Iris Chang - Author.

What happened just 60 years ago this month in the city of Nanjing (then called Nanking), China, is almost beyond words. During the two months after their entry into the Nationalist capital on Dec. 13, 1937, Japanese troops perpetrated a massacre that has virtually no parallel in recent history. Expert witnesses at the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, held in Tokyo in 1946 to try Japanese war criminals, estimated that some 260,000 noncombatants were slaughtered in cold blood. Many experts now believe the number to be over 350,000, an extraordinary figure for a city with a population of only 650,000, several hundred thousand of whom had already fled. The carnage was the result of a secret order sent to Japanese forces in China under the seal of Prince Asaka, uncle of Emperor Hirohito: ''Kill all captives.'' Soon competitions arose among soldiers to see who could kill most efficiently.

After being coaxed into surrendering with promises of fair treatment, prisoners were shot, blown up with hand grenades, bayoneted or decapitated. ''The Japanese soldiers already encircled them in a crescent formation along the river,'' Cpl. Riichi Kurihara wrote in his diary. ''Suddenly all kinds of guns fired at once. The sounds of these firearms mingled with desperate yelling and screams.''

A Japanese newspaper reporter watched Chinese prisoners being bayoneted on top of the city wall. ''One by one the prisoners fell down to the outside of the wall,'' he wrote. ''Blood splattered everywhere. The chilling atmosphere made one's hair stand on end and limbs tremble with fear.''

And then there were the samurai-style decapitations. ''Those in the second row were forced to dump the severed bodies into the river before they themselves were beheaded,'' the military correspondent, Yukio Omata, wrote of one mass execution. ''The killing went on nonstop from morning until night, but they were only able to kill 2,000 persons in this way. The next day, tired of killing in this fashion, they set up machine guns. . . . Prisoners fled into the water, but no one was able to make it to the other shore.'' So great was the slaughter that Lieut. Gen. Kesago Nakajima was soon complaining in his diary that it was difficult to find ditches deep enough to bury the enormous piles of corpses.

During the same period, tens of thousands of Chinese women were raped, often in schools and nunneries. Thousands more were put into sexual slavery. In fact, Japan's first wartime ''facility for sexual comfort'' opened in Nanjing in 1938, with Chinese women forced into prostitution referred to in Japanese as ''public toilets.''

Neither young nor old could escape being raped. ''We sent out coal trucks from Hsiakwan to the city streets and villages to seize a lot of women. And then each of them was allocated to 15 or 20 soldiers for sexual intercourse and abuse,'' one soldier in the 114th Division in Nanjing recalled.

In her important new book, ''The Rape of Nanking,'' Iris Chang, whose own grandparents were survivors, recounts the grisly massacre with understandable outrage. So dehumanized did Chinese become in the eyes of the Japanese troops, she tells us, that ''many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls. Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs and the roasting of people become routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them torn apart by German shepherds. So sickening was the spectacle that even Nazis in the city were horrified.''

One of the most inspiring if unusual aspects of the massacre was the presence of John Rabe, an Oscar Schindler-like Nazi businessman who along with a number of other unsung foreign educators and missionaries not only stayed in the beleaguered city through the worst of the bloodshed, but helped set up an ''International Safety Zone'' to minister to wounded, homeless and starving Chinese and to protect those being preyed upon by Japanese soldiers.

Rabe, a bald, bespectacled and mild-mannered German, worked for the Siemens China Company and kept a diary that Chang, the author of a book about the Chinese missile industry, ''Thread of the Silkworm,'' unearthed while researching ''The Rape of Nanking.'' Rabe wrote: ''I want to make sure with my own eyes about this cruelty, so I can someday tell others about it as a witness.'' The day Japanese troops entered the city, he described the scene as one he would have ''scarcely believed if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes.''

With his swastika armband as his only protection, Rabe began making regular patrols of the city in an attempt to protect Chinese from Japanese predations. But perhaps his most important effort was his work in setting up the safety zone, a special area into which a quarter of a million desperate Chinese ultimately fled and were watched over by a small handful of heroic Westerners. As one of Rabe's Nanjing colleagues, the Harvard-trained surgeon Robert O. Wilson, wrote of Rabe, ''What a splendid man he is and what tremendous heart he has.'' However, Wilson hastily added, ''It is hard to reconcile his personality with his adulation for Der Fuhrer.'' Nonetheless, for his heroic efforts, Rabe earned the name ''the living Buddha of Nanking.''

Until recently, scant attention was paid to the Nanjing Massacre. Then a spate of books reminding the world of this almost unbearably savage episode began to appear. In 1995, the novelist R. C. Binstock published ''Tree of Heaven,'' a spare but beautifully written piece of fiction exploring the complex relationship between a Japanese soldier and a Chinese woman whom he both protects and sexually exploits. An expanded second edition of Shi Young and James Yin's ''Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs'' (Triumph Books, $75) -- a large-format book filled with photographs of beheadings, bayonetings, rapes and mass executions, many taken by Japanese soldiers and then surreptitiously copied and hidden by a Chinese employee of a local photo shop -- was published last month. To thumb through this volume is an almost unbearable experience and helps one understand continuing Chinese sensitivity to even the semblance of foreign domination. And because of Chang's book, Rabe's 1,200-page diary is now being published in Japanese, German and Chinese.

These books raise several troubling questions: How could such mass barbarity have remained so neglected by historians for so long? Why have the Chinese never asked Japan for reparations? How could the Japanese Army have engaged in such a monstrous and protracted crime against humanity with so little evident awareness of the moral significance of what it was doing? (Indeed, if photographs in these books of smiling soldiers standing over their victims are any indication, many Japanese seemed to enjoy the savagery of what the Chinese call ''the three defoliations'': ''Kill all, loot all and burn all.'')

The West's failure to focus on the Nanjing Massacre is perhaps explained by the advent of the cold war, when our alliance with Japan was forged alongside a growing hostility toward China as Mao seized power and the Korean War erupted. China's reluctance to press claims against Tokyo has had much to do with the Chinese Communist Party's eagerness to win diplomatic recognition from Tokyo (this year is the 25th anniversary of Chinese-Japanese diplomatic ties) and then to enjoy aid and trade advantages from Japan. But the reluctance of Japanese to fully and officially acknowledge the crimes their army committed in what they often refer to now simply as ''that war'' is a far more complex issue. Japanese avoidance makes a fascinating counterpoint to the experience of Germans coming to terms with the Holocaust.

''When it comes to expressing remorse for its own wartime actions before the bar of world opinion, Japan remains to this day a renegade nation,'' Chang writes. ''The Japanese managed to avoid the moral judgment of the civilized world that the Germans were made to accept for their actions in this nightmare time.''

Although starting in the early 1990's tentative apologies did begin to be proffered, Japanese leaders have not made the kinds of unalloyed gestures of contrition that Willy Brandt did early on, falling to his knees in the Warsaw Ghetto to apologize for Germany's crimes. Indeed, right-wing political leaders like Shigeto Nagano, a former Minister of Justice, and Shintaro Ishihara, a former cabinet minister, who yearn to find an unbroken vessel for Japanese national pride and honor, remain in almost complete denial, calling Japanese atrocities ''a lie'' made up by Chinese ''to tarnish the image of Japan.'' Such sentiment caused the Japanese distributor of ''The Last Emperor'' to edit out the documentary footage of the Nanjing Massacre that Bernardo Bertolucci had pointedly put into his film.

The impulse behind denials like these is not obscure. ''The person who has inflicted the wound pushes the memory down deep, to be rid of it, to alleviate the feeling of guilt,'' Primo Levi wrote in ''The Drowned and the Saved,'' a book that recounts his Holocaust experience. ''The best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry, to extend a cordon sanitaire. It is easier to deny entry to a memory than free oneself from it after it has been recorded.''

But, of course, suppressing memory denies the perpetrator and victim alike the ability to ''bear witness,'' something that in Europe has been viewed as fundamental in the process of ''dealing with'' the collective trauma of the Holocaust. What is bitterly ironic is that not only have ordinary Chinese been denied the catharsis of heartfelt apology and the benefits of reparations from Japan, but they continue to be denied, by their own Government, the right to protest publicly against Japan. Chinese Communist Party leaders are fearful of the political implications of such popular protest (especially when connected to such intense emotions) and of damaging economic aid and trade relations with Tokyo through such an overt expression of anti-Japanese sentiment. So Chinese seeking to come to terms with the Nanjing Massacre find themselves in a double jeopardy. They confront not only Japan's reluctance to face up to its past but their own leadership's disinclination to let them fully express their sense of long-repressed grievance. This is perhaps not surprising given the party's history of savaging its own people. While the horrors that Japan visited on China certainly qualify them as a world-class holocaust, they pale in terms of the number of people who actually perished because of the party's own misguided policies. It is this unspoken awareness of its own complicity in abuse, and its continuing unwillingness to ''reverse the verdicts'' on politically repressive ''movements'' from the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Great Leap Forward to Democracy Wall and the June 4th Massacre, that now makes the party less than a forceful advocate for bearing witness to Japan's crimes in Nanjing and elsewhere.

Jews have made it impossible for Germany to dodge the consequences of National Socialism. In his book ''The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan,'' Ian Buruma describes the German obsession for ''memory'' as being ''like a massive tongue seeking out, over and over, a sore tooth.'' But neither Tokyo nor Beijing has been possessed of a similar urge to remember and thus has never really been forced to come to terms with the respective insults against humanity. Indeed, when littered with so many corpses and so much suffering, the past can be a terrible burden from which, as Levi has written, it is a temptation for leaders just to ''weigh anchor, move off, momentarily or forever, from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality.''

Since the dead will never regain life, the more important question involved in ''weighing anchor'' and forgetting the past is the price paid by the living for such historical amnesia. Does it matter that witness is never borne, that historical verdicts are never accurately rendered and that latent guilt is never allowed to be cut by the solvent of repentance? Most Westerners, and certainly most Jews, believe that it does matter, that memory not only lies at the root of consciousness but is the only antidote -- Levi called it an ''immunizational defense'' -- against repetitions of such barbarity. As Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu writes in an introduction to the Young and Yin photography book, ''We can only forgive what we know.''

Perhaps societies steeped in so-called Asian values react to such evasions of recognition and repression of memory in ways that Levi would never have understood. In writing about Confucian-based ''shame'' cultures and Christian-based ''guilt'' cultures, Ruth Benedict suggests in her classic World War II book, ''The Chrysanthemum and the Sword,'' that a Japanese ''does not experience relief when he makes his fault public even to a confessor. So long as his bad behavior does not 'get out into the world' he need not be troubled and confession appears to him merely a way of courting trouble.'' Perhaps.

But now that the story of the Nanjing Massacre has started to ''get out,'' how will the Japanese deal with their shame or loss of face, if not their guilt? What form might repentance take? This is the crucial question that Chang's disturbing book raises, but cannot, of course, answer.

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Orville Schell is dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and a longtime observer of Asia.