Iris Chang - Author.

The vast war crimes committed during the 20th century remain its greatest mystery, a moral and psychological black hole that swallows all pity and remorse, and leaves behind a void that will haunt the next millennium. I shuddered over each page of this heart-rending book, but strongly urge everyone to read it. Meticulously researched and written in a tone of barely contained anger, it serves as a warning to those who believe that Belsen and the Burma-Siam railway could never happen again.

How could Japan and Germany, two of the most advanced nations on our planet, have unleashed wars of ferocious barbarity against their neighbours, murdering millions of civilians in the most cruel and savage way? How could these same peoples, only a few years later, sharing the same airliners with us and strolling around the same museums, seem virtually indistinguishable from ourselves, as kindly and generous to strangers?

Genocide, for Europeans and Americans, is almost a German monopoly, but Iris Chang points out that mass murder was carried out systematically by the Japanese invaders of China long before the first gas chambers were built at Auschwitz. During the Sino-Japanese war, from 1937 to 1945, the Japanese army killed at least 10m Chinese civilians. Yet few of those responsible, from foot soldiers to general staff, were ever punished or showed the slightest regret. Chang brings together a huge body of eye-witness accounts, war crimes testimonies and personal reminiscences which have appeared in scattered form throughout the past 50 years.

In August 1937, Japanese forces invaded China, swiftly seizing the main coastal cities. For three months fierce fighting raged around Shanghai, and my own family, who lived outside the British-run International Settlement, left for the French Concession, a safe haven from the fighting, when shells from rival Chinese and Japanese artillery guns began to fly over our roof. Tens of thousands of Chinese civilians were killed in the fighting, as we saw when we later drove out to the silent battlefields.

I remember the procession of chauffeur-driven Packards and Buicks that stopped near a devastated village, and the hundreds of dead Chinese lying by the roadside and in the abandoned paddy fields. Wearing their silk dresses, my mother and the other wives stepped with their husbands among the bright cartridge cases, a sight that even at the age of seven struck me as bizarre.

That November, after laying waste to the Yangtze plain, the Japanese armies launched their attack on Nanking, then the capital of China. When the city fell on December 13, the triumphant Japanese soldiers unleashed an orgy of murder, rape and torture that lasted for six weeks and killed more than 300,000 Chinese civilians, shocking even the German Nazi party members who were resident in the city.

The 90,000 Chinese soldiers who surrendered were quickly rounded up, roped together and moved to improvised killing grounds outside the city, where they were shot, beheaded, used for human bayonet practice or soaked with petrol and burnt alive. Mounds of Chinese corpses formed huge dykes along the Yangtze. All this was photographed by Japanese reporters, and one newspaper ran an illustrated article about the friendly rivalry between two officers under the heading "Contest to kill first 100 Chinese by beheading".

Once all military opposition was out of the way, the Japanese soldiers turned on the city's civilians. For the next six weeks they moved from house to house, bayonetting the men and raping the women, from girls as young as eight to grandmothers in their seventies. After they were raped most were killed. One former soldier, Azuma Shiro, recently testified: "We always stabbed and killed them . . . When we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman, but when we killed her we thought of her as something like a pig."

Sadistic torments were devised, involving live burials, castrations, disembowellings, and the forcing of Chinese parents to have sex with their children before they were killed. Mutilated corpses rotted in the streets. Amazingly, much of this was documented in photographs, many of which are reproduced in Chang's horrific account. If these chilling images, a true pornography of death, help to sell this book they will have served their purpose.

A few of the new recruits to this orgy of killing were shaken by what they saw, but they soon became desensitised and willingly joined in. An officer named Tominaga was stunned when he first met the men under his command. "They had evil eyes. They weren't human eyes, but the eyes of leopards or tigers." He quickly turned into a killing machine, using emaciated Chinese prisoners for beheading and bayonet practice, and noticed that his men's eyes no longer seemed evil. He said: "Everyone became a demon within three months."

A Japanese veteran from Nanking, Dr Nagatomi, is one of the few to express remorse. "I beheaded people, starved them to death, burned them, buried them alive, over 200 in all . . . There are really no words to describe what I was doing. I was truly a devil."

But why did he become a sadistic murderer, and why did hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers turn into a horde of conscienceless killers? Chang, an American historian whose parents narrowly escaped death in Nanking (they fled to Taiwan and then became academics in America), blames the brutalities of the Japanese army and the long-standing racial hatred of the Chinese, seen as an inferior people little better than animals. When we try to make sense of Nazi crimes, we blame a small group of political gangsters (Hitler and the Nuremberg defendants) and their SS murder squads, together driven by deeply psychopathic racial hatreds. But historians have confirmed what many people suspected, that millions of Germans in army and police regiments were involved in the mass murder of civilians.

Were they all psychopaths? I suspect that none, or few, of them were. During the long Japanese occupation of Shanghai we witnessed countless atrocities against Chinese civilians. After the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, my family and I, along with other Allied nationals, had been interned in Lunghua camp near Shanghai. In August 1945, a few days after the war had officially ended, I was walking from the camp and came across a unit of Japanese soldiers at a wayside railway station. One of them, who was slowly strangling a Chinese youth with telephone wire, shouted at me. He had noticed my transparent celluloid belt, which I had wheedled from an American sailor. A long haggle went on, which ended with me unbuckling my precious belt. I remember the soldier's intense pleasure in his new possession as he went back to killing the Chinese, and my own deep sense of loss.

Was he a psychopath? I seriously doubt it. The real horror of this century's war crimes is that they were carried out by ordinary human beings, farmers and factory workers and office clerks, who returned to their jobs and brought up their children. Faced with a threat to themselves, human beings become cruel and dangerous, and the murder and torture of enemy civilians is an unhappy part of their natural behaviour, only restrained by the prevailing moral codes, the political leadership and the officers in charge. When rulers and generals urge on racial war, ordinary soldiers become their core selves, as vicious as the chimpanzee raiding parties who work themselves up with blood-curdling screams and tear the enemy limb from limb. I hope that the Japanese soldier at the railway station went on to become the remorseful Dr Nagatomi.

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J. G. Ballard is the author of the autobiographical EMPIRE OF THE SUN, later adapted into a film by Steven Spielberg. He also wrote CRASH, which became a controversial movie starring Holly Hunter and James Spader.