Review of The Rape of Nanking

The Rape of Nanking is a book that describes in gruesome detail the events that took place when the Japanese invaded Nanking during World War II. Most have no idea that such a rape took place, and many deny it even happened. For these reasons Iris Chang wrote this book, not only for most Americans to now of this holocaust, but so that no one will forget what happened.

She starts this book giving a background on the Japanese. Starting with the American Matthew Perry who went to Japan and demanded they open trading. Japan became very successful and were very wealthy during World War I. After that nothing was needed for them to produce and they became very poor and angry that other countries had more space and food than they did. Soon trying to build an elite country they trained their children twice as hard as other countries did, trying to toughen them up for future conquests. All this building up eventfully paid off when the Japanese started the Second Sino-Japanese War against China on July 7, 1937.

Eventually after the fall of Shanghai the Japanese started their march to take the capital of China, Nanking. The Japanese did eventually take Nanking with little resistance and upon capturing it began many gruesome months of rape for the Chinese. Iris writes of the horrible acts that the Japanese committed during their occupation of Nanking. As much as 150,000-350,00 people died during this time. The Japanese realized that they had no extra food for the POW’s captured and they instead killed them. Either by just lining up and shooting them, or playing games, such as who can chop of the most heads in a certain time. Not only POW’s had these gruesome deaths, most men even those not in the army were killed this way or in other variously brutal ways. Then there was the women, if found they were rapped, women as young as 9 and as old as 80’s were rapped by the Japanese soldiers. Most of the time they would then kill these women after word to remove any proof of rape. They would even rape women who were pregnant.

There were some sources of light within Nanking during this time for the Chinese people. The International Safety Zone was the safest place that could be found for the Chinese. This place was ran by the westerners of the city who risked their lives to save thousands of Chinese from rape and death. Although the Japanese beat many Americans they managed to keep many Chinese save. After having read about the safely zone I am surprised that the Japanese even let this happen. They could have easily just gone in and killed them all. But for some reason they didn’t. They did how ever try time and time again to steal women from these camps or just rape then in the camps. Many were chased away by the Westerners, and the Westerners fought every hour of the day to spare the lives of every man and woman in the camps. There were individual heroes in these camps who did most of the saving; surprisingly by the Nazi John Rabe was the most significant hero of the Nanking Raping. His efforts to save Chinese were very tremendous and Iris talks very high of him and what he did. After looking into it more I found there was a movie made in 2009 about John Rabe and his heroism during the Rape of Nanking.

Overall this was a good book that should be read by all so that this even like the Holocaust in Germany can never be forgotten. Before reading this book I was unaware of this even happening as I would assume most Americans have no idea of it either.