Rape Of Nanking Research Articles

John Rabe, the Nazi Leader, Who Became “the Living Buddha of Nanking”

During the World War II, John H.D Rabe, a Nazis German business man, saved hundreds thousands of Chinese under the gun of Japanese army during the Rape of Nanking. The article aim to answer the question: Why, John Rabe, stood as the opposite of Japan—German’s ally, risked his life to save those Chinese? Through reading and analyzing Rabe’s diaries, we may conclude that there are several explanations which related to his political position, life experience in China, love of Chinese culture, and personal ties for the question. War is a game of inhumanity, cruelty and indifference. Even in these dark times, there is a humanist who maintains his reverence for life and his cultural zeal, and who stands firm at the point of a gun, even at the cost of risking his life.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction

Narrativizing trauma, activating awareness: Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking and its afterlives

ABSTRACTWhen Iris Chang published The Rape of Nanking in 1997, exactly sixty years after the Nanjing Massacre, the subtitle The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, called attention to one of the greatest human tragedies in the twentieth century. As a powerful historic reminder, The Rape of Nanking aims “to understand the event so that lessons can be learned and warnings sounded.” This paper focuses on Chang’s role as a writer/fighter who uses words to fight forgetfulness with a forceful narrative concerning one of the most dreadful traumas in the collective psyche of the Chinese people. It produces quite a number of “afterlives,” including different Chinese translations in Taiwan and mainland China, a nanking winter (2008), a play by the second-generation Chinese Canadian playwright Marjorie Chan, Nanjing Requiem (2011), a novel by the first-generation Chinese American novelist Ha Jin, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems (2013), a collection of poems by the third-generation Chinese Hawaiian poet Wing Tek Lum. Furthermore, the docudrama Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking (2007), directed by Bill Spahic and Anne Pick, presents a filmic representation of the short fascinating life of this passionate writer. This paper discusses how Chang, role as a writer and activist, fights against amnesia with remembrance as well as her rich legacy to the world across linguistic, generic, and semiotic boundaries. Chang’s text and its afterlives strive to give voice to those nameless war victims as a step towards truth, justice, reconciliation, and peace.

난징사건과 도쿄재판 : 미국인 선교사 증언이 남긴 과제

난징사건과 도쿄재판 : 미국인 선교사 증언이 남긴 과제

Retranslation as a socially engaged activity: the case of The Rape of Nanking

ABSTRACTThe Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang describes the massacre that took place in Nanking during the second Sino-Japanese war. Originally written in English, this book, which was published in the US in 1997, received wide attention and caused much controversy, not only in the US and Japan, but also in South Korea, where three different Korean translations have been published to date. This study examines The Rape of Nanking with a view to identifying various ways in which narratives encoded in the source text are reframed by the translator and the publisher to foreground particular events and to make them more salient in translation, while excluding, diluting, and downgrading others, in such a way so as to promote particular narratives. The contextual and textual analysis of the three Korean translations reveals that each translation is paratextually framed and temporally positioned, and also that they expand the scope of the original narrative to the South Korean setting by adding related events and issues that were of immediate interest to South Korean readers at the time of their publication.

Debating History and Memory: Examining the Controversy Surrounding Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking

Iris Chang’s 1997 work The Rape of Nanking precipitated a wave of critiques and reappraisals in Asia and abroad. While held in low-esteem by most historians and academics, it holds greater sway amongst broader reading publics as one of the most widely read popular histories on the subject. The impact of Chang’s book transcends the ongoing and heated debates about the Nanking Massacre itself, and connects with related debates concerning history, memory, and human rights in the Asia-Pacific. The article examines some of these related historical debates appearing in the late nineteen-nineties and shows how The Rape of Nanking has stimulated public interest and recognition of past human rights violations including, but not limited to the atrocities of Nanking.

The Living Goddess of Mercy at the Rape of Nanking: Minnie Vautrin and the Ginling Refugee Camp in World War II (1937–1938) †

During the infamous Nanking Atrocity, some Western businesspersons and missionaries established the Nanking Safety Zone to protect about 250,000 refugees. When the Japanese army was pressing on Nanking, Minnie Vautrin, an educational missionary from the United Christian Missionary Society, took charge of the Ginling College campus. As one of the 25 refugee camps, Ginling provided shelter to about 10,000 women and children in late December 1937—the hardest time during World War II in China. With her neutral identity of American nationality, Vautrin seriously struggled with Japanese soldiers when they were seizing Chinese women for rape from the campus; thus, she helped many women avoid the possible fate of sexual violence and slaughter. The Chinese people promoted her as a “Goddess of Mercy”, in the Chinese language a “Living Buddha” (Huo pu sa) or “Guanyin Buddha” (Guan Yin pu sa). The Chinese central government awarded her the Order of Jade (Cai Yu xun zhang). Drawing from Vautrin’s diaries and other original materials, this paper narrates this Christian female missionary’s moving story in humanism, evangelism, and internationalism. Her devotion to the Chinese refugee women and children made her an eyewitness to the Nanking Massacre, a rehabilitator of refugee sufferings, and a mental and bodily victim of disastrous war.

Massacre and Memory, History and Humanity: A Discussion on Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking

While World War II seemed inevitable in Europe, Japanese aggression was well underway in Asia. Japan assaulted the capital of China, Nanking, in December 1937 and perpetrated a six-week-long massacre, killing thousands of unarmed Chinese military troops and civilians, including women and children. Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II exposes this horrific event that showcases humanity at its worst. After reading Chang’s book, it is clear why “rape” was deemed necessary for the title; her gripping account will make one’s stomach turn. War brings up questions of the human condition, responsibility, and justice. In the following discussion, students at Armstrong respond to the atrocities of war presented in this book and confront issues of massacre, memory, history, and humanity.

Rediscovering a massacre: The filmic legacy of Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking

In December 1937, the then-Chinese capital of Nanjing fell to the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA). China, under the control of the Nationalist government (the KMT), had been engaged in full-scale conflict with Japan since July of that year in what is known as the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). During 1937, Japanese forces captured several major Chinese cities, including Shanghai, whose taking enabled the invading army to advance on the capital. By the time the IJA entered an already-bombarded Nanjing on December 13, the KMT had withdrawn its army, leaving the city officially defenceless. The events that ensued over six weeks – including mass rape and killing of both civilians and disarmed military personnel – are known collectively as the Nanjing Massacre. Its death toll remains hotly disputed particularly among Japanese historians, though the official Chinese estimate is 300,000. This figure, set in stone as if to quantify the city's trauma, has confronted visitors to the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum since its opening in 1985.

Genocide and the Terror of History

The Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson initiated the Taskforce for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research in 1998 after visiting a Nazi concentration camp and...

I Want to Be Human

This article reads a Chinese blockbuster film, City of Life and Death ([南京! 南京! Nanjing! Nanjing!] dir. Lu Chuan, 2009), as an allegory of China and the human for contemporary China. This movie illustrates the historical entanglement and tension of China and the human in twentieth-century Chinese cultural criticism and raises provocative questions about the geopolitics of historical trauma (the Nanjing Massacre in this case), the politics of memory, and the recuperation of Chinese humanity through memory work. I situate this film's representation of the Nanjing Massacre in relation to two other texts, The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe and The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, and examine the intricate power relations revolving around these contemporary discourses of the human in representations of this historical incident. I argue that these two texts have prepared the ground for City of Life and Death, positioning it strategically vis-à-vis Chinese history and the global condition of neoliberal globalization. I suggest that the movie articulates the Chinese desire for the universal human among the emerging new Chinese middle class, which has proved itself to be a formidable force in cultural and ideological production in contemporary China.

Memory on Trial: Constructing and Contesting the ‘Rape of Nanking’ at the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, 1946–1948

AbstractThe spectre of the 1937 ‘Rape of Nanking’ continues to haunt China and Japan. Sixty years ago in Tokyo, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE) announced its definitive ‘judgement’ of what happened in Nanking. This judgement purported to be intractable. The legal process used to reach it produced a disputed picture instead. The resulting narrative confusion continues to inform how memory of Nanjing is shaped, used and contested. This paper explores the construction of ‘Rape of Nanking’ narratives at the IMTFE. By demonstrating the inherently contested nature of narratives produced by adversarial legal proceedings, it argues that using courts as a panacea for postwar restoration and as validators of traumatic narratives is both short-sighted and ineffective. The IMTFE exemplifies the inadequacy of trial-based post-conflict reconciliation. It is hoped that the lessons learned from Tokyo's limitations will benefit the ongoing quest for tenable models of international justice.

The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture (review)

Reviewed by: The Nanking Atrocity 1937-38: Complicating the Picture R. Keith Schoppa (bio) The Nanking Atrocity 1937–38: Complicating the Picture. Edited by Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi. Berghahn Books, New York, 2007. xx, 433 pages. $95.00. The current relevance of this excellent book was underscored by my receiving, as I was finishing reading it, an email (dated May 5, 2008) from the "Committee for the Examination of the Facts about Nanking." Two of the members of the committee, Fujioka Nobukatsu and Higashinakano Shūdō, loom large in Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi's edited volume as foremost "deniers" of the Nanking Atrocity. The email posed five questions about the "Battle of Nanking" to visiting Chinese President Hu Jintao—the substance of which are all addressed in this book. The issue of what happened in Nanking from December 1937 into early 1938 has recently become an especially hot topic, with a number of books focusing on it following the publication in 1997 of the late Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (Basic Books) In the sharply polarized reaction to her book, she was both lionized and demonized for her interpretation. Wakabayashi's book is in many ways a reaction to issues raised by her work. The essays probe what indeed happened in the Chinese capital 71 years ago, and they analyze the historiography of the events, looking at interpretations of the Nanking Atrocity by Chinese, Western, and especially Japanese scholars. I find the book's subtitle to be somewhat surprising. I would have thought "Clarifying the Picture" more appropriate than "Complicating the Picture." After all, Wakabayashi, in explicating the goal of the book, states that "[o]ur task is to refine, not reject, the prevailing view of Japanese turpitude, Chinese victimization, and Western humanitarianism at Nanking" (p. 23). He is not challenging the reality of the killings and the rapes that occurred: "We contend that the Atrocity was a shameful violation of law and morality" (p. 19). But he goes on to say that he and other essay writers "find [them]selves in grudging and qualified agreement that certain intractable facts betray key points in the official Chinese narrative and in Western accounts that follow it" (p. 19). The elephant in the room is the atrocity-deniers, who have raised questions mostly about numbers and identities of those killed and about (a perceived lack of) coverage of the events at the time. Wakabayashi asserts that "[t]he most that would-be deniers can do is minimize the number of victims, cite extenuating circumstances to explain it, or claim that all armies in all wars commit similar atrocities" (p. 143). And yet, it seems to me that he [End Page 172] leaves open the possibility that the atrocity-deniers may be right. Several sentences following the preceding quotation, he says, "if Japanese critics . . . succeed in disproving the factuality not only of the killing contest [which Wakabayashi discusses], but of many more incidents in the Nanking Atrocity, the Chinese will be hard put to maintain credibility because modern-day historians will not accept narratives unless these are convincingly supported by empirical evidence" (p. 143). Even more pointedly, he asserts, "if deniers prove that many more incidents in the Nanking Atrocity are baseless in fact, we may have to rethink our overall understanding of it" (p. 361). On the one hand, this makes perfect sense: historians must leave themselves open for any possibilities. But the phrase "convincingly [my emphasis] supported by empirical evidence"—on its face the ideal of every historian—is, in this case, also a trump straight from the deniers' playbook. It is troubling, given the realities of the atrocity where a host of factors militated against the careful setting down of accurate and unbiased empirical evidence. Even what exists is suspect, incomplete, or open to widely varying interpretations. In the end, what does it take to be convincing? Many essays in this volume deal with the numbers game. Whether the number is "at least up to 5,000" as David Askew posits (p. 112), 46,215 in Wakabayashi's estimation (p. 384), or between 200,000 and 300,000 in Chinese eyes, even the...

The Nanking atrocity, 1937-38: complicating the picture

December 13, 2007 marks 70th anniversary of fall of Chinese city of to Japanese army. The Nanking Atrocity of winter 1937-8, also known as Nanking Massacre, lies at core of bitter disputes over history, wartime victimization, and postwar restitution that preclude amicable Sino-Japanese relations to this day. This volume, which is both history and historiography, offers most recent scholarship about what actually happened in and places those findings in context of how Chinese and Japanese writers have attributed mutually incompatible meanings to event ever since; an event that is coined, on Chinese side, as the forgotten Holocaust, after subtitle of Iris' Chang's 1997 bestseller, The Rape of Nanking, uncritically adopted by Western public opinion, a gross distortion according to contributors of this volume. However, authors also deflate Japanese exculpatory narratives which, serving their own ideological agendas, holds that was a combat operation against unlawful belligerents, which produced only a few dozen innocent victims. This volume presents new facts and fresh interpretations with overriding aim to complicate picture and to debunk myths, expose fallacies, and rectify misconceptions that obstruct a clear understanding of issues and prevent ultimate reconciliation between China and Japan. Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi is Professor of History at York University, Toronto, specializing in Japanese political thought and World War Two in East Asia. His publications include Anti-Foreignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan (Harvard University Press, 1986), Japanese Loyalism Reconstrued (University of Hawaii Press, 1995), and Modern Japanese Thought (Ed.,Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Takashi Yoshida (ed): The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States

Takashi Yoshida (ed): The Making of the “Rape of Nanking”: History and Memory in Japan, China, and the United States

Victims or Victimizers? Museums, Textbooks, and the War Debate in Contemporary Japan

This essay addresses a widespread misperception in mainstream thinking about Japanese views of their World War II record. Popular works, such as Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking, tend to speak of a monolithic Japanese view of the war today. This article, through an analysis of the exhibits and descriptive literature of Japanese "war" and "peace" museums as well as recent struggles over how to depict Japan's wartime record in school textbooks, disagrees. Rather than a unified "Japanese" view of the war, the reality is a struggle in which conservatives and right-wingers duel with moderates and leftists over the "correct history" of the war.

‘Reflections with Memories’:

This article uses as data for cultural criminology an album of photographs taken by German soldiers and policemen involved in the Holocaust. The author labels these actions ‘genocidal tourism’. He then asks what impact they have on the exclusionary tactics at work in mainstream criminology that, typically, define genocidal killings as outside the scope of the criminological enterprise. Many of the photographs discussed played an important part in the debate occasioned by the work of Daniel Goldhagen and Christopher Browning. Goldhagen advanced a ‘cultural’ argument for the Holocaust (eliminationist anti-Semitism), pointing out the ‘readiness’ of members of Reserve Police Battalion 101 to participate in the atrocities. In Goldhagen’s hands the Holocaust cannot provide material for criminology, as it is a unique historical event that belongs entirely to an interaction between ‘ordinary Germans’ and Jews. This article argues that this can be partly explained by differences in the rhetoric of Goldhagen and Browning’s texts and their respective use of photography. By comparing photography from the case of the genocidal massacres in the Rape of Nanking, the author counters Goldhagen’s argument and points to the possibility of the development of a situational criminology.

Children of bad memories

Throughout history, the international discourse about armed conflicts has turned a blind eye to the issue of rape, conceptualising it as an inevitable by-product of war. The 20th century witnessed rape being used as a weapon of war more consciously as a means to demoralise and destroy the enemy. The 1937 Japanese occupation of China’s wartime capital, for example, became known as the Rape of Nanking. Although military tribunals were established to enforce accountability to those responsible for the heinous crimes committed during such conflicts, rape has continued to remain invisible as a war crime and hence is rarely sanctioned. Conflicts in the former Yugoslavia (1992) and Rwanda (1994) have, however, promoted immense attention to mass rape, for it was used as a tactic in the genocidal intent of the conflict. Women were held in rape camps with the specific aim to impregnate them with a child of the enemy. Evidence of the pregnancies resulting from rape in these conflicts aroused interest in the international legal and feminist communities, because “rape-induced pregnancy was presented as a worse crime against women than rape itself”. 2

Representing History in Amy Tan's "The Kitchen God's Wife"

Historical is often understood according to binary logic, with critics tending to privilege either phenomenalism or theoreticism. A phenomenalist approach assumes that historical literature is a reliable source of information about past experiences, and a theoretical approach argues that 'events' are never not discursively constituted and that the of historiography is always also language (Spivak, In Other Worlds 242). In short, historical literature is generally understood as either phenomenal fact or theoretical fiction. When imagined simply in terms of a binary opposition, both approaches are beset by limitations. It is the task of this discussion to examine these limitations via a reading of Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, specifically the section narrated by Jiang Weili, otherwise known as Winnie Louie. This novel is valuable because in representing a particular period of Chinese history, namely Japan's occupation of China during the 1930s and the 1940s as well as the Rape of Nanking (1937)1, it promotes an analysis that resists two equally conservative, if not downright oppressive, ideologies: neocolonialism and Japanese revisionism. These ideologies exploit phenomenalism and theoreticism respectively, allowing neocolonialists to factualize literature and Japanese ultranationalists to fictionalize history. The Kitchen God's Wife negotiates between these two extremes in terms compatible with deconstruction by generating a debate about the difficulty of referencing past experiences a la phenomenalism. This difficulty urgently needs addressing in the wake of

Nanking 1937: Memory and Healing. Edited by Fei Fei Li, Robert Sabella and David Liu. [New York and London: M. E. Sharpe, 2002. xxvi+304 pp. Hard cover $64.65, ISBN 0-7656-0816-2; paperback $23.95, ISBN 0-7656-0817-1.

For many years the Nanking massacre of December 1937 was not well known in the Western world as various international political factors prevented recognition of the event. This has now changed. In recent years, much new documentation has been discovered and published, including John Rabe's diary, and the documents of a group of American missionaries who remained in Nanking during the atrocity. The emergence of these documents and Iris Chang's best selling book, The Rape of Nanking, has aroused international attention and discussion.