Customer Reviews

The Alleged "Nanking Massacre": Japan's rebuttal to China's forged claims (English and Japanese Edition)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(40)

 

 

This book is typical of the denial of the evil that was the Japanese regime prior to its destruction by the US in WWII. The sad fact is that Japanese school children have never been taught the true nature of the brutality of the Japanese military, and we now have several new generations who live in ignorance of the truth about Japanese militarism in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

The authors of this book are no different than other propagandists who deny the numerous other holocausts in the last century of the Armenians, the Ukrainians, the Jews, and the horrible atrocities the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese, the Koreans, and anyone that the Japanese army fought such as the Americans, the British, and other native populations in SE Asia.

Having spent more time in Japan than I care to admit, this book is actually a reflection of the knowledge of the majority of the Japanese population about their crimes against humanity during the 30's and 40's, with the exception of those scum of the war who actually committed millions of atrocities and know better, but are too cowardly to come forward and expose books like this to be the lie that they are. At least they are consistent in their shameful approach to life. This is a society in denial of its crimes against humanity, using humans as guinea pigs for the "experiments" as well as their brutality against civilians. Even the German Siemens representative, John Rabe in his diaries, who has been called the Oskar Schindler of China, wrote a first hand account of these atrocities, but the authors of this book ignore the truth. And of course the Japanese critics of his book, "The Good Man of Nanking" are the same ones who favorably review this piece of trash.

The authors of this book should be ashamed, but they are able to write this nonsense because there was no Nuremberg equivalent after the war ended because McArthur kept the military industrial infrastructure intact out of the fear of communist pressures. It would have been like keeping a murderer like Saddam in power to keep the Shiia out of power.

Luckily this fable is very short and can be read in less than a couple hours so only one anti-vomit pill is needed to get through it. The positive reviewers of this book are the same kind of gullible apologists who have no understanding of putting propaganda like this in proper perspective. The spawn of Neville Chamberlain. Just how many pictures do you need of atrocities to understand that this book is pure fiction.? You won't see those pictures in this book, but anyone who has any sense of history can view them. This book is the OJ defense on a grand scale.

This book makes "Mein Kampf" look like an honest discussion of the issues facing Europe after WWI. This is a book written by citizens of a country which should hold its head in shame for centuries to attempt to atone for the sins of their fathers. The sad fact is they are ignorant of them. I read this book and wrote this review on the anniversary of another cowardly attack, on Pearl Harbor, and held off submitting it to see if I had cooled off after reading this book. Sorry, but I only got madder.

As an American of chinese descent and a member of Generation X I was far removed from the horrors of WW2 and the conflicts that shaped the greatest generation. However, I was fortunate in that there were 2 of my family members, an Uncle and a Father that both survived the Sino-Pacific theater of the war who were able to relate their experiences to me. My Uncle was the equivalent of a Chinese Navy Corpsman at the time and my Father was a 15 year old combat irregular who fought against the encroaching Japanese forces and the Communists. He was later conscripted into the mainland Chinese KMT army and fought in the Chinese revolution against the Communists before being forced to retreat to Taiwan after the KMT lost the mainland. He then immigrated to America in the 1960's as an allied war veteran. My father who is now an old retired pensioner still has war wounds that he sustained as a young man in WW2. For years he was vague about how he suffered his injuries, whenever he was asked about it he would only reply that he received it from a tank accident. It wasn't until he was well into his 60's that he became more frank about his terrible experiences in WW2. He would tell me what he saw in the remains of those small Chinese towns after the Japanese Army was eventually pushed out which included slain civilians of all ages shot in fields, raped women, and evidence of torture. All of it was too horrible to comprehend even as a full grown adult and the memories of the past haunted him so much he didn't want to talk about it for over 50 years. I did not learn more about the scale of the massacres until I started doing research on the subject. Until his dying day my uncle refused to talk about the war but we are sure his experiences serving in the Navy against the Japanese was probably something he wanted to forget. Until his dying day he also refused to buy anything linked to the Japanese.

I don't know what to say about this book except that if someone wants to learn the truth there are hundreds of wartime accounts that span over several countries and dozens of ethnicities. If you ask Filipino, Korean, Chinese, Singaporean, Malaysian, English/Dutch civilians, and Burmese people who lived through Japanese occupation and military aggression they will have a similar story. This isn't even taking into account the more popular Allied POW accounts of forced death marches, massacres, and starvation at the hands of Japanese soldiers. The Japanese war atrocities during this era were as prolific as Nazi Germany. It's a shame that the attempt at revisionism has not recieved the amount of condemnation aimed at Neo-Nazi sympathizers and their ilk. This book is a frank and grim reminder that there is real evil that lurks in the present day and it is in the form of historical revisionism. To move forward Japan and its citizens needs to come to terms with its own history and stop whitewashing their history as a nation. As the old saying goes those that ignore history are doomed to repeat it.

As a son of survivors in Singapore/Malaysia who personnally knew of people who were murdered by the Japanese, and who live amongst children and grandchildren of survivors, we all know better. The Nanking massacre was by no means unique amongst the atrocities commited by the Japanese during the war. All the Singaporeans and Malaysians of Chinese descent from the older generation will narrate to you all the horrifying tales of people being herded off to remote locations, forced to dig trenches, and then machine-gunned before being buried secretly. An estimated 40000 Chinese died in Singapore alone due to these massacres. Were these fabricated by the Chinese government also? In case one doesn't know, Singapore (an ex-British colony) is a sovereign state thousands of miles from China. The Japanese conducted the massacres to weed out the resistance groups who have been supporting China during the war against Japanese aggression.

My former mother-in-law was a teen living in Tokyo when the Japanese invaded China in 1937. She showed me a large box of newspaper clippings she had saved during the war. One SERIES of them was from a paper call the "Tokyo Advertiser" or Japan Advertiser" or something like that. They were providing running counts of the beheading contests. The article also explained the rules for this beastly activity.

She told me that then she thought it was thrilling and neat. After all the Chinese, the hated enemy of Japan for more than 2000 years, were not really people. After living through the American occupation and experienced the Americans treatment, she, and the rest of her generation, realized how ghastly the Japanese brutality had been. People reacted generally by trying to lie to themselves. Not my former mother-in-law. She KNEW that people would lie to protect Japanese pride and she became ashamed of her very own people and family.

This book is an absolute lie and I HAVE SEEN THE FIRST HAND CONTEMPORARY ACCOUNTS FROM THE JAPANESE CONFIRMING THE HORRIFIC MASSACRE WITH MY OWN EYES.

The authors of this book are promoters of hate. The publisher should withdraw this book of evil lies.

To understand the claustrophobic environment in Japan that has given rise to this book: bear in mind that the Japanese company Kashiwashobo had originally planned to publish Chinese-American journalist Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking" in Japan. Chang's book recounts the atrocities the Japanese Army committed during its occupation of Nanking in 1937. The book has received widespread critical acclaim, except from Holocaust deniers and their ilk, who place The Rape of Nanking in quotation marks, and insist it never happened. In 1999, Kashiwashobo announced it had canceled plans to publish the book. Chang's American publisher issued a statement saying that it could not reach agreement with Kashiwashobo on text and photographs the Japanese company was insisting had to be cut from the original. Chang refused, saying the requested bowdlerization was the result of pressure on Kashiwashobo from ultranationalist groups in Japan.

In a 1999 interview with salon.com, Chang noted: "Japanese extremists have used lawsuits, death threats and even physical intimidation to silence their opponents. Just this year, a fanatic with a baseball bat trashed the offices of a Japanese publisher who printed the diary of a Japanese veteran of the Nanking massacre. Also, when a Chinese feature film on the Rape of Nanking was shown in Japanese theaters a few months ago, right-wingers harassed theater owners, slashed up movie screens with knives and even smashed a loudspeaker truck through theater gates. In Germany, Holocaust deniers have no significant voice, and they remain on the fringes of society. But in Japan, those who deny the existence of the Nanking massacre often occupy leading positions in government, business and academia. For instance, I find it extremely disturbing that the newly elected governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, is an outspoken revisionist of World War II history. He told Playboy magazine back in 1990 that the Rape of Nanking was a "lie" and "a story made up by the Chinese." He's enormously popular in Japan, and he won the election by a landslide. Last summer, Kunihiko Saito, the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., made headlines when he attacked my book as "inaccurate" and "one-sided" -- though he couldn't come up with one good example to support his allegations, even when grilled by reporters. People were pretty shocked by his comments, because they were made not by some notorious ultranationalist fanatic but by a major Japanese government official -- indeed, the top official representative of the Japanese government in the U.S. And many people spoke up and criticized him for it. The People's Republic of China, my American publisher (Basic Books) and human rights groups like the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia all wrote letters protesting the ambassador's statements."

So in Japan, people don't get to read Chang's dangerous words. Instead, we in the West are treated to this sort of poisonous historical denial. You can see from some of the reviews below that some gullible people are ready to buy into it, or at least to say that accounts of the Rape need to be "balanced."

From their front cover, where they insinuate that the Rape of Nanking all comes from Chinese authors (ignoring accounts of even Nazi Germany's consul in Nanking!!!) this book is crap.

Anybody who claims some American historians are "revisionist" has no idea what real political revisionist "pseudohistory" is all about. That would be the only halfway reason to even glance at this book -- a reason to "never forget."

First there was the Japanese's refusal to acknowledge Emperor Hirohito's involvement in World War II (for a historical work on this, I recommend Herbert P. Bix's book "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan"), then there was the complete exclusion of the events World War II in school textbooks in Japan with the exception of only 2 events (yes, that's TWO): Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima/Nagasaki (for a historical work on this, I recommend any general history book on World War II, any encyclopedia, or just turn on the History channel - point being, virtually every "educated" nation in the world but Japan knows what Japan did in World War II), and now this book of [unsuitable material] which is even in response to the denial of the blatant truth in History that many have documented to undo the original problem selective memory conscious ignorance of the Japanese government.

The Nanking massacre has been documented historically, and even in books such as the non-historical work "Rape of Nanking" by Iris Chang, though she just is a journalist and the whole thing is a personalized slant of events, the photos are images that cannot be talked out of and it's foolish to try. These are already truths about World War II that anyone moderately educated on the Pacific theater of the war has learned from research of facts, and knows.

This book "The Alleged Nanking Massacre" is already written with the purpose of discounting yet another fact of Japan's pathetic historial past in the early modern era. It's purpose is a joke. And what's more, it's sending a continually worse message to the world that Japan, a country whose society is based on shame, cares only of the shame to themselves and could care less about the "gaijin" foreigners of the rest of the world. Works like this, also that happen to be written by Japanese only perpetuate the "stereotype" that Japanese are self-conceived elitists that despite the pieces of culture they borrow from other countries for their own ragged status game, they still at the heart don't consider the people of the outside world as some form of equal human beings that deserve respect. And from my experiences, even their neighbors in East Asia acknowledge the same.

This book gets only 1 star because it's not based upon fact, and written with a severely slanted agenda by Japanese with every motivation I have just mentioned. If you really want to learn about the Nanking Massacre, read the historic works about it (read more than one, since there is a fininte number of them that are dedicated only to this part of the war). And the book by Chang is only good for the photos inside if you want to see what happened with your own eyes.

After i read the book, i was wondering why the asian population should ever forgive japan. Even in the principals of christianity, repentance comes before forgiveness. Think about the little children boiled alive, think about the human experiments, think of the millions of lost souls. It's been over half a century, and those bastards still haven't the guts to say "we did it".

This book should be a -10 stars for its shameless denial of the Japanese military's shameful practices during WWII; facts which are as incontrovertible as the Jewish holocaust in Europe.

Just remember- for years after World War II the Germans denied the Holicaust ever happened also