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Originally Posted by HelloHockeyFans
The Rape of Nanking - Iris Chang
I think this is a must-read for Chinese people, but also, an important read for history buffs and people who would like to read tragic, but important facts of World War II.
A warning though, I was referred to this book by a friend who couldn't stomache to read any more after getting about half-way because she started to develop a prejudice towards Japanese people in general.
I've been approached twice already (I've only had the book for a week) by strangers who have read the book with comments on how "hard" the book is to read, but how glad they were they read it.
It talks about the "forgotten holocaust of World War II" where in the span of 6 weeks, the Japanese military killed over 300,000 Chinese citizens and soldiers in the old capital of Nanking. To put this into perspective, the estimated death toll of the two atomic blasts combined was 210,000. France and Great Britain combined for an estimated 169,000 civilian deaths for the entire war. The Japanese exterminated 300,000 in 6 weeks by methods unimaginable by many as confessed by Nagatomi Hakudo, a Japanese veteran of the invasion... "Few know that soldiers impaled babies on bayonets and tossed them still alive into pots of boiling water... They gang-raped women from the ages of twelve to eighty and then killed them when they could no longer satisfy sexual requirements. I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, and buried them alive, over two hundred in all. It is terrible that I could turn into an animal and do these things. There are really no words to explain what I was doing. I was truly a devil."
It's important in my opinion because it's an event in history that not many people are aware of. An excerpt from the book:
"In contrast to Germany, where it is illegal for teachers to delete the Holocaust from their history curricula, the Japanese have for decades systematically purged references to the Nanking massacre from their textbooks..."
"... And it is not just the fact that while Germans have made repeated apologies to their Holocaust victims, the Japanese have enshrined their war criminals in Tokyo -- an act that one American wartime victim of the Japanese has labeled politically equivalent to "erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin." "
This definitely isn't a book for everyone, but from what I can gather, there are quite a few people here who are extremely knowledgable in history and would likely be interested in reading such a book.
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