 REMEMBER HER VOICE: A PLEA TO SUPPORT THE MEMORY OF IRIS CHANG, 1968-2004I have a theory about what the real motivation behind the North Korean nuclear program is. And I do not believe that it is to force a confrontation with the United States - at least not in the near term. North Korea has been an isolated nation for almost 60 years now. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the moderation of the People's Republic of China's foreign policy, that isolation is almost total. Yes, the PRC does support the Kim regime with fuel oil and grain, but only enough to prevent a mass migration of refugees into Chinese territitory. Even with its impressive economic progress in the thirty years since Mao's death, China does not have the resources or the inclination to support upwards of twenty million Koreans fleeing starvation, particularly in the Yalu river region. Therefore, it is in the Chinese national interest to keep the North Korean state functional, if only minimally. This does not make them allies, at least as the term is traditionally understood. If they were, Kim would have heeded China's admonitions about its recent nuclear test. Certainly, he would have given the PRC's embassy more than twenty minutes notice that the test was going to occur. If anything, North Korea is an issue that has interfered with a closer relationship between the Chinese and the United States over the last decade. The American government views the North Koreans as a mortal threat and they view the Peoples Republic of China as supporting that threat. That is a much greater stumbling block to close relations than China's human rights record, as one side sees its national survival as being threatened. I believe that Kim Jong Il thinks that the regional pressure on him might be lessened if a greater threat to Asian security presented itself. The recent testing of a nuclear bomb and the long-range missile that would carry it demonstrates clearly that Kim is not an immediate threat to the United States. They have shown the world that they can only manufacture a tiny warhead and their long-range missles can only barely leave the launch pad. North Korea is not yet a mortal threat to the United States and will not be anytime soon. But those tests do threaten Japan. Virtually everyone agrees that the North Koreans will soon have the capability of launching a limited first strike across the Sea of Japan. As the only country in human history to have sustained a nuclear attack, the Japanese might be forgiven for taking this with the utmost seriousness. In the wake of the North Korean tests, Japan's new conservative prime ministe, Shinzo Abe, has openly mused about his country developing nuclear weapons of its own - something most observers agree they can accomplish in approximately six months. A nuclear Japan is, I believe, Kim's ultimate ambition. A nuclear Japan would almost certainly unify eastern Asia in a way that it has not been since before the Second World War. If the competing nations of Asia- large and small alike - agree on anything, it is a universal loathing of Japan and its imperial past. The late Iris Chang taught the West why that loathing exists, and why it is so deeply ingrained in their cultures. Her contribution to Western understanding of Asian history and attitudes are invaluable and should never be forgotten. In the sixty years following the end of World War Two, North America and Europe remember the German aspect of the conflict most strongly. The obsession with Nazi Germany and its horrific crimes - while certainly justified - has been at the expense of learning about the reign of terror imposed on Asia by the Japanese. When westerners think of the Japanese war at all, they often consider only what happened after Pear Harbor.  Iris Chang changed that forever with her 1997 book, The Rape Of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. From the moment of its publication on, that history was available to anyone with the inclination to learn it. No longer could anyone claim ignorance about the scope of the brutality that the Japanese government has denied with impunity for nearly seventy years. For that reason, people of goodwill everywhere - and perhaps even history itself - owes the memory of Iris Chang a huge debt. To be sure, her publisher, Peguin/Basic Books, did not have much faith in the project. The initial publication run was a mere 2,000 hardcover copies, and a promtional budget was pointedly refused. It was left to a private group, the Association for Learning and Preserving the History of WWII in Asia (ALPHA,) to fund the book tour that made the book the success it ultimately was. Japan's unspeakable cruelty toward the Chinese people began with the 1931 invasion and occupation of Manchuria. Indeed, this was the first military exercise that began the long march toward the Second World War, still two years before Adolf Hitler's assumption of power in Germany. the full-scale invasion of the world's most populous nation waited until the fall of 1937. Within a month, the first genocide of the modern era - what has become known as "the rape of Nanking" began. The use of the word "rape" is not an exrcise in alliteration. Once the hapless Chinese military retreated from their imperial capital, the women of Nanking suffered unimaginable indignities. Women were killed in indiscriminate acts of terror and execution, but the large majority died after extended and excruciating gang-rape. "Surviving Japanese veterans claim that the army had officially outlawed the rape of enemy women," writes Iris Chang. But "the military policy forbidding rape only encouraged soldiers to kill their victims afterwards." She cites one soldier's recollection that "It would be all right if we only raped them. I shouldn't say all right. But we always stabbed and killed them. Because dead bodies don't talk ... Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 49-50). Kenzo Okamoto, another Japanese soldier, recalled: "From the time of the landing at Hangzhou Bay, we were hungry for women! Officers issued a rough rule: If you mess with a woman, kill her afterwards, but don't use bayonets or rifle fire. The purpose of this rule was probably to disguise who did the killing. The military code with its punishment of execution was empty words. No one was ever punished. Some officers were even worse than the soldiers." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 188)
One eyewitness, Li Ke-hen, reported: "There are so many bodies on the street, victims of group rape and murder. They were all stripped naked, their breasts cut off, leaving a terrible dark brown hole; some of them were bayoneted in the abdomen, with their intestines spilling out alongside them; some had a roll of paper or a piece of wood stuffed in their vaginas" (quoted in Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195). John Rabe, a German (and Nazi) businessman who set up a "Nanking Safety Zone" in the city's international settlement and thereby saved thousands of Chinese lives, described in his diary the weeks of terror endured by the women of Nanjing. Though young and conventionally attractive women were most at risk, no woman was safe from vicious rape and exploitation (often filmed as souvenirs) and probable murder thereafter. "Groups of 3 to 10 marauding soldiers would begin by traveling through the city and robbing whatever there was to steal. They would continue by raping the women and girls and killing anything and anyone that offered any resistance, attempted to run away from them or simply happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. There were girls under the age of 8 and women over the age of 70 who were raped and then, in the most brutal way possible, knocked down and beat up." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 119.) In addition to those killed after the violation, historian David Bergamini notes that "Many immature girls were turned loose in such a manhandled condition that they died a day or two later. ... Many young women were simply tied to beds as permanent fixtures accessible to any and all comers. When they became too weepy or too diseased to arouse desire, they were disposed of. In alleys and parks lay the corpses of women who had been dishonored even after death by mutilation and stuffing." (Yin and Young, The Rape of Nanking, p. 195.)
Not all of the victims of rape were female. "Chinese men were often sodomized or forced to perform a variety of repulsive sexual acts in front of laughing Japanese soldiers," writes Chang. "At least one Chinese man was murdered because he refused to commit necrophilia with the corpse of a woman in the snow. The Japanese also delighted in trying to coerce men who had taken lifetime vows of celibacy to engage in sexual intercourse. ... The Japanese drew sadistic pleasure in forcing Chinese men to commit incest -- fathers to rape their own daughters, brothers their sisters, sons their mothers ... those who refused were killed on the spot." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, p. 95.)  And this began five years before the Holocaust in Europe. For all of their industrialized barbarity, Hitler's Nazi war machine never approached the depths of the stomach turning depravity that the Japanese military did nothing at all to hide. In fact, as Mrs. Chang wrote, Japanese officers and enlisted men alike filmed and photographed their conquests for the amusement of their families and friends at home. The Germans did go to some lengths to obscure their existence of their mechanized extermination camps in Eastern Europe. They were mentioned not at all in the German media during the war. This is why the Allies forced ordinary Germans to examine those camps after their liberation, to see what the government they supported had done. Not so the Japanese media, which glorified the atrocities being committed in Nanking. In her book, Chang cites a newspaper article about a contest between two officers about which could behead the most civilians. That article was published alongside a photo of the two grinning criminals with their swords drawn. Japanese civilians on the home islands would read these stories approvingly over breakfast. Unlike the Germans, the Japanese people knew exactly what was being done in their name. During the war, the murder of civilians was the policy of all sides. The United States killed approximately 100,000 people during Curtis LeMay's firebombing of Tokyo of March 9, 1945. The entire city of Dresden was annhiliated by American and British bombing raids and tens of thousands died. This was due to the then accepted theory of war that breaking the population's will to resist would shorten the conflict and spare more lives than were taken.  For the Japanese, however, the gruesome slaughter of innocents was the entire point of the war. The Japanese military, government and people subjected their captive nations - and China in particular - to the most excurciating and humiliating ends that they could connive. And they did so as a matter of national policy. Atrocious tortures were also inflicted on the captive men. "The Japanese not only disemboweled, decapitated, and dismembered victims but performed more excruciating varieties of torture. Throughout the city they nailed prisoners to wooden boards and ran over them with tanks, crucified them to trees and electrical posts, carved long strips of flesh from them, and used them for bayonet practice. At least one hundred men reportedly had their eyes gouged out and their noses and ears hacked off before being set on fire. Another group of two hundred Chinese soldiers and civilians were stripped naked, tied to columns and doors of a school, and then stabbed by zhuizi -- special needles with handles on them -- in hundreds of points along their bodies, including their mouths, throats, and eyes. ... The Japanese subjected large crowds of victims to mass incineration. In Hsiakwan [along the Yangtze] a Japanese soldier bound Chinese captives together, ten at a time, and pushed them into a pit, where they were sprayed with gasoline and ignited." (Chang, The Rape of Nanking, pp. 87-88.) In fact, the horrors that took place in the occupied city were so shocking to the conscience that a member of good standing in the Nazi Party endangered his own life to save others. For perhaps the first time, Chang told the story of John Rabe, a German businessman in Nanking during the worst of the seige. Rabe was instrumental in the creation of the Nanking Safety Zone, which saved thousands of Chinese civilians from the marauding Japanese. At times, Rabe brandished his swastika armband to frighten the invaders away from the safety zone. Upon returning to Germany in 1938, Rabe wrote a letter to Hitler, pleading with him to use his influence with the Japanese to ensure the humane treatment of the Chinese. For this, John Rabe was arrested by the Gestapo. The Chinese honored Rabe in having his tombstone moved from Berlin to Nanjing following his death in 1950. And in discovering his diaries in her research, Iris Chang introduces us to one of the previously unknown heroes of the Second World War. While these atrocities are still a fresh wound in eastern Asia, they were largely unknown in the West before the publication of The Rape Of Nanking. North Americans and Europeans were aware of crimes such as the Bataan Death March and the seige of Hong Kong, but that is largely the extent of it. Because of the truncated occupation of Japan (which ended in 1952, a mere seven years after VJ Day) and the close relationship made necessecary by the rising Soviet threat, most westerners viewed Japan as lesser partners in the collective crimes against humanity of the Axis. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Japanese began their foreign aggression before Hitler even came to power. Indeed, their vicious occupation of Korea - a nation they promoptly converted into a military whorehouse - began in 1910. Even after the establishment of the Third Reich, there was some German resistence to Hitlerism. Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Tojo were met with none. In fact, Japanese militarism and chauvanism toward the rest of Asia had been ingrained for at least a century at every level of Japanese society. While the Germans imitated the concept of a "master race," it was a long-standing tradition in Japan, one taught even to school children.  Tojo was hanged for his crimes but Hirohito - in whose name they were committed - died peacefully in his own bed some 43 years after the war, his funeral attended by most of the world's leaders. Japan became a member of the world community in good standing, their horrendous acts largely forgotten. There is no sense of continuing collective guilt in Japan, as there is in Germany. Unlike Germany, Japan has not formally apologized to their victims in China. In fact, they've mimnimized their crimes when they weren't denying them completely. In this, the plight of the Comfort Women is instructive. During the war, the Japanese military created a virtual gulag of brothels on their bases, and impressed women from their captive nations to staff them. These women, known as "comfort batallions," were in fact brutally raped for years - often with disasterous health consequences. It is also claimed that beatings and physical torture were not uncommon. A single woman could expect to have sex a dozen to forty times a day, often resulting in injury to the genitals. Women were divided into three or four categories, depending on their length of service. The "freshest" women were the least likely to suffer from STDs and were placed in the highest category. Virgins were usually given to officers for first sex. As time went on, the comfort women were downgraded as the likelihood of their acquiring STDs became more certain. Any others who were suspected with pregnancy were forced to undergo crude methods of abortion, more often than not killing the women through over-bleeding during surgical removals. When they were considered likely to be too diseased to be of any further use, they were abandoned, oftentimes far from home, or even in a different country, as the comfort women were shipped wherever deemed necessary. Sometimes to conceal the existence of their use of comfort women, retreating Japanese battalions would stash these women in secret caves and blast the entrance, causing landslides that sealed the cave. Many women reported having their uteruses rot from the diseases acquired from being raped by thousands of men over several years, at times requiring surgical removal.
A 1965 trade agreement forced the South Korean government to forgo any claim of compensation, and the Japanese for decades denied any responsibility for the comfort battalions. The victims however, would not settle for business as usual and filed claims of their own.
Several surviving comfort women also independently filed suit in the Tokyo District Court. More suits followed in the ensuing years. It was widely expected that the court would reject all of these claims on the basis of the statutes of limitation or on the basis that the state is immune from civil suits in court on the matter of war time conduct. However, these suits have helped to revive and sustain the issue of comfort women in Japan as well as in the international media.
Initially the Japanese government denied any official connection to the wartime brothels; in June 1990, the Japanese government declared that all brothels were run by private contractors. However, in 1992, the historian Yoshimi Yoshiaki discovered incriminating documents in the archives of Japan's Defense Agency indicating that the military was directly involved in running the brothels (by, for example, selecting the agents who recruited). Since then, Japan's official position has been one of admitting "moral but not legal" responsibility.
"Moral but not legal responsibility." It took the Japanese government a full six decades to admit even that. For turning some of history's oldest civilizations into their personal whorehouses, they accept "moral but not legal responsibility." The galling ability of the Japanese government to stagger the imagination with their denials is seemingly endless. In an interview with Salon, Chang explained the difference between the German and Japanese post-war national experiences. Both countries found themselves in entirely different political circumstances after the war. In postwar Germany, most of the Nazi war criminals were thrown in prison, executed or -- at the very least -- prevented from occupying positions of power. The Germans also officially acknowledged their wartime misdeeds by paying billions in restitution to their victims and passing laws to mandate the teaching of the Holocaust in public schools. By dismantling the Nazi infrastructure from top to bottom and by teaching subsequent generations the full story of the horrors of that regime, Germany was able to make a clean break from the past and earn back some of the trust and respect it had lost from the international community.
But what happened in Japan was precisely the opposite. To this day, Japan has never paid a penny in reparations to the victims of the Nanking massacre, or, to my knowledge, adequate restitution to its other victims, like Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for the Japanese military or the American and Chinese POWs who were used as human guinea pigs for Japanese medical experimentation.
Moreover, the entire royal family of Japan was exonerated under the terms of the surrender, and avoided prosecution, and even having to testify, during the International Military Tribunal of the Far East. Emperor Hirohito stayed on the throne until his death in 1989.
Why did this happen? I think it happened because the United States, the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China in Taiwan were all more concerned about achieving their immediate political objectives than about seeking justice for the victims of Japan. After 1949, neither the PRC nor the ROC demanded apologies or reparations from Japan because both governments were competing for Japan's diplomatic recognition and trade relationships. And during the Cold War, the U.S. government sought to build up Japan as a strong and stable ally to counter the forces of communism in the Soviet Union and Asia. No doubt a deep-seated American guilt over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki also made U.S. criticism of Japanese wartime behavior difficult.
Therefore, the Japanese escaped the moral scrutiny and legal responsibility that their counterparts in Germany were forced to accept, and the consequences can be felt in Asia today. Thanks to American and Chinese leniency, the entire Japanese wartime bureaucracy remained intact, leaving it in a position to control what was taught in schools -- or broadcast in the media -- during the postwar years. As a result, the people of Japan never went through the intense process of national soul-searching and atonement for their World War II crimes.
The Rape of Nanking lasted for approximately six weeks and claimed 300, 000 lives in the most barbaric ways imaginable. The Japanese occupation of Korea lasted for 35 years and no one is sure how many were destroyed there. Mrs. Chang told the story of those six weeks for the first time in English in nearly fifty years. Her contribution to the history of that era was, and is, invaluable. Why is it so important? As the beginning of this essay explained, Japan might be a nuclear power someday very soon. Prominent voices in Japan have called for the renunciation of the constitutional limits on their military. They have long sought a seat as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Japan has styled itself - and is viewed by many as - a leader of the international community. Yet Japan continues to deny its culpability in some of the 20th century's most monsterous acts. When confronted with irrefutable facts, they spew platitudes like "moral but not legal responsibility." Phrases like that are an insult to the intelligence of the living and a desecration of the memory of the dead. This is not the way responsible countries behave. Germany, for all of its sins, is the model of national rehabilitation. On the other hand, Japan feels that it has nothing to rehabilitate. They are reactionary and steeped in a national state of denial, preferring to shelter the evil in their history, rather than bury it forever. How would the world react if the Germans treated their war history as the Japanese have? What if the German ambassador to the United States described Schindler's List as "lies" and "one-sided," as the Japanese ambassador described The Rape of Nanking?" How do you think the international community would respond if high officials in the German government asserted that the Shoah never happened at all? Much is made of the ongoing Iranian nuclear program, but one would have to go back several centuries to find an example of Persian foreign aggression. As everyone in Asia will not hestitate to remind you, this is not the case with Japan. And they can develop a far more effective nuclear program in months, as opposed to the years that Iran is expected to take. Further, it isn't unreasonable to suggest that if one doesn't admit responsibility for past bad deeds that future ones might be just around the corner. That is why Iris Chang was important. She was important because the continuing actions of the Japanese government made her important.  That important work cost Iris Chang dearly. Her husband believes that her research into the harrowing events of Nanking and the Bataan Death March ( the subject of what was to be her fourth book) was directly responsible for the nervous breakdown she suffered in Louisville, Kentucky in the spring of 2004. On November 9, 2004 Iris Chang parked her car on a road outside of Los Gatos, California, put a revolver in her mouth, and pulled the trigger. She was 36 years old and left behind her loving husband, Bretton Douglas, and two-year-old son, Christopher. On the same day that she was buried in Los Altos, a memorial service was held for her at the Victims' Memorial Hall in Nanjing, China. The following year, a wing of that museum was renamed in her honor - befitting someone who might have been the final victim of the Rape of Nanking. On Sunday night, the Toronto chapter of ALPHA held a dinner not far from my home. The banquet was held to raise money to finish a documentary, The Ray of Hope ... Iris Chang. ALPHA has already raised a million dollars for the film, which is scheduled to be released next November - the tenth anniversary of Chang's book and the 70th anniversary of the Rape of Nanking itself. The Ray of Hope is to be followed by a dramatization of The Rape of Nanking, set to be produced by Chinese, British and American filmakers. The mission started by Iris Chang and the good people at ALPHA will likely continue well into the future. Monsterous crimes that were hidden for far too long will stay in the public eye for some time to come.  I thought long and hard before publishing the black and white photographs in this essay. I resisted using them for literally years for fear that they would be seen for nothing but shock value. I know that some of you think that pornography is pictures of naked girls, but those images are the yardstick I measure pornography by. They are the most obscene things I've ever seen. Those pictures were not taken by war crimes investigators after the fact. They were taken by the Japanese soldiers who committed the atrocities they depict. They were proud of what they were doing, so much so that they wanted to record it for their families and friends back home. Those images should be shocking, not so much for what they depict as for what they represent - an entire nation glorying in their own depravity. To witness an entire civilization wallowing in their own moral filth is a shocking and deeply depressing experience. You should be shocked by theese pictures. You should be disgusted that the was an opportunity for them to be taken at all. Every time we are presented with a new atrocity, humanity collectively cries "never again!" But the outrage seems to fade even more quickly than the memories do. And, in the case of the plight of the people of Nanking, they were never widely known in the West at all. That is what the life and work of Iris Chang were all about. Remembering her goes a long way in remembering those awful six weeks in China and the people who were - and remain - responsible for it.  I don't often use this space to bring charities to your attention, but if you feel as strongly about this as I do, you can take a look at the Toronto chapter of ALPHA which can receive donations on their website or at the following address; 78 St. Patrick St. #134 Toronto , ON
M5T 3K8
Canada Iris Chang's alma mater, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has established The Iris Chang Scholarship Fund to which you may contribute by mailing University of Illinois Foundation
Attn.: Jeff Roley
1305 West Green Street
Urbana, IL 61801-2962
Make checks payable to: University of Illinois Foundation In the memo field: Iris Chang Scholarship Fund.
Perhaps the best way to honor her work is to help someone with her talent, dedication and passion with their education. If this stupid blog can help the University of Illinois produce someone as great as Iris Chang, I will do everything in my power to do so. I'll do this because I love to read far more than I love to write.UPDATE: Please read this and this regarding Prime Minister Abe's views on the Second World World War. You can also read a touching eulogy of Iris Chang here. If her loss doesn't touch you, it should. Permalink Labels: The Serious Side of skippy
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