The Rape of Nanking

As you heard in lecture, our present author, Endo Shusaku, was the first major novelist in Japan to confront the wartime atrocities. His novel The Sea and the Poison is based on the vivisection of captured American airmen in World War II. This question is addressed in Silence where it is fictionally re-written into the Edo period: Endo's novels insist that his Japanese readers address the war crimes issue directly.

The issue reached Vancouver this year: in May hundreds of protesters marched to the Japanese consulate to, unsuccessfully, present a petition urging that the Japanese government stop the revision of school textbooks to eliminate mention of the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

Johns Hopkins magazine has a detailed article on Iris Chang and her study into The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II (BasicBooks / HarperCollins, 1997) here.

Terribly, Chang killed herself in 2004, only 36 years of age, after suffering depression, seemingly brought on by her perpetual research into Japanese wartime atrocities: she left unfinished at her death a study into the Bataan death march.

A (grisly) slideshow is available here.