The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, by Iris Chang (Basic, 278 pp., $25)

Mr. Jenkins is a research assistant at NR.

IN August 1995 the Washington Post ran the following headline: "Fifty Years after the Bomb, Japan Agonizes over Its Role in the War." Agonizes? Really? A survey conducted in Japan that very month found that nearly half of those polled felt that Japan had done enough to compensate for its actions. As the historian Noburu Kojima has put it, "How long must we apologize for the mistakes we have made?" That doesn't sound like a nation agonizing over its past. Japanese films and novels about World War II routinely depict Japan as the injured party in that conflict. And only this August did the Japanese Supreme Court rule that the government illegally deleted references in schoolbooks to atrocities the Japanese army committed during the war. This being the case, one wonders whether Iris Chang's The Rape of Nanking will ever see the light of day in the Land of the Rising Sun.

What Miss Chang has done is nothing spectacular; it is, however, uncommonly useful. She has provided a very readable, well-organized account of the "incident" (as Japanese textbooks prefer to call it) at the Nationalist Chinese capital of Nanking in the winter of 1937 and spring of 1938. Her subtitle, The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, is no overstatement. Most histories mention the Rape only in cursory terms, a sentence here, a paragraph there. It has achieved the status of, say, the slaughter at Cawnpore or the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre: a monster story at the time, only dimly remembered or understood now.

Miss Chang has rescued this episode from its undeserved obscurity. Her book gives us the political and military background, details of the subsequent butchery, and personal accounts from participants, victims, and rescuers. (The last of these categories notably includes John Rabe, a Nazi official on the scene with sufficient stature to permit him to write to Hitler on behalf of the residents of Nanking.) She attempts to demonstrate the considerable influence the Code of Bushido had on Japanese behavior, and to lay bare the political forces at work after the war which served to encourage amnesia on the subject. Also made plain is the complicity of the Japanese royal house in the operation. And, in an unflattering contrast to Germany's experience, she notes the postwar political and financial success of the men who ordered the killing of unarmed prisoners and permitted the wanton murder of noncombatants and the rape of twenty to eighty thousand women, along with other varieties of sexual torture.

The numbers stagger, and they are well documented. Miss Chang accepts that at least 260,000 Chinese lost their lives in the Rape. Her statistics are those cited by the Allied military tribunal in bringing the perpetrators (all 28 of them, we are told) to justice. Some estimates put the figure of those killed in the 350,000 range, while others go higher still.

To put this in perspective, consider that the United States, on all fronts, lost 323,000 in the four years of World War II. Or that at Auschwitz the Nazis killed on average 350,000 every two months. The Japanese killed roughly the same number in a few months without the benefit of the technology of mass murder available to the Nazis and without the advantage of concentration camps.

What's more, the Japanese troops weren't "specialized": nothing comparable to the Einsatzgruppen existed in their military. These were the boys next door. In his casting about for ordinary men who submissively participated in crimes too huge to be imagined, Professor Christopher Browning settled on the members of the SS police battalions. One wonders if he might have more profitably examined the men who formed the rank and file of the regular Japanese army in China (or the Philippines, for that matter).

The ferocity of the Japanese Imperial forces in the aftermath of battle defies the usual military explanation for such episodes: that the defenders had so bloodied the attackers that the latter were sent into a paroxysm of rage. No. The Chinese army resisted for four days and then, in an effort to preserve its strength, withdrew, leaving the city at the mercy of the Japanese. This wasn't Stalingrad; it wasn't even Bastogne.

So why did it happen? Modern Japan is a country famed for its advanced economy and high-tech industries. But the Rape of Nanking reminds us how recently Japan emerged from its medieval age: a scant 140 years ago, less than 100 at the time of the Rape. What European armies did during the Thirty Years War (which occurred at roughly the same remove from their medieval epoch), the soldiers of Hirohito did at Nanking. The rules of war the Japanese were abiding by were those of the twelfth century, not the twentieth. It is like contemplating a hybrid wolf/dog, only a generation removed from its wild ancestors, seemingly domesticated but capable at any moment of reverting to savagery. Miss Chang makes it clear that more than a couple of generations are required to alter the habits of mind produced by centuries of isolation.

Japan is today considered a more or less pacifist nation, and a member in good standing in the community of Western states. Yet given the attitudes toward the history of the war found among certain elements of Japanese society, one cannot fault the casual ob-server for supposing that Japan hasn't fully abandoned the culture of the more militaristically inclined Shogunates for that of modern liberalism. Iris Chang offers compelling evidence that, at least as recently as 1937, it hadn't.