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Summary: Don't bother with this book... Some more facts
Review: 1. Never ask a Taiwanese about what happened in China. Most Taiwanese liked the Japanese occupation. They were lucky that the armies that occupied Taiwan were friendly. Some units on the mainland were not savages either. My grandfather and uncle met them. Unfortunately, for most of China and Asia, people were not as lucky.
2. The Nationalist army was weak. Too dispersed and corrupt and eventually fighting an internal war with the Communists. They did little to ward off the invaders. They even invited the invaders and served to support the invaders. (Not all units, but enough to be noticed by the people.)
3. Yes, in some cases the Nationalist army did attact, rob, and rape their own people as stated by some witnesses.
4. Counting the number killed by consulting those who performed the burrials? What about those already burried alive or incinerated? Some are still being discovered to this day.
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Summary: Foreign Military Officers Are Amazed by Chinese Destruction
Review: By HALLETT ABEND Special Cable to The New York Times Thursday, Dec. 9.Now that the Japanese campaign against Nanking is nearly completed, certain matters hitherto termed military secrets may be revealed.
Long ago, members of the staff of General Iwane Matsui, the Japanese commander here, told the writer they were delighted because the Chinese kept pouring divisions into the Shanghai area. When the total reached forty divisions, or about 400,000 men, the Japanese were jubilant. When the total reached nearly eighty divisions, with more troops still coming downriver, the Japanese were almost incredulous at their good luck or the ineptitude of their enemy.
"It seems almost unbelievable that the Chinese high command or their German advisers have not realized our whole desire has been to get the Chinese armies into one mass so we could destroy them," a member of General Matsui's staff told the writer many weeks ago. Massed Forces Bombed "At the beginning of hostilities China had nearly 2,000,000 armed men, widely scattered. Instead of scattering these forces in hilly, mountainous terrain, where it would be extremely difficult to employ our superior mechanical equipment, China has thrown huge, massed forces against us in the vicinity of Shanghai.
"Actually they have been sometimes too numerous for proper military use, affording magnificent targets for our shells and bombs. If some secret Chinese faction planned upon giving us an opportunity for wholesale destruction of China's immense armies things could not have been managed more to our satisfaction.
"History will record this campaign around Shanghai, as far as China is concerned, as one of the most foolhardy, wasteful campaigns on record. Certainly this must have been done in utter defiance of the plans of China's able German military advisers."
The Japanese officer paused reflectively and then continued:
"Of course, China's gesture around Shanghai served the purpose of getting this war on the front pages of the world's newspapers. Possibly China believed that by forcing the fighting around the foreign-controlled areas she would succeed in bringing the United States, Great Britain or some other power into the hostilities on her side. If this was true it was a woeful miscalculation." Best Troops Threatened Others What happened, according to the Japanese version, was that China used Chiang Kai-shek's well-disciplined Central Government divisions largely in the role of supervisory divisions behind the front lines with orders to shoot units that showed signs of wavering. Division after division of poorly equiped, poorly disciplined provincial forces were poured into the front lines and destroyed by Japanese aerial bombings and artillery fire.
Meanwhile the Japanese Army was being derided abroad because it was unable to break the Chinese defenses and unable to make progress in the difficult Shanghai terrain, but when the Japanese bombed the supervisory divisions the Chinese retreat soon followed.
The Japanese high command professes to be pleased because nearly 300,000 men are making a stand in the Nanking-Wuhu area for a brave "fight to the last man" because the invaders will have a further chance to carry out their aim to destroy China's vast armies.
Foreign military observers remaining in Nanking are amazed by the extent of the Chinese destruction of everything within the zones they still control. Most of this destruction is said to be purposeless, serving no military use for the advantage of the Japanese except to force the invaders to use tents instead of billeting in buildings. The Taiping rebellion about the time of the Civil War in the United States involved a far greater area but though the destruction wrought then has become proverbial with the Chinese it was not nearly as thorough as what has been going on since the retreat from Shanghai, according to foreign military men.
"Not since the armies of Genghis Khan turned the sites of once-populous cities of China into grazing lands has there been any such systematic destruction as that going on in the lower Yangtze area at the hands of the Chinese themselves," a neutral military observer told the writer.
"Japanese aerial bombings and artillery fire have been destructive in comparatively narrow ranges, mostly military objectives, but all such damades combined will not equal one-tenth the destruction achieved by the Chinese armies. From the way the Chinese are behaving you would think they did not expect to recover any semblance of control in this part of China in the next century. You would think they were laying waste land belonging to some bitter foe. Vast Wealth Destroyed "It is incredible that they are adopting this 'scorched earth' policy against forces which must certainly be only temporary invaders and are not going to attempt to colonize Chinese soil. What is being destroyed represents the savings of thrifty generations of hard-working Chinese.
"Those who advocate the policy of frenzied destruction of towns, cities and countryside do not pause to think that they are utterly wiping out hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of accumulated wealth and that this property, if not destroyed, could have been taxed by the Chinese Government at no distant future, thereby helping the nation to refinance its rehabilitation. This rich area, which had been one of the most thickly populated in the world, will need vast sums to rebuild what is vanishing in flames."
The only acceptable explanation seems to involve the ancient Oriental idea of "saving face," the Chinese believing they enhance their prestige if their retreat leaves only a barren wilderness of smoking ruins for the invaders to occupy. This policy ignores the welfare of millions of Chinese who have fled from this fighting zone.
How the millions of refugees are to be fed and housed through the Winter is a serious problem because their own government cannot do anything for their relief.
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Summary: Typical Japanese right-wing garbage
Review: Do not bother with this book. The claims it makes are based on straw conjecture and fantasy. This is typical junk from the right wing of Japanese politics and is no more trustworthy than the fools who make up the extremes of Japan politics. That anyone would take seriously the ideas offered up in this book is laughable...it's like claiming the earth is flat and the moon is made of green cheese. The atrocities committed by Japan in China and the rest of Asia will burn in the souls of the Japanese people as an everlasting shame. It makes the atom bomb attacks look like divine justice, in comparison.
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Summary: Hi again, Hiromi
Review: First of all, to Hiromi, I would be most delighted if you should look back at your review on the film, "Spirited Away". With all due respect, I would dare say you were not "totally fluttered" but were "totally flattered" by whoever rated the film as 5 stars. Congratulations on your stupidity! I would suggest you stop discharging your everlasting frustration and illogical persistence and zip yourself just in the maze of your mind.
I am a half Japanese, who has been living in Japan for more than 20 years with a 100% Japanese wife even though I was born and brought up in Southern California. From my two dacades' of experiences in Japan, I could say people like Mr. Yamamoto, the infamous author, and Hiromi, the fanatic reviewer, are quite exceptional and isolated in the country, which unfortunately but most likely has made them so aggressive and insistent like a dissatisfied puppy yelping its head off. They might be sticking out at a glance from overseas, however, I would like to assure Americans and Asians living in the US that the majority of Japanese people are terribly sorry from the bottom of their hearts for what Japan did to Asian countries, especially to China and Korea. In addition, they are so ashamed of having had an emperor like Hirohito, who had been constantly quite far from apologetic for his critical responsibilities for the War all his life. I personally think Hirohito should have been hanged or should have committed a suicide immediately after the War was over, just like his German and Italian counterparts.
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Summary: Wish History NEVER Repeat Again
Review: Good Article. Recommend every to have a view of this book. For who still doubt the number of 300,000 victims, I want to clarify one thing here. This is REAL. This is not include to hundreds and thousands civilians been kill in Nanking City, but also surrounding urban towns and villages. A so-called "Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone", which was published by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone, had been cited by lots of Japanese right-wings supporters to deny Japanese Army's inhumanity crime. The population it recorded was inaccurate and it only was a statistical data for a small aristocratic area where lives most richmen and foreigners circled by Japanese. The fact is that by a Nanking local publication - "Nanking Population Survey" in 1936, the popluation in Nanking city was 1,006,968. Truth will always be Truth.
History can NEVER can be changed.
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Summary: What is Nanking?
Review: I am Chinese. The terrible atrocity of Nanking has casted a lasting scar on the Chinese people.If the truth of the happening cna never be acknowledged on all sides, the wound can never get heal.The writer has done a masterful job in gathering research materials from many sources and put them very neatly in historical context.I recommand this book to anyone who is interested in massacre research and other realted topic.
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Summary: Test your objectivity and fairness.
Review: It is no doubt that this book is one of most advanced researches on the issue in the world among other books and essays written by the authors of Nihon "Nankin" Gakkai (Japan "Nanking" Society) led by Higashinakano Shudo. (The vice-chairman is Mr. Kou, a Taiwanese, by the way.)
I admire his sober atitude towards this issue very much and strongly recommend this book to all readers who want to know what really happened in Nanking in 1937.
However, I did not rate this book with 5 stars because I do not totally agree with his conclusion that of the executions of the Chinese P.o.Ws were illegal. There may have been some cases that were indeed carried out in illegal way, however, having had quite good amount of eyewitnesses of the foreigners who were in Nanking at the time of the capture of the city, you can say that, in fact, the Japanese Imperial Army's conducts during the battle, the capture and the occupation of Nanking were legal in general.
After all, the Japanese Army executed only those who were hostile while they disguised themselves as civilians and hid in the Safety Zone with plenty of hidden weapons, that is, by the way, could have caused severe consequenses to genuine refugees to have been mixed up and executed as ex-soldiers. In that situation, to protect the refugee as well as the Japanese Army themselves, those executions were completely legitimate according to the International Laws of War. It is the fact that the International Committee of the Nanking Safety Zone stated clearly in their famous Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone: They eyewitnessed NO MASSACRE of the civilians other than only one "legitimate execution" of a Chinese soldier.
Farthermore, they admitted that almost entire reports shown in the Documents that came from their Chinese "friends" were, in fact, unsubstantiated second-hand hearsay.
In the first place, the Committee stated officially that they had 200,000 Chinese refugees in the Safety Zone which figure never decreased but soon after the city's capture increased to 250,000.
On top of that, when the Nanking Criminal Court conducted a survey with the Nanking citizens after the war ended in order to prosecute some Japanese Army "criminals", the people of Nanking never wanted to speak up and remained in silence "like a winter cicada".
Amazingly, some even told the surveyer that the atrocities happened in Nanking were, in fact, done by the Chinese soldiers.
It suggests, in reality, the refugees had no family members who were killed by Japanese Army in neither case of being misunderstood as if they were ex-soldiers nor being "massacred". If you really study this issue or other topics in the modern history of the Far East, you should never miss out the fact: "China was purely innocent victim of Japan's aggressive war" is grossly untrue.
More precisely speaking, it was only the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Union who were profitting from the war at the expense of real innocent civilians of China. If you read books on history of China and Russia in that period, there are evidences that of Chinese Communist Party and Soviet Union waging the war against Japan putting their real enemy, the Chinese Nationarist Party, in the front line to fight the Japanese so that they could eliminate both Japan and the CNP at the same time, and that of Chinese propagandists were in action hiring the American missionaries in Nanking and some other jounalists in other places to propagate the Japanese Army's "atrocities against the poor Chinese people" so that the foreign countries could be convinced the story was true and become by their side. Ignoring and dismissing those facts (some are even stated in Chinese documents and books) plainly as "revisionist's view" is like studying astronomy using textbooks written by the Inquisitors who never ever recognised the heliocentric theory as a proper science. Do you think it is absolutely justifiable that a former Nazi member can be charged with crimes that he never committed and can be sentensed to death even though the court have found no evidences that support the crimes? Just because he was Nazi, and therefore, he IS evil, do you think that he has no right to refute his false accusation and has to accept it?
I hope many of readers are not that irrational to let the prejudice conquer their reasons like the masses who were eager to burn the "witches". Were the "witches" all genuine? Who knows? Fortunately, there are a mass of evidences that support the counter-arguments of the "Nanking Massacre" and other crimes the Japanese Imperial Army was falsely accused in the Tokyo Trial.
And some judges of the trial acctually offered their dissentient opinion suggesting the whole procedure of the trial was, indeed, defective, if not plain unfair or one-sided. In the course of rethinking the whole issue of history of war-time Japan, that is directly related to the post-war policy of the Allied powers including the Tokyo Trial and the notorious "War Guilt Information Programme", the "brain-washing" of the Japanese nationals during the 7 year occupation, the readers from the U.S.A. and Russia and China themselves may have to face the music.
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Summary: What is Nanking?
Review: Like many (if not all) Asian Americans in the US and the rest of the world outside of Asia, we have never heard of Nanking. World history in school were chapters about the Germans, Jewish Halocaust, Diary of Anne Frank. And oh yeah in a few sentences, we fought the Japanese too, period. But for those of us who grandparents in China at that time, we grew up hearing stories of the atrocities of the Japanese army. Our grandparents told us these stories not for us to hate, but for us to remember those who suffered so these events would not be repeated. We have nothing against the Japanese, we buy their goods, cars, toys, because all that was in the past. But outrageously, Japanese today deny the rapes and murders in china, and the Japanese govt continues to try to cover it up and brainwash the next generation. Nanking? There was more to just Nanking. The Japanese army raped and mutilated throughout China. The true death toll and rape toll during the occupation is more accurately 1000x what was recorded in Nanking. My grandparents, relatives aren't even from Nanking, and they have their own stories of Japanese atrocities. This book is biased and inaccurate. Read Chang's book with first person eyewitnesses for more accurate account.
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Summary: Face the Truth
Review: Population of Nanking by "Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone" 1937 December 200,000
1938 January 250,000 "Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone" was published by the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone. Iris Chang claims that over 300,000 people died in 6 weeks after Japan's occupation of Nanking on December 12. Is it possible?
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Summary: shameless japs
Review: what worries me a lot is that lots of japs never admit the fact based on history, 300,000 civilian killed by japs in nankin and more people gonna die inevitablely in the future if japs could not even admit the crimes and start another war. shame on you japs, shame on you.
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