Iris Chang - Author.

As the author of THE RAPE OF NANKING, I must respond to Charles Burress's July 26th article, "Wars of Memory," which describes the controversy my book has provoked in Japan. The often rabid criticism of my book among Japanese conservatives is certainly a proper subject for a press report, but Mr. Burress does a disservice to your readers by failing to explain the context of the criticism and by giving blind credence to charges made by Japanese revisionists. One disturbing tendency in his article is to quote right-wing Japanese critics without demanding evidence to back up their allegations. I will cite three instances of this tendency. (1) He writes that Ikuhiko Hata of Nihon University argued that eleven of the photographs in my book are fakes or misrepresentations. But not once in his article does Burress cite any evidence offered by Hata to support the charge or to describe how any of these pictures were artificially altered. Instead, Burress focuses on the caption under one photograph in my book, and uses what he claims is misleading in this one caption to support Hata's blanket charge of doctored photographs. (I discuss the caption below.) Burress also failed to tell readers that Hata is not regarded as a serious scholar in Japan or the United States, very much because he is a regular contributor to ultra right-wing Japanese publications like Bungei Shunju. To provide a sense of the extreme nature of the views found in these publications (something Burress should have done when airing Hata's charges against me) the Bungei Shunju recently published an article that accused me, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Rupert Murdoch of being part of a gigantic conspiracy of the Chinese Communist party. Also, Marco Polo magazine -- formerly a Bungei Shunju publication before it was forced to shut down -- published as serious history an article from a Holocaust denier claiming that no gas chambers were used to kill Jews in Germany. (2) Burress mentioned that a group of conservative Japanese professors held a press conference in June to attack my book as "grossly exaggerated and containing fake photographs." But here is reportage sleight of hand. To encourage credulity among readers only marginally familiar with the issues, Mr. Burress quotes only the most constrained language of his sources. Left out of his article is that some of these academics told reporters that the Japanese army not only refrained from committing any massacre but were applauded for their kindness and good manners. Dokkyo University professor Akira Nakamura even insisted that it was the Chinese army that raped and murdered Chinese civilians before they retreated from the area and that the Japanese were "massacred unilaterally" by the Chinese up to that point. (Burress cannot claim to be ignorant about these statements, which would have greatly undermined the credibility of these critics with any sensible Chronicle reader, because he faxed me the original 22-page press release distributed during the press conference. I am enclosing a copy of this press release with this letter.) (3) Burress also tells his readers that the Japanese ambassador to the United States called my book inaccurate and one-sided without mentioning that when grilled by reporters the ambassador failed to come up with one solid example of a historical inaccuracy in my book. He also neglects to mention that the ambassador's statements provoked immediate protests not only from Chinese officials but from Chinese American organizations, my publisher and the Simon Wisenthal Center. (In a letter to ambassador Kunihiko Saito, Rabbi Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized him for failing to come up with any specific details to back up his serious allegations. He also wrote: "Mr. Ambassador, this is a unique time in history when people and nations across the globe are finally taking stock of errors, misdeeds, and crimes against humanity during the World War II era. Indeed, I recently met in Tokyo with a group of repentant Japanese war criminals who publicly recounted their grisly crimes against innocent people which they carried out in the name of their emperor and nation. It is a sad state of affairs that the Japanese government lacks the vision and commitment to do the same.") The criticism of my book offered by Burress himself is also demonstrably false. Here are two serious mistakes: (1) On the first column of the second page of the article, Burress writes: "She calls her book the first in English to document the Nanjing tragedy (although one critic says that distinction belongs to "What War Means," an account published in 1938 by H. J. Timperley, a British reporter for the Manchester Guardian.)" This is certainly not true. On page 10 of THE RAPE OF NANKING, I clearly mention that THE RAPE OF NANKING: AN UNDENIABLE HISTORY IN PICTURES by Shi Young and James Yin was published in 1996, a year before my own book was published. My book also mentions other works that have devoted chapters to documenting the Nanjing tragedy, such as George Fitch's MY EIGHTY YEARS IN CHINA and Hsu Shuhsi's DOCUMENTS OF THE NANKING SAFETY ZONE. On the book jacket, the editors at Basic Books wrote the following: "Iris Chang, whose own grandparents barely escaped the massacre, has written what will surely be the definitive, English-language history of this horrifying episode..." Definitive, not first. Surely not a claim that my book is the first English-language history of the Nanking massacre. William Kirby, chairman of the history department at Harvard University, wrote in his foreword to my book: "This is the terrible story that Iris Chang tells so powerfully in this first, full study in English of Nanking's tragedy." Again, "the first, full study," not as Burress charges, "the first in English to document " Careless reading has led Mr. Burress to his careless reporting. I defy him to find one sentence in my book that specifically quotes me as saying that I have written the very first book in English that documents the Nanjing atrocity. (2) In the second column of the second page of the article, Burress writes "Other mistakes occur in Chang's book, which quotes as 'compelling evidence' a secret telegram by Japan's foreign minister admitting that Japanese troops, 'in a fashion reminscient of Attila and his Huns,' had slaughtered 'not less than 300,000 Chinese civilians.' This was, in fact, a quotation from the cable of a British reporter, and concerned deaths not only in Nanjing but elsewhere." Once again, the mistake is Burress's. On January 17, 1938, Foreign Minister Koki Hirota in Tokyo relayed the following message to his contacts in Washington, DC, a message that American intelligence intercepted, deciphered, and later translated into English on February 1, 1938: "Since returning (to) Shanghai a few days ago I investigated reported atrocities committed by Japanese army in Nanking and elsewhere. Verbal accounts (of) reliable eye-witnesses and letters from individuals whose credibility (is) beyond question afford convincing proof (that) Japanese Army behaved and (is) continuing to behave in (a) fashion reminiscent (of) Attila (and) his Huns. (Not) less than three hundred thousand Chinese civilians slaughtered, many cases (in) cold blood." While true that Manchester Guardian correspondent H.J. Timperley originally wrote a report, which was stopped by Japanese censors in Shanghai (this is discussed in the paperback edition of THE RAPE OF NANKING), his estimate of 300,000 deaths found its way into the message sent by Japanese Foreign Minister Hirota Koki to Washington, DC, which, in turn, was intercepted and decoded by the Americans. The significance of this piece of Japanese evidence is not that the Japanese were the first to report the enormity of the massacre but that the Japanese government knew about the 300,000 figure given by Timperley, and included it in government communiques. I continue to stand by my assertion that it represents a compelling piece of evidence that this was not something that occurred among low-level soldiers without the knowledge or complicity of Japanese higher-ups. Finally, I must discuss the photograph of the villagers that the Chronicle enlarged and printed on page four. Burress claims that my use of this photograph is an error because - as Hata points out - this photograph was taken not in Nanking during the massacre, but shortly before the Nanking massacre, in a village occupied by Japanese troops. Nowhere in the caption do I state when and where the picture was taken. My book reports on much of the horror of the Japanese invasion of China, as context for the Nanjing Massacre. In my book, the caption under the photo reads, "The Japanese rounded up thousands of women. Most were gang-raped or forced into military prostitution." Those two statements are indisputable facts. But there is an even more bizarre claim by Burress regarding this one photo. He claims that two villagers in the photograph are smiling, though how he can tell a smile from a grimace in a sixty-year-old photo escapes me. None of those many people who saw the photographs have noted any villagers smiling. It isn't obvious to me, it isn't obvious to the editors at Basic Books or Viking Penguin, and I doubt it is obvious to anyone who reads the San Francisco Chronicle. But even if a smile is suspected, it does not erase the fact that the Japanese committed endless atrocities against Chinese men, women and children in occupied territory. A common tactic of Holocaust deniers is to pick at one small piece of evidence to draw attention away from scope and magnitude of the genocide. But a photograph of a Jewish child smiling as he gets off a train and heads for a concentration camp is not proof that the Holocaust didn't happen, but only of the irrepressible optimism of human nature. Nor is it proof that the child was happy and smiling a month later, when no cameras were around. Burress's nitpick here is also reminiscent of a dreadful time in our own history, and of those apologists for slavery who argued it could not have been that bad because the slaves were often seen singing. The Japanese, like the Nazis, relied on deception to make mass executions and mass rapes more manageable. The hapless Chinese men, women and children rounded up by the Japanese were usually kept ignorant about their fate until it was too late to escape. In Nanking, women were guided to "marketplaces" to buy ducks and chicken, only to find platoons of soldiers waiting to rape them. Men were assured of food, shelter and safety by Japanese soldiers, only to be lured to remote areas and used for bayonet practice or decapitation contests. Whether a woman or two is smiling as they are escorted across the countryside by Japanese soldiers is really a non-issue. What matters is how these women were treated once they reached their destination. Burress's sloppy reporting cannot rehabilitate those right-wing Japanese militants who still refuse to acknowledge the atrocities committed by the Japanese Imperial Army against their subjugated nations. Instead, it tarnishes the fine reputation of the San Francisco Chronicle. Yours truly, Iris Chang