose"
"Honor Thy Father and Thy Mother"
Rating: -
Although this book is horrifying in its detail, it is a must read for anyone who wants to learn more about what happened in Asia during WWII. It is truly sad that as Americans we seem to only focus on what has happened to us and our European neighbors during the war.
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I had known about this book for quite some time, but only got around to reading it recently. You need quite a bit of mental fortitude to get through such a book; it is graphic in the extreme. I stealed myself for the effort, but got quite upset by about page 80. The accounts of savagery - gang rape almost always followed by murder, dousing people with gas and setting them alight, bayoneting practice, ad infinitum - require a kind of mental detachment that may be hard to summon. But the book is much, much more than accounts from diaries, etc., although these are fascinating. There is all sorts of research here; interesting tidbits on everything from the manner in which the city of Nanjing was abandoned by Chiang Kai-shek to the Tokyo War Crimes tribunal to CCP spin on the atrocities after it came to power to the incredible efforts to deny and cover up the event in Japan. I seldom use the phrase 'page-turner' to decribe a book (it's a bit cliche, no?), but that's what this book is; one mind-boggling, shocking scenario after another, brimming with facts and examples all penned in a fine style. The subtitle, 'The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II,' is apt, not some marketing ploy. The parts about John Rabe alone, a Nazi living in Nanjing at the time, who did whatever he could to save people's lives (including inform Adolf Hitler of the genocide), make this worth reading. The Rape of Nanking is a fascinating "lost chapter" of twentieth century world history.
Rating: -
Reading this book reminded me about the unsightly tragedies that happened in Korea during the wartime as well. I remember my Korean grandmother telling me horrible stories of her childhood as she witnessed the people around her getting killed and bombed from the Japanese.
I am surrounded by Japanese-American and native Japanese friends, and I can say with a certain fact that they are not stupid or ignorant to this history. Also, they are very keen in understanding what has transpired and apologetic about their ancestors doings, but don't feel guilty themselves...for, why should they?
I remember many of my friend's Korean parents would tell me, as I grew up playing at my friend's house, to never play with Japanese people and that they were all cold-hearted. Maybe they were then, because of the pressures of the war, but this is not true now. My point is, we should not blame the current society and spread racist remarks or hatred to the individual people of Japan, but instead show our concerns to the government.
I also think that war makes people inhuman. This is unfortunate, but from the history I've studied, is true. Looking at the Al Qaeda, Nazi, Stalin's slaughters, Darfur, and the constant wars that go on today, it is not the people but the war itself that creates beasts within us.
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