TLDR;

The book provides a historical account of the 1937 Nanking massacre. The Japanese imperialist army carried out mass executions and rapes, and tortured Chinese civilians and PoW. Told from the perspectives of the oppressor, the suppressed, and the outsider, the book examines how a city was devastated due to the indisciplined Japanese soldiers. This is an important book as it informs us about the psychology of evil during war, the helplessness of the weak, the incompetency of rulers, and the ignorance of the outside world.

Overview

• The Nanking massacre by the Japanese imperialist forces is one of the worst atrocities committed in our world during a war. The inhumanity of the Japanese troops was so appalling that it couldn’t be stomached even by the Nazis. Worse than the massacre was the denial of the Japanese people of these attrocities. To this day, there has been no formal apology extended by the Japanese people to the people of China.
• The author of this book, Iris Chang, has employed a brilliant writing strategy to confront such a dark chapter in humanity’s history. She has used the multiple perspectives technique borrowed from one of Japan’s best literary works, Rashomon, by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. Basically, she has used the best of Japan’s literature to expose the worst of their deeds.
• The book is organised into 3 major sections:
  1. The actual atrocities done in Nanking: This, in itself, is divided into 3 perspectives
     • The Japanese perspective (the oppressors)
     • The Chinese perspective (the suppressed)
     • The Western perspective (the outsiders)
  2. The denial of the Japanese
  3. The legacy left

Quotes

1. “As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.”
2. “Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely.”
3. “There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.”

Memory hooks

1. The bushido way of life in Japan was instilled among the children from a very young age. They were honourable but also unreasonable.
2. The US naval officer, Mathew Perry’s bold move of stepping into isolated Japan to show the Japanese people how left behind and cut off they are from the Western world’s progress.
3. The Chinese army’s reluctance to fight shocked the Japanese, who lived by the bushido philosophy. The Japanese were even disgusted by the Chinese surrender.
4. After slaughtering the Chinese soldiers, who had given up, near the Yangtze River, the Japanese bayonetted their bodies from morning to evening, one by one.
5. The Japanese ordered POWs and civilians to form themselves in a row. They beheaded the people in the first row and asked the people behind them to dump their bodies into the river. Then this row would be killed, and the row of people behind them would take their place. The Japanese found this to be tiring and could kill “only” 2000 people this way. That’s why they decided to use machine guns.
6. The Japanese soldiers believed that raping virgins would make them stronger on the battlefield.
7. The raped women were killed by the Japanese soldiers, who only thought of the women as human till they raped them, and after that, they were just like pigs.
8. Matsui, the general who was to lead the charge on Nanking but stayed behind due to a bout of tuberculosis, was aghast at the actions of the Japanese military. He was so shocked that he even told the New York Times that the Japanese military is probably the most undisciplined in the world.
9. The Japanese were afraid that they would be reprimanded by Western countries, and so instead of punishing their soldiers, they decided to start underground military brothels. For this, they had planned to acquire 80,000-200,000 women from Korea, China, and Indonesia. They did this in an effort to reduce the instances of rape on the battlefield.
10. The Samurai in Japan were infamous for lopping off the heads of peasants if they were not given a polite answer to a question. A rhetorical question is thus asked: isn’t it obvious that everyone in Japan had to be well-mannered?
11. On their march to Nanking, the Japanese soldiers held friendly competitions to see who would first kill 100 Chinese. This was covered in the Japanese media.
12. Nanking just fell in 5 days even when the Chinese had deployed 90k soldiers that could last a siege for about 5 months. The reasons for this were:
    • No aerial force
    • no communication devices
    • troops came from different regions so speaking by to each other was an issue
    • amateur soldiers and forcefully drafted soldiers
    • no trust between generals
13. Chinese soldiers were so scared when the invasion was about the begin that they stripped naked in the public and got rid of their army unforms and tried to blend in with the civilians.
14. Many Chinese citizens believed that after the invastion was completed the Japanese soldiers would treat them nicely. In an attempt to appease the Japanese soldiers some Chinese families even hung out the Japanese flag outside their houses.
15. The generally agreed upon death toll in Nanking is approximately about 300,000.
16. John Rabe, a German Nazi party leader in China, saved many Chinese from the Japanese military.
17. Japanese media described their army as saviours of the Chinese people. The worst propoganda ever!
18. At a certain point in history there was a conspiracy theory that Japan had ambitions to conquer the entire world.
19. Japanese school textbooks were heavily censored and did not include much information about Worl War 2. Some rural students, till early 1990s, were surprised to find out that Japan had a war with the USA.

Why I liked it?

1. This was a part of world history that I had no idea about. This was an extremely dark chapter in humanity’s history.
2. Explored the psycholofy of transfer of opression or the idea that “a slave does not wish for freedom, he wishes for a slave for himself”.
3. Those with the least power become the most sadistic when given with the power to make decisions of life and death. Sounds true and very dark.
4. Usage of Rashomon story telling technique to expose Japan’s brutality.

Rating - 5/5