How did you become interested in the subject of the Rape of Nanking? What made you decide to write this book?
My grandparents lived in Nanking before the massacre, and they almost separated forever during the chaos and mass evacuations from the city in November 1937. That they were able to find each other again was a miracle.
The Rape of Nanking intrigued me at a very young age. My parents told me stories about the Nanking atrocities when I was a little girl&—how the massacre was so bad that it left the surface of the Yangtze River literally covered with bodies and blood. This was something I found hard to believe at the time, and as a child I searched the local libraries for an English-language book on the Nanking massacre and found nothing. Eventually, what goaded me to write the book was a December 1994 conference on the Rape of Nanking, organized in Cupertino California, by the Global Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese war. I remember being in the conference hall, staring at photos of decapitated bodies and women who had been horribly mutilated after rape. I walked around for an entire day in a state of shock. Later, I resolved to do my part to give these victims their proper place in history.
While researching this book, did you find that you were able to separate yourself from the horrible stories that you uncovered or were you very personally affected by what you learned? How did you cope with the stress of living with this tragedy on a daily basis?
I found it almost impossible to separate myself from the tragedy. The stress of writing this book and living with this horror on a daily basis caused my weight to plummet and my hair to fall out.
I understand that you went to China in 1995 to talk to many of the survivors. What was the hardest thing about interviewing them?
Trying to decide which stories to put in my book and what to leave out. Each and every story was important to me, because each represented a unique and precious life extinguished forever by the Japanese. But to have included every atrocity I heard or read from the Nanking massacre would have lengthened my book to thousands of pages.
How did the Chinese survivors of the Rape of Nanking react to your interest in the topic? Were they at all suspicious of your motives?
Suspicious? Not at all. Every single survivor I met was desperately anxious to tell his or her story. I spent several hours with each one, getting the details of their experiences on videotape. Some became overwrought with emotion during the interviews and broke down into tears. But all of them wanted the opportunity to talk about the massacre before their deaths.
Why do so few people in the U.S. know about the Rape of Nanking today?
The Cold war led to a concerted effort on the part of the West and even the Chinese to court the loyalty of Japan and stifle open discussion of this atrocity. To me, this is nothing more than a second rape.
Few people realize that the United States were co-conspirators in a secret deal with the Japanese that sold out the Chinese victims and even American veterans of World War II. During the war, Japanese doctors performed live medical experiments and even vivisection on American and Chinese POWs, but after 1945 the United States government not only failed to punish these doctors but exonerated them in exchange for their medical data. The American government also exempted the Japanese royal family from war crimes trials, permitted Emperor Hirohito to stay on the throne and even encouraged many officials of the Japanese wartime government to return to power. And in a move that shocked and baffled scholars to this day, the U.S. in the 1950s also returned to Japan secret military documents seized in 1945 by American occupation forces&—but without properly microfilming them first.
One of the greatest ironies of the Rape of Nanking is that not only have the Japanese squelched efforts to heal the victims of the massacre, but the Chinese government has also strongly discouraged any protest against the atrocities committed at Nanking. Has this changed at all since the publication of your book?
I think it has. For one thing, the Chinese government itself has jumped to my defense whenever I came under serious attack from Japanese revisionists. The PRC issued scathing a letter of protest to the international press when a group of conservative Japanese academics not only called my book "the most outrageous, world-class lie" but denied that the Rape of Nanking even happened. China also blasted the Japanese government when the Japanese ambassador to the United States denounced my book as "erroneous," "one-sided" and filled with historical inaccuracies &— an allegation that the ambassador was not able to support with a single good example, even when grilled by reporters.
Do you think that we should be scrutinizing more closely the methods by which our own servicemen are inaugurated into a military culture constructed to protect our national interest at any cost? Is it necessary to dehumanize a soldier before sending him or her into the arena of war? Where do we draw the line?
We should be on our guard to avoid cultivating a military culture that would dehumanize both its own soldiers and the people of an enemy nation. One reason why Japanese soldiers found it so easy to commit atrocities is that they were brought up in a military environment that held in contempt ALL human life, even their own. But there are clear, established laws of war &— laws set by the Hague Convention of 1907 and ostensibly recognized by most civilized nations &— and every American serviceman should be thoroughly drilled in these laws before they are sent into the line of fire.
Are you surprised by the success of THE RAPE OF NANKING? Why or why not?
To say I was surprised is an understatement. I was flabbergasted! My greatest hope for The Rape of Nanking was to see it in libraries, so the Nanking massacre would not be forgotten by future generations. Instead, it became an international bestseller, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for five months. All at once I found myself lecturing in auditoriums packed with thousands of readers, or discussing the Nanking massacre on shows like Good Morning America, Nightline and Jim Lehrer. All at once I found myself profiled in the New York Times, and featured on the cover of Reader's Digest. The entire experience has been like a dream.
For a scholarly nonfiction book to receive this kind of attention and sales is phenomenal. Most serious history books don't have a wide audience. (For instance, I doubt my first book, Thread of the Silkworm, sold ten thousand copies.) But The Rape of Nanking isn't just about history, but justice. That's why it was successful &— it struck the deep vein of moral outrage in this country.
Are you working on another book? What is it about?
My next book will be a narrative epic history of the Chinese in America.
Excerpted from The Rape of Nanking © Copyright 2009 by Iris Chang. Reprinted with permission by Penguin USA. All rights reserved.
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