The Japanese Holocaust

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

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.

RJ

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Russell Jenkins

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

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.