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Nanjing Massacre / Rape of Nanjing


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My first ever essay in English was on the Rape of Nanjing.

 

There is controversy over what happened. The Chinese say 300,000 were killed and many women were gang-raped by the Japanese soldiers, but as I spent six months researching all sides of the argument, I learned that some in Japan deny the incident altogether.

 

Nobukatsu Fujioka is one of them and the author of one of the books that I read as part of my research.

 

"It was a battlefield so people were killed but there was no systematic massacre or rape," he says, when I meet him in Tokyo.

 

"The Chinese government hired actors and actresses, pretending to be the victims when they invited some Japanese journalists to write about them.

 

"All of the photographs that China uses as evidence of the massacre are fabricated because the same picture of decapitated heads, for example, has emerged as a photograph from the civil war between Kuomintang and Communist parties."

 

As a 17-year-old student, I was not trying to make a definitive judgement on what exactly happened, but reading a dozen books on the incident at least allowed me to understand why many people in China still feel bitter about Japan's military past.

 

I'm interested in reading more on this, anyone recommend any good book focusing on that particular part of history?

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