By: James Aitchison

In 1997, Iris Chang’s bestselling book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, sold more than half a million copies.  Within seven years, Chang would take her own life.

Her book was the first definitive account of Japanese atrocities in 1937-1938, which claimed 300,000 Chinese lives in the Nanking Massacre — men, women, children, even babies.  Its publication brought both praise and honour to Chang; tragically, it also unleashed a vitriolic response and death threats from sinister holocaust deniers and Japanese ultranationalists.

Author, journalist, lecturer and human rights activist Iris Chang Shun-Ru was born on 28 March 1968 in Princeton, New Jersey.  Her parents were Chinese university professors who moved from China to Taiwan before settling in the United States.

Growing up, Chang recalled hearing stories about the Nanking Massacre, from which her maternal grandparents escaped.  At the time, Nanking was the capital of the Republic of China.  When the Imperial Japanese Army swept into the undefended city, a bloodbath ensued.  Chang was profoundly impacted by stories of how Japanese soldiers “sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths”.  She said the Nanking Massacre “remained buried in the back of my mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil”.  But when she tried to find books about the massacre, there were none.

The pivotal motivation to write her own book came at a 1994 conference in California on the subject of Nanking.  While still at the conference, Chang wrote the book’s introduction.  “I was suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect of death and dying would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch … unless someone forced the world to remember it”.

Armed with a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois, experience at Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, and a master’s degree in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University, Chang was well-equipped for research and reporting.  For two years she gleaned compelling evidence from diaries, films and photographs taken at the time of the massacre by missionaries, journalists and military officers.  She travelled to Nanking (now Nanjing), gathering survivor accounts and later collected confessions by Japanese army veterans. 

Two diaries were particularly significant.  One had been kept by John Rabe, the local Siemens AG manager, containing eight hundred pages of detailed atrocities.  Despite being a Nazi Party member, he set up a demilitarised zone that saved 250,000 civilians from the Imperial Japanese Army.  Chang called him the “Oskar Schindler of Nanking”.  The other diary was the work of American missionary Minnie Vautrin, who saved 10,000 women and children by sheltering them in Ginling College.  (Tragically, Vautrin later suffered a nervous breakdown and suicided.)

Chang catalogued grim facts.  The Nanking Massacre, she charged, “was certainly one of the greatest mass rapes in world history”.  She estimated 20,000 to 80,000 women were raped, including Buddhist nuns and pregnant women whose bellies were slashed open afterwards.  She described tortures such as live burials, mutilation, death by fire, death by ice and death by dogs.  Some Japanese soldiers conducted “killing contests” to see who could kill the fastest.  Chinese men were lured to remote places and used for “bayonet practice or decapitation contests”.

Unsurprisingly, Chang’s book ignited a storm of controversy.

The Rape of Nanking was published on the 60^th anniversary of the massacre, remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for ten weeks.

While The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and The Atlantic Monthly hailed the book as a compelling indictment of the Japanese military, ultra-right-wing Japanese scholars slammed her for fake and inaccurate reporting.  Chang’s Japanese publisher requested her to amend the book.  She refused.  In her own words Chang believed, “If the Japanese Foreign Ministry and the rest of the Japanese Government truly care about historical truth, then they should open all their wartime archives to the rest of the world …”

Some American scholars argued that because of her personal feelings, her book lacked intellectual rigour. Retaliating, Chang accused her critics of “nit-picking” to draw attention from the magnitude of the massacre.  Chang’s accuracy was confirmed by one Chinese military specialist who estimated that 430,000 civilians died, while the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall stated in 1946 that 300,000 were slaughtered in cold blood.  This figure is now generally accepted as the truth.

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The arduous work on her book, as well as the resultant controversy, exacted an abrupt toll.

Chang began receiving hate mail, threatening notes on her car, and believed her phone was being tapped.  Suffering from depression, she was diagnosed with reactive psychosis in August 2004.  She wrote, “I can never shake the belief I was being persecuted by forces more powerful than I could have imagined … As long as I am alive, these forces will never stop hounding me…”

Chang suffered a nervous breakdown while working on her next book about the Bataan Death March, another formidable account of atrocities.  On 9 November 2004 at 9.15 am Chang was found dead in the driver’s seat of her Oldsmobile Alero on a rural road south of Los Gatos, California.  She had committed suicide by shooting herself through the mouth with an old army revolver.  At the time of her death, she was taking Depakote and Risperdal to stabilise her mood.

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Today Iris Chang is commemorated by both a new wing and a bronze statue in the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall.  In 2017, the specially dedicated Iris Chang Memorial Hall was opened in Huai’an China.

After years of official government censorship, and too late to vindicate Iris Chang’s work during her lifetime, the Nanking Massacre is now enshrined in Japanese middle school textbooks.   However, the Japanese Government has yet to apologize or atone for the massacre.