Iris Chang, a well-regarded author of several books on Japanese atrocities during World War II died of what is believed to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound yesterday. Chang’s book The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Genocide of World War II is one of the most riveting, horrifying, and important books on the brutal Japanese occupation of China.
In 1937, the Japanese invaded the Chinese city of Nanking and brutally tortured, raped, and murdered 300,000 Chinese citizens. The horrors inflicted upon China by the Japanese were beyond horrible – so much so that a card-carrying Nazi Party member by the name of John Rabe personally appealed to Adolph Hitler to stop the violence. Rabe personally saved countless Chinese lives, and Chang refers to him as the “Oscar Schindler of China” for his actions.
Chang fought a long struggle to see to it that the Japanese government officially acknowledged the atrocities that occurred during World War II. Unlike Germany in which the memory of the Holocaust is continually kept alive to ensure that such atrocities never occur again, the Japanese do not acknowledge their actions during the Second World War. While Japanese militarism is as dead and discredited as Naziism, and Japan is now a peaceful and prosperous nation, a whitewash of history serves no one.
While Iris Chang’s life has been tragically cut short, her work should continue to be remember and studied, as she has done the world a great service by continuing to ensure that the victims of the Rape of Nanking are not lost to history. RIP.
We live with the Holocaust, but the memory of the awful atrocities committed against the Chinese by Imperial Japan often goes forgotten. I recently made the point in a class that Junichiro Koizumi’s visitation to a Japanese WWII memorial and overtures to the Komeito party are, in Chinese eyes, not unlike how it would look to us (or, even moreso the French and British) if Gerhard Schroeder visited a memorial to fallen SS troops and held high-level meetings with neo-Nazis. Though I’m supportive of Japanese rearmament (we’re going to need their help in dealing with Chinese and North Korean millitarism in coming years), we all too often forget what they did in the second World War. The loss of life inflicted by the Japanese is estimated to be higher than that inflicted by Germany- but, since the Chinese became our cold war enemy shortly after, the atrocities were forgotten in America’s popular consciousness, not unlike the horrible hardships faced by the Red Army, who lost over 10 million men in the savage fighting on the eastern front.
Chang’s voice was an important one. May we never forget.