70 years ago today, December 13th, 1937, the Nationalist China capital city Nanking fell to the Japanese. What ensued over the next few months is known as “The Rape of Nanking.” In today’s New York Times, the newspaper reviews the documentary, “Nanking” in the article titled “Giving Testimony on the Horror That Was Nanking“:
” “Nanking” is a swift, incisive documentary about one of the lesser-known horrors of the 20th century: the 1937 Japanese invasion of the Chinese city
now called Nanjing, where more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered in a matter of weeks. The capital of the Republic of China at the start of World War II and the headquarters of the Chiang Kai-shek government, this attractive, cosmopolitan city of parks and thoroughfares was largely destroyed in what is known as the rape of Nanking. Though some Japanese scholars dispute the statistics determined after the war by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, it is widely agreed that during the occupation in 1937 and 1938, more than 20,000 rapes were also committed by the rampaging Japanese Army. In its concentrated savagery, the catastrophe was comparable to the even more numerous mass murders in Rwanda in 1994.”
The definitive book, at least in English in the United States, was authored by Iris Chang, titled “The Rape of Nanking – The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.” To understand the post-World War II underlying animosity between China and Japan, one has to understand that Japan has never fully acknowledged publicly, and especially in their school textbooks, the atrocities it committed to the Chinese, especially The Rape of Nanking. Unfortunately, mankind has not learned the lessons of history and has repeatedly waged war and genocide against each other many times over since Nanking.
About John
I'm a Taiwanese-American and was born & raised in Western Massachusetts, went to college in upstate New York, worked in Connecticut, went to grad school in North Carolina and then moved out to the Bay Area in 1999 and have been living here ever since - love the weather and almost everything about the area (except the high cost of housing...)
