CORRESPONDENCE

To the Editor:

I was extremely disappointed to read Joshua Fogel’s letter (Book Review, Aug. 15), regarding Harriet Mill’s review of “The Good Man of Nanking: The Diaries of John Rabe.” He wrote that my book, “The Rape of Nanking,” was not only based on “flimsy” evidence, but “roundly criticized by historians who have investigated the topic, especially those fundamentally sympathetic to her project of bringing the Nanking Massacre to the attention of concerned people everywhere.”

Describing evidence as flimsy and reviews of my book as roundly critical are characterizations, not arguments, and are very much at variance with the characterizations of others. Exactly which parts of my research did he find “flimsy”? The Rabe diary? The thousands of records kept by American missionaries who witnessed the massacre? The firsthand accounts of both Chinese survivors and Japanese participants? The contemporaneous press coverage?

Fair disclosure would require Fogel to mention that almost all the historians critical of “The Rape of Nanking” are Japanese. Far from being “fundamentally sympathetic” to my project, many of them downplay the horror of the Nanking massacre; others even refuse to acknowledge that it happened at all. Some Japanese academics not only deny the existence of the Nanking Massacre but demand that references to it--along with references to other war atrocities (such as the Japanese army’s use of sex slaves, euphemized as “comfort women”)--be deleted altogether from Japanese textbooks.

Outside of Japan, however, the response to my book has been overwhelmingly favorable. “The Rape of Nanking” has been widely praised by American and British historians, including two Pulitzer Prize winners, the head of Harvard’s history department and world-class professors from Yale, Berkeley and Oxford. It has been lauded by prominent Chinese historians who have devoted their careers to investigating the Nanking Massacre. It has been embraced by countless victims of Japanese war aggression, some of whom flew thousands of miles to meet with me personally: American veterans, former Allied POWs of the Japanese, survivors from China, Korea, Singapore, the Philippines and India. For Fogel to imply that this book has been discredited is both unfair and misleading.

Iris Chang

Sunnyvale, Calif.