The Rape of Nanking

Initially, the United States plans to forbid Japanese political and military leaders to continue serving in government, in the same way former Nazis are banned from holding office in postwar Germany. That strategy changes with Chiang Kai-shek’s loss to Mao Zedong’s Communist Party in 1949 and the outbreak of a proxy war between North and South Korea in 1950. As the geopolitics of the nascent Cold War era take hold, the United States allows Japan to maintain continuity in its political leadership so that it might offer a more stable and effective counterbalance to communism in East Asia.

Meanwhile, Japanese veterans who participate in the slaughter at Nanking receive full pension benefits, while the survivors of the massacre face poverty and despair. With China isolated from the rest of the world under Mao’s regime, there is nobody to share the Nanking survivors’ stories. To demonize its current enemies, postwar China itself rewrites the history of the conflict by naming the United States as a collaborator in the Nanking massacre.

In 1995 the author travels to Nanking and becomes one of the first people to collect video testimonies from the massacre’s survivors. Many of them suffer lingering physical ailments from the Rape of Nanking that diminishes their ability to make a living, to say nothing of their psychological scars.