The Rape of Nanking (book)

The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II is a 1997 book by Iris Chang (張純如) and William C. Kirby, which presents a history of the 1937-1938 Nanjing Massacre. This book is by no means the authoritative tome on the subject; however, this is the most popular work outside of academia, and oftentimes the first to introduce the Nanjing Massacre to the non-academic Western audience.

As to be expected from a subject of high sensitivity, Chang's book provoked widespread response from readers and critics alike.

Some US and Japanese scholars have disputed the accuracy of the book, claiming it contains many serious factual errors. Critic Timothy M. Kelly says a "lack of attention to detail" call the book's credibility into question and presents a case describing Chang's plagiarising passages and an illustration from Japan's Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini.

Another point of debate is the figure given for the death toll, 300,000, exceeds the city's population of the time. Others note that Nanjing was then awash with refugees from the northeast, which may have accounted for the numerical differences (see Nanjing Massacre for details). In Japan, the majority of the criticisms came from right-wing nationalists. Mainstream academia there largely ignored the book.

Chang responded to criticisms of the book in a 1998 letter to the San Francisco Chronicle, in which she said there was no evidence that photographs in the book had been fabricated; that the photographs were properly captioned; that the Japanese Foreign Minister at the time, Koki Hirota, had given a figure of 300,000 civilians killed; and that her critics in Japan were right-wingers who denied the existence of the massacre and, in some cases, of the Holocaust .

The Japanese translation was halted because of disagreement between Chang and