The Rape of Nanking, by Iris Chang, was an important book of history published in 1997, around the 60th anniversary of the massacre it describes. The book caused a great deal of controversy, some of it academic, some of it in the common press. The objections have been discussed above, and on the whole, I think that many of them are not too material to the book. Of course Iris Chang is biased. It is impossible to be objective about genocide. Of course estimates of people killed in wars and genocides are going to be inaccurate. I think that anyone who is not a holocaust denier will have to agree that the evidence is that the Japanese practiced systematic murder and degradation of the Chinese populace. Allowing this fact, the numbers game doesn't really matter to the book.
The European holocaust, along with the rest of World War II, has been researched and written about on many levels. The historical record of nazi barbarities has been told many times, and many social scientists, psychologists and philosophers have produced many volumes trying to make sense of it all. Iris Chang's book is neither an exhaustive academic record, nor a philosophical work. What she has done is produced a very short, very understandable primer to the basic events of the massacre: the rise of Japanese militarism, the invasion of China and Nanjing itself, the killings and rapings, the efforts of those in safety zone to save people, the occupation of the city, and the long post-war controversy surrounding Japan's inability to come to terms with its past. In 225 pages, Miss Chang covers all of the important points someone may need to know about the Rape of Nanking. In this, she succeeds in her goal:
This book started out as an attempt to rescue those victims from more degradation by Japanese revisionists and to provide my own epitaph for the hundred upon thousands of unmarked graves in Nanking
What was missing for this book for me, but which may be impossible to answer, is what it all means, how the Japanese were melted into such sadistic killers. Iris Chang, for all her writing skills, is not a Hannah Arendt. She writes that the book became "a personal exploration into the darker side of human nature"; a task that perhaps led to her suicide in 2004. What I don't find in the book is any insight into the darkness of human nature, any new theories or explanations of what can lead young people into such barbarity. But perhaps that is a question we will not have an answer for any time soon.