Нанкин қырқыны: Екінші дүниежүзілік соғыстың ұмытылған геноциді

1997 non fiction book by Iris Chang

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a bestselling 1997 non fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanjing Massacre — the mass murder and mass rape of Chinese civilians committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, immediately after the Battle of Nanjing during the Second Sino Japanese War. It describes the events leading up to the Nanjing Massacre, provides a graphic detail of the war crimes and atrocities committed by Japanese troops, and lambastes the Japanese government for its refusal to rectify the atrocities. It also criticizes the Japanese people for their ignorance about the massacre. It is one of the first major English language books to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages. The book significantly renewed public interest in Japanese wartime conduct in China, Korea, Southeast Asia (including the Philippines) and the Pacific. The book received both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. It has been praised as a work that "shows more clearly than any previous account" the extent and brutality of the episode, while elements of Chang's analysis of the motivations for the events, Japanese culture, and her calculation of the total numbers killed and raped were criticized as inaccurate because of her lack of training as a historian. Chang's research on the book was credited with the finding of the diaries of John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, both of whom played important roles in the Nanking Safety Zone, a designated area in Nanjing that protected Chinese civilians during the Nanjing Massacre. The book prompted AOL executive Ted Leonsis to fund and produce Nanking, a 2007 documentary film about the eponymous massacre.

As a child, Chang was told by her parents that during the Nanjing Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." Her parents had escaped with their families from China to Taiwan and then to the United States after World War II. In the introduction of The Rape of Nanking, she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanjing Massacre "remained buried in the back of [her] mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil." When she searched the local public libraries in her school and found nothing, she wondered why no one had written a book about it. The subject of the Nanjing Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned of producers who had completed documentary films about it. One of the producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce Magee's Testament, a film that contains footage of the Nanjing Massacre itself, shot by the missionary John Magee. The other producer was Nancy Tong, who, together with Christine Choy, produced and co directed In The Name of the Emperor, a film containing a series of interviews with Chinese, American, and Japanese citizens. In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanjing Massacre, held in Cupertino, California, and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write her 1997 book. As she wrote in the book's introduction, while she was at the conference:<blockquote>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. Also, she incorporated the most recent work on the subject by Chinese and Chinese American historians by including many disturbing photographs and a myriad of translated documents. Before publication, the book was reviewed by Rana Mitter and Christian Jessen Klingenberg of the University of Oxford; Carol Gluck of Columbia University; and William C. Kirby of Harvard University. At the time of writing, the Japanese government classified Japan’s World War 2 archives, making archival records unavailable to investigators.

Chang's research led her to make what one San Francisco Chronicle article called "Significant Discoveries" on the subject of the Nanjing Massacre, in the forms of the diaries of two Westerners who were in Nanjing leading efforts to save lives during the Japanese invasion. Rabe's diary is over 800 pages, and contains one of the most detailed accounts of the Nanjing Massacre. Translated into English, it was published in 1998 by Random House as The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe. The other diary belonged to Minnie Vautrin, the American missionary who saved the lives of about 10,000 women and children when she provided them with shelter in Ginling College. Vautrin's diary recounts her personal experience and feelings on the Nanjing Massacre; in it, an entry reads, "There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today." It was used as source material by Hua ling Hu for a biography of Vautrin and her role during the Nanjing Massacre, entitled American Goddess at the Rape of Nanking: The Courage of Minnie Vautrin. Chang dubbed Rabe the "Oskar Schindler of Nanking" and Vautrin the "Anne Frank of Nanking." and states that women from all classes were raped, including Buddhist nuns. Furthermore, rape occurred in all locations and at all hours, and both very young and very old women were raped. Not even pregnant women were spared, Chang wrote, and that after gang rape, Japanese soldiers "sometimes slashed open the bellies of pregnant women and ripped out the fetuses for amusement." Not all rape victims were women, according to the book, Chinese men were sodomized and forced to perform repulsive sexual acts. Some were forced to commit incest—fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers.