Iris Chang - Author.

The author of a runaway bestseller on Japan's anti-Chinese wartime atrocities has challenged to a public debate Japanese scholars who say the 1937 "Rape of Nanking" never happened.

"These revisionists are engaged in a second rape of Nanking -- the rape of history," said Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who fears right-wing revision of Japan's past will indelibly influence its youth.

"This is what is at stake here," Chang said in a telephone interview from her Sunnyvale, California home. "They are determined to cleanse Japan's past."

In a pointed attack on Chang's 1997 book, "The Rape of Nanking," six conservative Japanese academics this month rejected accounts that Japanese troops pillaged the southern Chinese city, now known as Nanjing, during World War II.

They even suggested that the Chinese committed widespread and brutal atrocities against their own people before the city fell.

Chang called on them to defend their assertions in a nationally or internationally televised forum, preferably on a US talk or magazine format show.

Accusations that Japan is failing to acknowledge its wartime aggression have been fueled by a small but vocal group of right-wing activists who have sought to discredit Chang's popular book.

It was on The New York Times bestseller list for five months, and the book is flying off shelves in Canada and Taiwan. The book is to be published in Japan and translated into Italian, Czech, German, Korean, Spanish and Chinese.

The scholars rejected estimates that up to 300,000 people died in the 1937 episode, saying they found no evidence of a massacre. Chang invited them to review her voluminous documents and eyewitness accounts of the event.

As the debate has swirled through Tokyo and Beijing, historians and other who track war crimes have been drawn into the controversy. They have found quibbling over the body count especially odious.

"This business of the body count is really a gruesome exercise in historical revisionism. If 100,000, 300,000, or 50,000 were killed, is it morally any different?" asked Harvard University history department chairman William Kirby.

"There really isn't any question that it was a policy of terror and murder," Kirby added. "Anyone who suggests that the Rape of Nanking never happened is in historical Never-Neverland."

Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which tracks Nazi war criminals, likened Japanese revisionists to those who say that accounts of the Nazi Holocaust were fictionalized or exaggerated.

"Japan cannot be trusted as a member of the community of nations until it once and for all, sincerely and genuinely, apologizes for its deeds during World War II -- beginning with Nanking," Cooper said.

The Japanese government has not taken a stand on the matter, though its ambassador in Washington characterized Chang's book as "one-sided," "erroneous," and rife with historical inaccuracies. He offered no examples of alleged misreporting, however.

Reinterpretations of Japan's wartime role are gaining popularity, with some stunning twists.

Akira Nakamura, a professor at Dokkyo University, went so far as to suggest that mutual apologies were in order. Until Nanking, he argued, Japanese nationals had been "massacred unilaterally" by Chinese.

"This is so outrageous I have a hard time believing it was ever uttered," Chang said. "Just exactly where did the Chinese 'unilaterally' massacre the Japanese?"

Nanking was only one episode of brutality during Japan's invasion of China, she said, during which between 19 million and 35 million Chinese were killed.

Cinema is often the last chapter of history for the public, and historians and Nanking eyewitnesses are appalled by Japan's popular film "Pride, an Instant in a Lifetime," which lionizes hanged war criminal General Hideki Tojo.

"That is really disgusting. He wasn't a hero. He was a tyrant," said David Magee, who was 10 years old when his father, a missionary, filmed the atrocities and kept records that the younger Magee later shared with Chang.

"It was horrible, horrible. They're trying to rewrite history," Magee said. "I saw the films of those wounded in the hospital by bayonets, little boys being burned. It was the Japanese, no question."