One final victim of the Rape of Nanking?

A young historian's book on the 1937 atrocity unleashed a tide of repressed anguish and international recriminations that continue even after her suicide

THOSE who knew Iris Chang used to worry about how she could cope with the gloom of her chosen work. But when they visited the house in California that she shared with her husband and saw him playing with their two-year-old son by the swimming pool in the backyard, they were reassured.

The 36-year-old historian would sip lemonade with her friends at a Chinese café called the Tea House and, for a while, the torrent of terror that she frequently invited into her life would seem far away.

Were it not for the crinkled maps of China, the pictures of mass graves and the two desperately overstuffed Rolodexes on her desk, Chang might have been just another former high school homecoming queen from the aptly named Sunnyvale. But she had become one of the foremost young historians of her generation after publishing, seven years ago, a bestselling account of the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst episodes of human cruelty in recent history.

Her book brought international acclaim and controversy, and many spoke of a stellar future. It was not to be. In November she killed herself, no longer able to bear the weight of horrors from seven decades ago.

The Rape of Nanking in 1937 began with the march of invading Japanese soldiers up the Yangtse River. They occupied the Chinese capital of the time and soon conquest was followed by bloodlust. Soldiers slaughtered between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians sheltering in a few city blocks. Slowly.

Over a six-week period, up to 80,000 women were raped. But it wasn’t so much the sheer numbers as the details that shock — fathers forced at gunpoint to rape daughters, stakes driven through vaginas, women nailed to trees, tied-up prisoners used for bayonet practice, breasts sliced off the living, speed decapitation contests.

During the war the massacre was well known, but both Tokyo and Beijing preferred not to mention it over the four decades that followed.

Iris Chang was pitched into this maelstrom of history as a child when her immigrant parents, who had escaped from wartime China to the US, told their daughter how the Japanese “sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths”. In the introduction to her book she wrote: “Throughout my childhood [the massacre] remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil.”

When, at 27, she read one of the few accounts of the atrocity still circulating in the West, she sensed a mission in life. “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it.”

Chang soon made her first trip to China and sought out Sun Zhaiwei, a history professor in Nanjing, as Nanking is known today. “I provided her with an assistant and fixed appointments with some of the survivors,” he says. Chang was given free lodgings and unlimited access to archives on the tree-lined campus near where the Japanese breached the old city wall before beginning their slaughter.

When the book based on her research — The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II — was published two years later, it sold more than half a million copies and Chang became an instant celebrity in America. Hillary Clinton invited her to the White House and Stephen Ambrose, the doyen of US historians, described her as “maybe the best young historian we’ve got”.

She was also widely praised for the emotion and commitment she brought to her work. On book tours the slim, ponytailed author spoke with an intensity that few listeners expected. Many broke down by her side, feeling compelled to recount their own tales of horror even if these were unrelated to her subject.

Orphans, rape victims and Holocaust survivors all wanted to bare their souls to her, finally relieving themselves of agonies sometimes decades old. They felt encouraged by the passion that she brought to the sort of grievances few of them could tackle on their own.

Chang cried when they cried. She was enraged even when they no longer were. It was unthinkable for her just to pass the paper tissues and wait until people had composed themselves again. Chang invited memories of atrocity and abuse with a seemingly limitless appetite.

Dan Rosen, who heard Chang at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, said: “As with many speaking programmes there, it was 50 per cent elderly Jews, many of them war survivors, in the audience. I was overwhelmed by the warmth and immediacy with which they embraced and applauded Chang. It was an instance of bearing witness, of never forgetting, which is holy to the Jewish community. They related to her like a daughter, and vice versa.”

But her success had its price. The book became a touchstone of renewed rivalry between Japan and China. Both nations had been content to allow the massacre to fade into the past, but in the 1990s China found itself in the ascendant and a long-suppressed sense of outrage burst out. Anti-Japanese museums sprang up across the country. Japanese nationalists responded by attacking the book and its author. Death threats were issued.

Nobukatsu Fujioka, a right-wing commentator, campaigned to prevent publication of her book in Japan by citing a list of errors. He also published a book denouncing Chang as a propagandist funded by Japan-haters. The two volumes are still on prominent display in his Tokyo office.

“The pressure on her from Tokyo was unbearable,” says Yang Xiaming, one of Chang’s research assistants in Nanjing. “She was afraid of travelling to Japan because she feared for her life.”

But the Japanese attacks were the easy part. With her newfound fame, Chang felt compelled to visit Chinese communities around the globe to hear more horror stories of Japanese occupation, forced prostitution in so-called “comfort houses” and nerve gas experiments on prisoners in Manchuria. After these encounters with people who would often approach her in tears, she felt utterly drained even hours later. Friends said that she was beginning to look frail, and she admitted to them that her hair was coming out. The more of others’ suffering she absorbed, the more her old energy and intensity drained away. Each horror story seemed to pull her down a little farther.

At home in California Chang worked to exhaustion, often until she collapsed in her study. When travelling she became forgetful and irritable. Her mind was preoccupied with earlier decades and haunted by gruesome images. Flashbacks of Chinese photographs that she had uncovered in archives tortured her.

In the months before her death, Chang was researching a new book on Japanese wartime atrocities. Despite feeling unwell, she flew to Kentucky to interview survivors of the Bataan Death March. They recounted to her how thousands of American PoWs were killed during the occupation of the Philippines, some forced to bury their best friend alive or, if they refused, for both of them to be buried alive by a third friend, with the chain continuing until the Japanese soldiers found a PoW who complied.

Eventually Chang broke down and needed to be treated in hospital. Her husband, computer scientist Brett Douglas, was not surprised. “The accumulation of hearing those stories year after year may have led to her depression,” he says.

Douglas sent their two young children to live with their grandparents, and when Chang left hospital he tried to watch her movements. He was worried by her obsessive talk about how people would remember her. She was calling friends one by one in what seemed like a series of goodbyes.

On November 6 she spoke to Paula Kamen, whom she knew from university, and told her that she was struggling to deal with the magnitude of the misery she had uncovered, listened to and written about. She begged to be remembered as lively and confident. It was the last conversation they would have. Two days later, Chang was even more despondent than she had previously been. Her husband tried to calm her down but eventually fell asleep.

At some point in the night, Chang got into her white 1999 Oldsmobile, taking with her a six-round pistol that she had bought from an antique weapons dealer to defend herself from attackers. She drove to a country road, loaded the pistol with black powder and lead balls, aimed it at her head and fired. She was found a few hours later, along with a farewell note to her family.

Yet even in death Chang was not rid of the controversy. In recent memorial services across China, historians have blamed intense hostility from Japan for her death. The People’s Daily in Beijing hailed Chang as a “warrior full of justice” and a “dart thrown against the Japanese rightists”. In April the massacre museum in Nanjing will add a statue of Chang to its commemorative collection, in effect giving her the status of a massacre victim, with a finger pointed firmly across the Sea of Japan. The San Francisco Chronicle seemed to concur: “Many wonder if the gentle, sympathetic young woman was the massacre’s latest victim.”

Meanwhile, Japanese right-wingers interpreted her suicide as belated support for their contention that the massacre never happened. “By the end she must have known that her arguments were without merit. We exposed the lies in her book,” said Fujioka.

In Nanjing, Professor Sun Zhaiwei says that being an historian can be “torture of the mind”.

“Nuclear scientists wear protective clothing and have their health checked by doctors. Perhaps we historians of the extreme need similar measures. Yet for now we have to take care of ourselves.

“Maybe that was Iris’s problem — she cared for the dead but failed to take care of herself.”

And part of the reason the Chinese are so angry with Japan is Japan's unwillingness to make amends or acknowledge the horrors perpetrated against Chinese and others. Chinese Communists use this nationalists grievance to stoke the flames of anti-Japanese sentiments. Not coming clean is having real effects to this day that could have been avoided if ultra-nationalists Japanese had not insisted that they'd done nothing wrong in the war. They also prevent any fair and honest history to be taught to Japanese children. This too is short sighted.

I had no idea this had even happened. I never heard about this! I just looked up some photos. How could people be so evil? It just baffles me. Did the Japanese soldiers enjoy slaughtering babies?

The Japanese marched into China in the early 30's.
The most modest estimates of the Chinese holocaust is 25 million.
You never heard about it because of the attitudes towards the Germans -- the only and ultimate bad guys of WWII -- and the attitude towards the Japanese -- let's just forget about it -- and the attitude toward the Chinese deaths (THEY estimate 34 million killed by Tojo and his Imperial military over the 15 or so long years of occupation.) -- who cares?
We have been obssessed only with Hitler. Hitler killed off 90% of the gypsy population, but that isn't well-known either. I didn't find out about the Korean "comfort women" until the last ten years.
Amazing what our history books LEFT OUT.

Our global world and its Internet is changing that. We are finding out and knowing OTHER things about WW II besides Hitler and the Nazis. It's a new world.

Even Stalin gets a pass because Hitler and the Germans seem to be the obsession, not the other equally evil Axis members. That is America, its history books, its education and its media --written history with an agenda.

I learned about the Chinese a long time ago, simply because there are so many Chinese here in California. The ABC's grew up and wrote books about it. I read about it and was shocked also. That part of my WWII history had also been ignored.
I didn't know very much about the WWII/Stalin USSR either until I read (part of anyway -- Three HUGE volumes was too much for me.) the Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He won the Nobel prize for literature in 1979 but his book was blacklisted in this country and he was never invited for the standard book tours. THAT book was as much of an eye-opener about the Soviet Russians as the books about the Chinese holocaust and other Japanes atrocities in the South Pacific, Korea and southeast Asia.

The world was full of villains in WW II. Nothing has changed. We have new villains today. Human nature hasn't changed one iota in 100,000 years. It never will.
A. Lincoln -- Human nature can be modified to some extent but human nature cannot be changed.
He was right.

Happy Easter. Nice to be reminded of good things, like our redemption and salvation.

It goes hand in hand with believing you are superior to other races or nationalities. The same beliefs gave us Indian massacres, Black lynchings, the Holocaust and numerous other examples of genocide that continue today. The old us versus them will get passion stirred up to a degree that has to be seen to be believed.

A modern corollary is sports riots when opposing fans pour onto a field in mass mayhem. It's the old I'm better than you. My dog is better than yours. My team is better than yours. Things can quickly get down to animal behavior.

as were many chinese. Japanese follow their own version on Buddhism mixed with other beliefs. Despite what hippies may say, there is no one buddhist religion and each countries version is different. It's like saying unitarians claim to be Christians and catholics are Christians... they must be the same.

Right on the money.
The Tibetans' indigenous religion, "Bon" is layered in right with their Buddhism.
The Japanese layer their Buddhism in with their own cultural hero worship, Japanese traditions and nature-worshipping religion. The whole package is called "Shinto."
Each non-Christian, non-Muslim country in Asia does that -- has its own native religion (which are pantheistic and without a moral code) layered with Buddhism, which DOES have a strong moral code of ethics.
The Sikhs are a Hindu-based religion that mixed in and added Islam, founded by Guru Narak in 1519. It's quite an interesting mixture. It didn't unite the two combating religions, as Narak hoped it would. In fact, it gave both Hindus and Muslims MUCH disgust towards them. The Sikhs never needed Buddhism for morality, as Islam had it.
The Hindus layered Buddhism into Hinduism a long time ago, when the Buddha was with them as ex-prince Siddhartha Gautama.

Lol, I know way too much about this. Forgive me.

Besides what do a bunch of pot-smokin', water-avoidin', stinky-haired-dreadlocked hippies know about it? For them it's only "cool" because it ISN'T Christianity.

A brilliant, beautiful young woman. I can understand her feeling this oppressive weight of horror as she listened to story after story of man's inhumanity to man. Reading the recounting here of the Bataan death march by the survivors is absolutely gruesome.

Re your post, The isolationist's in the 30's, right up until Pearl Harbor, had their heads buried in the sand. Our gov't wouldn't even allow the ship St. Louis, loaded up with Jewish refugees from Germany, to dock. Real Profiles in Courage. I wonder how easy the souls of Joe Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh, and their ilk, rest.

So, history keeps repeating itself. The peace at any price gang still sings the same tune. I wonder how many Iraqis or Afghanis or Rwandans or Sudanese, etc., would still be alive if the "United Nations" had acted on their behalf.

It does weigh on one's heart and soul to know that there is such evil in the world. May God rest Iris Chang's soul and give her the peace and comfort only He can.

he US reaction to the rape of nanking was sanctions and the japanese then bombed pearl harbor. It's a pretty sad part of history and makes the peaceniks who opposed war in the 30-40s to really look bad.

The 4th marines were stationed in china during a lot of this time and witnessed some attrocities such as bayonet practice on living beings etc. but were helpless to do anything about it, they were ordered not to interfere.

The rape of Nanking and many other attrocities by the Japanese army are common knowlege among my generation, I was born in 1942 and grew up with WWII stories told by everyone I knew and their mothers and fathers. Everyone, then, had a relative or knew someone who had a relative that had died in WWII, many of them lost their fathers in the war.

My uncle was a Captain of Marines and staioned in the philipines just prior to the war but was discharged just before Pearl Harbor because he contracted some tropical disease, else he would probably have died there along with many other marines who went under in defence of our country.

The US had an understrength Marine regiment there. The Asiatic fleet was tiny and obsolete. The Japanese had 2 million men in China and the most powerful navy in the Pacific. It would have require a total US mobilization to make war on Japan in 1937, as in fact was eventually required.

What you can fault US pacifists for was delaying the start of US mobilization till @1939. This delay caused the fall and occupation of the Philippines, in which many more people, actual US citizens, nationals and Filipinos who were allied citizens who had call on US protection, were murdered or died of hardship, than in Nanking.

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