So the book titled "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," by -year-old Chinese-American writer Iris Chang has the Japanese critics stirred up. Everyone from the former Japanese ambassador in Washington and Japan's powerful conservative commentators down to the rightwing academics and ultranationalist fanatics has denounced it for emotional errors and distortions.
Some photos in the book are faked, they say. The numbers killed in the 1937/38 Nanjing incident were far less than the claimed 300,000. And according to some finicky U.S. academics, it is an insult to Jewish memories to use the word Holocaust. The incident needs to be seen in perspective, they say.
Perspective? In that case, what the Japanese military did in Nanjing looks like a sideshow compared with what they did in the rest of China.
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