Brad Longwell Mr. Harvey HIST 111 VE December 9th, 2017 The Rape of Nanking Iris Chang was a leading American author/journalist famous for her works on Asian culture, and its violent war-torn history. She was the daughter of two professors who emigrated to the United States of America to escape the Chinese communist revolution of 1945. Voted as being one of the leading young historians of her time, on November 9th, 2004 her life was cut short due from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head which was later ruled a homicide. Iris suffered from extreme bouts of depression and mental psychosis which ultimately led to her untimely death. Known for other leading novels such as “The Chinese in America” and “Thread of the Silkworm” she …show more content…
Chinese men were used for bayonet practice, decapitations as a sport were often performed by Japanese officers as a game or form of entertainment. Women and children were brutally raped, tortured, and mutilated beyond recognition. Families were forced to have sexual intercourse with each other while the family watched. If they did not comply, they were brutally murdered and tortured to be put on display as an example of consequences of disobedience. More extreme cases involved women’s breasts being cut off and nailed to walls, disembowelments, roasting people alive on spits, castrations, live burials, torture hangings (often from the tongue) forced bestiality, babies were cut into several pieces and thrown into rivers and streams, people being torn apart by various wild animals, these were just some of the unspeakable acts committed by the Japanese occupants. If this was not shocking enough all of this was going on under the noses of the nations of the world with little information reaching outside of the Asian continent as it was …show more content…
Most of these accounts came from foreign correspondents on the ground and confiscated diaries in and around Nanking. It was only a matter of time before Mass media lit up like a 4th of July fireworks display. Soon everybody was becoming aware of what was happening in the Chinese region. The author conducted interviews with several different international reporters who were in or around Nanking during the conflict. What was once thought as being a forgotten incident, the real stories begun to unfold. Pictures, news reels, military maps, and letters from both sides of the conflict were starting to emerge. I can personally attest to the lack of information about the Nanking incident. I can only remember one time when this conflict was mentioned in prior scholary studies growing up but it was on such a small scale it did not have any significant informational value at the