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''The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II'' is a bestselling 1997 non-fiction book written by Iris Chang about the 1937–1938 Nanking Massacre, the massacre and atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army after it captured Nanjing, then capital of China, during the Second Sino-Japanese War. It describes the events leading up to the Nanking Massacre and the atrocities that were committed. The book presents the view that the Japanese government has not done enough to redress the atrocities. It is one of the first major English-language books to introduce the Nanking Massacre to Western and Eastern readers alike, and has been translated into several languages. The book was a source of fame for Chang but was also controversial; it was received with both acclaim and criticism by the public and by academics. It has been praised as a work that "shows more clearly than any previous account" the extent and brutality of the episode,〔Forward by William C. Kirby, in: 〕 while at the same time it was criticized as "seriously flawed" and "full of misinformation and harebrained explanations". Chang's research on the book was credited with the finding of the diaries of John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, both of whom played important roles in the Nanking Safety Zone, a designated area in Nanjing that protected Chinese civilians during the Nanking Massacre. The book prompted AOL executive Ted Leonsis to fund and produce ''Nanking'', a 2007 documentary film about the Nanking Massacre. ==Inspiration== When Iris Chang was a child, she was told by her parents, who had escaped with their families from China to Taiwan and then to the United States after World War II, that during the Nanking Massacre, the Japanese "sliced babies not just in half but in thirds and fourths." In the introduction of ''The Rape of Nanking,'' she wrote that throughout her childhood, the Nanking Massacre "remained buried in the back of () mind as a metaphor for unspeakable evil." When she searched the local public libraries in her school and found nothing, she wondered why no one had written a book about it. The subject of the Nanking Massacre entered Chang's life again almost two decades later when she learned of producers who had completed documentary films about it. One of the producers was Shao Tzuping, who helped produce ''Magee's Testament'', a film that contains footage of the Nanking Massacre itself, shot by the missionary John Magee. The other producer was Nancy Tong, who, together with Christine Choy, produced and co-directed ''In The Name of the Emperor'', a film containing a series of interviews with Chinese, American, and Japanese citizens.〔 Chang began talking to Shao and Tong, and soon she was connected to a network of activists who felt the need to document and publicize the Nanking Massacre.〔Chang, ''The Rape of Nanking," pp. 8-9〕 In December 1994, she attended a conference on the Nanking Massacre, held in Cupertino, California, and what she saw and heard at the conference motivated her to write ''The Rape of Nanking.''〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Rape of Nanking )〕 As she wrote in the introduction to the book, while she was at the conference, she was "suddenly in a panic that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it."〔Chang, ''The Rape of Nanking'', pp. 10〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Rape of Nanking (book)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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