I read this book in 1999 and was surprised to find that it was not on my GR list. I was not writing detailed reviews at the time so my single paragraph will have to suffice, but I did take down a few significant passages from the book, and pasted those at the bottom.

This book tells of the Japanese destruction, truly a "rape" of Nanking in December 1937. It is estimated that up to 350,000 people were murdered within a few weeks, many horribly. The Japanese have never acknowledged this atrocity, and in fact many of those involved remained in influential government positions. Because of cold war politics, most of the perpetrators of this were spared punishment.

The book was detailed and chilling. I have not yet seen the documentary, which is supposed to be excellent. It is on my Netflix queue.

While Japan is capable of greatness, too often their intensity and creativity have been put to dark purposes. Nanking was one instance. A recent news item about how Japan is doing its utmost to hang on to its xenophobia - http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/wor...

Book quotes:

p 217
Some Japanese scholars believe that the horrors of the Rape of Nanking and other outrages of the Sino-Japanese war were caused by a phenomenon called the "transfer of oppression." According to Tanaka Yuki, author of Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, the modern Japanese Army had great potential for brutality from the moment of its creation for two reasons: the arbitrary and cruel treatment that the military inflicted on its own officers and soldiers, and the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, in which status was dictated by proximity to the Emperor. Before the invasion of Nanking, the Japanese military had subjected its own soldiers to endless humiliation. Japanese soldiers were forced to wash the underwear of officers or stand meekly while superiors slapped them until they streamed blood. Using Orwellian language, the routine striking of Japanese soldiers, or bentatsu, was termed an "act of love" by the officers, and the violent discipline of the Japanese Navy through tekkan sensei, or "the iron fist," was often called ai-no-muchi, or "whip of love."

It has often been suggested that those with the least power are often the most sadistic if given the power of life and death over people even lower on the pecking order, and the rage engendered by this rigid pecking order was suddenly given an outlet when Japanese soldiers went abroad. In foreign lands or colonized territories, the Japanese soldiers-representatives of the emperor enjoyed tremendous power among the subjects. In China even the lowliest Japanese private was considered superior to the most powerful and distinguished native, and it is easy to see how years of suppressed anger, hatred and fear of authority could have erupted in uncontrollable violence at Nanking. The Japanese soldier had endured in silence whatever his superiors had chosen to deal out to him, and now the Chinese had to take whatever he chose to deal out to them.

p 219
Whatever the course of postwar history, the Rape of Nanking will stand as a blemish upon the honor of human beings. But what makes the blemish particularly repugnant is that history has never written a proper end for the story. Sixty years later the Japanese as a nation are still trying to bury the victims of Nanking-not under the soil, as in 1937, but into historical oblivion. In a disgraceful compounding of the offense, the story of the Nanking massacre is barely known in the west because so few people have tried to document and narrate it systematically to the public.

p 220
There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is paper thin. There are those who believe that the Japanese are uniquely sinister-a dangerous race of people who will never change. But after reading several file cabinets worth of documents on Japanese war crimes as well as accounts of ancient atrocities from the pantheon of world history, I have to conclude that Japan's behavior during World War II was less a product of dangerous people than of a dangerous government, in a vulnerable culture, in dangerous times, able to sell dangerous rationalizations to those whose human instincts told them otherwise. The Rape of Nanking should be perceived as a cautionary tale - an illustration of how easily human beings can be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures

Another lesson to be gleaned from Nanking is the role of power in genocide. Those who have studied the patterns of large-scale killings throughout history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal - that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible. In the 1990's R. J. Runnel, perhaps the world's greatest authority on democide (a term he coined to include both genocide and government mass murder), completed a systematic and quantitative study of atrocities in both this century and ancient times, an impressive body of research that he summed up with a play on the famous Lord Acton line: "Power kills, and absolute power kills absolutely." The less restraint on power within a government, Rummel found, the more likely the government will act on the whims of psychologically generated darker impulses of its leaders to wage war on foreign governments. Japan was no exception, and atrocities such as the raps of Nanking can be seen as a predictable if not inevitable outgrowth of ceding to an authoritarian regime, dominated by a military and imperial elite, the unchallenged power to commit an entire people to realizing the sick goals of the few with the unbridled power to set them.

And there is a third lesson to be learned, one that is perhaps the most distressing of all. It lies in the frightening ease with which the mind can accept genocide, turning us all into passive spectators to the unthinkable. The Rape of Nanking was front-page news across the world, and yet most of the world stood by and did nothing while an entire city was butchered. The international response to the Nanking atrocities was eerily akin to the more recent response to the atrocities in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda: while thousands have died almost unbelievably cruel deaths, the entire world has watched CNN and wrung its hands. One could argue that the United States and other countries failed to intervene earlier to prevent the Nazis from carrying out their "final solution" because the genocide was carried out in wartime secrecy and with such cold efficiency that until Allied soldiers liberated the camps and saw with their own eyes the extent of the horror, most people could not accept the reports they had been getting as literally true. But for the Rape of Nanking, or for the murders in the former Yugoslavia, there can be no such excuse. The Nanking atrocities were splashed prominently across the pages of newspapers like the New York Times, while the Bosnia outrages were played out daily on televisions in virtually every living room. Apparently some quirk in human nature allows even the most unspeakable acts of evil to become banal within minutes, provided only that they occur far enough away to pose no personal threat.