The Rape of Nanking was written by Iris Chang and tells the horrifying story of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and soldiers by the Japanese army during World War II in the winter of 1937. This event is portrayed in three perspectives: through the eyes of the ruthless Japanese military, the terror-stricken Chinese tortured and slaughtered in the once peaceful city of Nanking, and the group of Europeans and Americans who stayed behind to create the International Committee for the Nanking Safety Zone which saved almost 300,000 lives. The second part of the book discusses the Japanese government's refusal to admit its war crimes against humanity and its effort to hide this mass murder from the public knowledge, and "to …show more content…
forget a holocaust is to kill twice." Iris Chang earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Illinois in 1989.
She was temporarily employed as a reporter for the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune before receiving a graduate's degree in writing from Johns Hopkins University. Her works focuses on the strife and suffering that the Chinese and Chinese-Americans have had to struggle through. Her first book, Thread of the Silkworm, was published in 1995 and describes the ironic account of Dr. Tsien Hsue-shen, a brilliant scientist who contributed immensely to the American military defense but was labeled a Communist and deported to China, where he developed the Silkworm missile that could be used against the very Americans that held him in contempt during the Red Scare. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, Chang's second book, was …show more content…
published in 1997, stayed on the New York Times Bestseller list for ten weeks, and became a New York Times Notable book. The third and final book written by the young historian was The Chinese in America. Published in 2003, it tells of the Chinese-American fight for a niche in American society when all that was offered to them was ostracism. Iris Chang received many awards: the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Program on Peace and International Cooperation Award, the Woman of the Year award from the Organization of Chinese Americans, and two honorary doctorates (the College of Wooster in Ohio, and California State University at Hayward). Before Iris Chang could write another inspiring book, she succumbed to her clinical depression and committed suicide on November 9, 2004. Nonetheless, the extent to which she went to conduct her research was meticulous.
She had three primary sources: John Rabe, a German businessman; Robert Wilson, an American surgeon; and Wilhelmina Vautrin, an American missionary professor. The granddaughter of John Rabe, Ursula Reinhardt, gave Chang detailed descriptions of Rabe's life and copies of his reports and diaries, which spanned over thousands of pages. Early biological information on Robert Wilson's and Wilhelmina Vautrin's lives came from Marjorie Wilson (his widow) and Emma Lyon (her niece), respectively, during telephone interviews. The Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II, the New China News Agency, the Alliance for Preserving the Truth of the Sino-Japanese War, and survivors of the Rape have all contributed to her research in the form of photographs, articles, and important contacts from all over the world. She traveled to the East Coast to visit the Yale Divinity School Library in New Haven, and the archivists showed her missionary diaries and photographs of the massacre. When she traveled to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., an inconceivable amount of information became available to her: military and diplomatic reports, intercepts of Japanese Foreign Office communications, OSS records and transcripts, and exhibits of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE). On her trip to Nanking and the Republic of China, she received Chinese documentation of the Rape of
Nanking, a tour of the execution sites, oral and videotaped interviews with survivors, and rare access to veterans' files. Iris Chang wished to get the powerful firsthand accounts of the genocide; thus, not a single one of her sources are secondary. While The Rape of Nanking is not recommended for younger children or people with a weak stomach,
Hung Liu was born in Changchun, China in 1948 and grew up during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, when she was sent to the countryside to be “Re-educated” by the Maoist regime. She immigrated to the US in 1984 to
Long story short, let me be honest and say that the longer essay stapled to the back of this one is the one I wrote first, because I read the instructions wrong. I thought I would attach that paper also and turn it in, since I took the time to write it, and finished it before realizing it was not what you were looking for. It does, however, relate to this paper, because in this paper I will (indirectly) give the reasons why I wanted to write that paper in the first place.
In 1937, Japan started a war against China, in search of more resources to expand its empire. In 1941, during World War II, Japan attacked America which is when the Allies (Australia, Britain etc.) then declared war on Japan. Before long the Japanese started extending their territory closer and closer to Australia and started taking surrendering troops into concentration camps where they were starved, diseased and beaten. When they were captured, one survivor reports that they were told
In the book, “Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman,” written by Marjorie Shostak; is a culturally shocking and extremely touching book about a woman who had gone through many struggles and horrific tragedies in her life. This book also emphasizes the perspective of most of the women in the society. There are many striking issues in this book that the people of the !Kung tribe go through.
Kelman, Herbert C., Hamilton, V. Lee. “The My Lai Massacre: A Military Crime of Obedience”. Writing & Reading for ACP Composition. Ed. Thomas E. Leahey and Christine R. Farris. New York: Pearson Custom Publishing, 2009. 266-277. Print.
...target to escape and even held a competition of the person who kills 100 people first will win the game. The Japanese keeps denying their actions and refuse to give an official apology to all the offenders. Their officials go to shrine to pay homage on their so-called heroes, ignoring how these “heroes” have deeply injured the Chinese. During the Holocaust, alive human beings were taken to the chamber of gas and organs were taken to do the experiment. How the Nazi treated the Jewish was similar to how the Japanese treated the Chinese.
The constant changing of technology and social norms makes difficult for different generations to understand one another and fully relate to each other. Diction and slang change as years pass and what is socially acceptable may have been prohibited in the previous generations.
Do you believe in equality? Regardless of gender, age, education, religion, etc. all people should be treated the same. However, not everyone is. This literature review shows that. My literature review is on the Gender Matters set of essays. The first essay is The Startling Plight of China’s Leftover Women by Christina Larsen. This essay is about the unmarried, educated women in China and why they are still unmarried. The second essay is The Invisible Migrant Man: Questioning Gender Privileges by Chloe Lewis. This piece is about the struggles and issues that married male migrants face and have faced. The last is Body-Building In Afghanistan by Oliver Broudy. It is about the men who are unemployed in Afghanistan who spend their time working out. My literature review is written in the following order: Larsen’s essay, Broudy’s
(1800)Topic 2: A Literary Analysis of the Historical Differentiation of Patriarchal Culture and Female Gender Identity in the Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong and the Tale of Genji
23 .Roger Daniel, Prisoners Without Trial: Japanese Americans in the World War II 1993, Hill and Yang.
By any measure, The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong, known as Hanjungnok (Records written in silence), is a remarkable piece of Korean literature and an invaluable historical document, in which a Korean woman narrated an event that can be described as the ultimate male power rivalry surrounding a father-son conflict that culminates in her husband’s death. However, the Memoirs were much more than a political and historical murder mystery; writing this memoir was her way of seeking forgiveness. As Haboush pointed out in her informative Introduction, Lady Hyegyong experienced a conflict herself between the demands imposed by the roles that came with her marriage, each of which included both public and private aspects. We see that Lady Hyegyong justified her decision to live as choosing the most public of her duties, and she decided that for her and other members of her family must to be judged fairly, which required an accurate understanding of the her husband’s death. It was also important to understand that Lady Hyegyong had to endure the
By 1938 Japan had invaded much of China and had taken over Nanking killing more than 42,000 civilians. The Chinese government never surrendered completely, and the war continued on a lower scale until 1945. During World War II, the Japanese military forced women from various different countries to work as comfort women to the Japanese soldiers. Trafficking in women is a form of sexual slavery in which women are transported across national borders and sold for prostitution, sex tourism, or migrant workers. Women were kidnapped or brought over under false pretenses thinking that they were being given jobs. The comfort women of the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II are an extreme case of this institutionalized sexual violence against women. Through research and testimonies from comfort women survivors during World War II and former Japanese veterans, I attempt to show the ways that this has affected the intersection of colonial power, gender and class. I argue that the development of gender contributes to the construction of Japanese colonialism and the system of comfort women helped Japan as an imperial state gain power. The ideas of masculinity and femininity is what helped the maintenance of the Japanese military system and comfort stations made an impact in which Japan expanded its colonies by military means.
The Rape of Nanking, also known as the Nanking Massacre was a six week period when mass numbers of Chinese men and woman were killed by the Japanese. Embarrassed by the lack of effort in the war with China in Shanghai, the Japanese looked for revenge and finally were able to win the battle. The Japanese moved toward the city of Nanjing also known as Nanking and invaded it for approximately six months. Even though the people of Nanjing outnumbered the 50,000 Japanese, they were not as masterful in warfare as their opponents. Chinese soldiers were forced to surrender to the Japanese and the massacre began in which around 300,000 people died and 20,000 women were raped. The Japanese leaders had different methods of killing that were instructed to the soldiers. However, the prisoners of this “City of Blood” soon found their liberation and their justice was served.
But in world war two, they weren’t the only country with camps worst than death. In even today’s world, human trafficking is a problem, women and men taken from their homes and some sold to satisfy people 's “needs”. During world war two, a woman slave or ‘comfort women’ were made to perform anything the Japanese soldiers wanted. These women were very rarely women in their 20s or older, usually these girls were as young as 13 years old and as old as 15 years old. These women could be forced into rape up to 20 or more times a day with many different men. Interviewed, Prescilla Bartonico tells her story that at the age of 17 he cousin was raped by the army in front of her then killed. They then did the same to her but kept her alive and made her family watch. She was then taken and imprisoned, forced to work, and obey any order given. At the age of only 15, Rosa Maria Henson suffered the same fate, she was abducted and imprisoned for 9 months. Many more women came forward after Henson shared her story. It was later found out that “An estimated 400,000 women and girls across Asia were abducted and forced to serve in so-called “comfort stations” by the Japanese military during World War II. A majority of these victims were taken hostage in South Korea and China, but women were captured in virtually every territory occupied by the Japanese”(Mosbergen). These women were pretty much stipped of any rights
Cooke, Haruko Taya. & Cook, Theodore F. Japan at War: An Oral History. New York: The New