Summary Of The Book 'Raped' By Iris Chang

‘Raped’ is a forceful verb. The act itself has consumed the lives of many women, children and cities. Take the rape of Nanking. In 1937, Japanese troops ravaged more than 20,000 women in six weeks. In her book, The Rape of Nanking, the late Chinese-American author Iris Chang said the number of victims could have even touched 80,000. Much is written about the Japanese and their war-time atrocities, but little is done to prevent such a massacre from rearing its genocidal head again. Though people say the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were precisely in retaliation to ghastly racial campaigns like these, there is no real official apology forthcoming from the Japanese politicians. Even if there were a few apologetic gestures, there has never been

Some were hung by their tongues and their body parts consumed (heart, liver and even genitals for greater virility).Chang grew up listening to such eye-witness accounts and wondered why the world was not privy to it in a big way. She took it upon herself to dig deep and unearth the unvarnished truth. The result was her international bestselling book where she proved that the massacre at Nanking (now Nanjing) was indeed the ‘forgotten holocaust of World War 2’. NANKING IS NOT AN ISOLATED INCIDENTIn his 1996 book, Hidden Horrors: Japanese War Crimes in World War II, Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka doesn’t believe Japan was a victim in WW2. He cites their insane cannibalism in New Guinea – they not only fed on the flesh of their enemies but also their own lowest ranking soldiers. In 1942, they slayed 21 Australian Army nurses at Bangka Island in Indonesia and killed 5,200 American soldiers in the infamous Bataan Death March the same year. They murdered 2,500 Australian and British men in the Borneo jungle three years later. These prisoners of war were forced to go on a 160-mile march; anybody who stepped out of line because of exhaustion was shot to