Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  On April 22, 1998, when Iris was in Salt Lake City on her book tour, she had called to inform us that during the signing in one of the bookstores in Salt Lake, a Korean reporter had asked her how she reacted to the criticism of the Japanese ambassador who said that her book was inaccurate and biased. Iris was shocked to hear the accusation and she said she could not believe that an ambassador could make such comments on a book in public! We told her she should not jump to that conclusion and asked her to look into what exactly the ambassador had said and deal with it accordingly.

  Later, Iris found out that on April 21, the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., Kunihiko Saito, in a press conference in Washington, D.C., had indeed openly criticized her book as “contain(ing) many extremely inaccurate descriptions and one-sided views. . . .” Iris was outraged and asked us “Can you imagine what would happen if a German ambassador to the U.S. made a parallel statement about a book on the Holocaust?”

  “There is definitely different treatment of World War II in Asia and in Europe in this country,” she also said. She was preparing a rebuttal. Of course, we told her we were behind her one hundred percent. Like her, I just could not believe a Japanese ambassador would openly attack a book.

  On April 24, the Global Alliance for Preserving the History of World War II in Asia issued a strong statement denouncing the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., and urged the American and Chinese governments to ask Japan to immediately dismiss Saito for making such a distorting statement.

  On the same day, Basic Books also released a strong statement against the Japanese ambassador. In the statement, Jack McKeown, President and CEO of Basic, said: “Iris Chang has performed a vital service in turning a spotlight on the tragedy of sixty years ago in Nanking. As publishers, we will continue to strive to bring the book’s message to the widest possible audience. Many eminent scholars and historians have reviewed this book in glowing terms. . . .” The statement also said that the book was now in its seventeenth printing with over 130,000 books in print. “It remained on the New York Times ‘Best Sellers’ list for thirteen weeks, and foreign rights have been sold in Germany, Spain, Taiwan, China, Czechoslovakia, and Italy.” The statement also announced that “The book will be published in Japan, despite negative publicity in Japan, by publisher Kashiwashobo.”

  In a press release, Iris asked the ambassador to name the “erroneous facts” and challenged him to a public debate on national television.

  The news of the criticism of the book by the Japanese ambassador and the challenge for a debate from Iris had been reported in newspapers and media widely in this country and overseas. However, Saito declined to cite any specific inaccuracies in the book and did not respond to her challenge for a public debate.

  Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles gave Iris tremendous support. Rabbi Cooper told her that he had sent his protest letter to the Japanese embassy and to all news media outlets. He said, “Can you imagine a German ambassador making a similar statement?” He told Iris “We’ll be there for you!”

  Early in April, the Associated Press reported that a monthly magazine in Japan, Shokun, had featured an article that criticized the Foreign Ministry of the Japanese government for being silent about “anti-Japanese” books such as The Rape of Nanking. Iris and Shau-Jin and I speculated that the Japanese government must be under pressure from the ultranationalists to do something about it.

  The news of Iris’s challenge to the Japanese ambassador for a public TV debate was also in Time magazine’s May 11, 1998 issue. The news said, “. . . Saito’s attack on Chang has so far drawn fire from only a few organizations, but Tokyo is less concerned about Saito than about the damage the book may be doing to Japan’s image in the U.S.”

  It was not true that Saito’s criticism had “drawn fire from only a few organizations.” Actually, as far as I knew, Saito’s remarks on Iris’s book had triggered strong reactions in the U.S., and especially from Chinese-Americans and overseas Chinese communities. Many readers wrote letters of protest to newspapers. A number of Chinese newspapers’ editorials supported Iris. The Chinese consulate general in San Francisco on May 6 had issued a statement in support of Iris’s book and criticizing the Japanese ambassador for being extremely irresponsible by making a public announcement distorting history. The statement said that the Nanking massacre was one of numerous atrocities committed by Japan’s militarists during its war of aggression against China. “It’s an undeniable history,” said the Chinese consulate general, and he demanded Japan respect the truth.

  On May 8, a spokesman from the Chinese embassy in Washington also issued a strong statement refuting Saito’s criticism of Iris’s book and asking the Japanese government to face their past war crimes with honesty. To my knowledge, it’s quite rare that a book could generate so much international attention and cause the attack and counter-attack of governments of two countries.

  Because the Chinese embassy and the Chinese consulate in the U.S. issued statements in support of Iris’s book, Japanese right-wing Web sites claimed that the Chinese government was behind Iris’s book. This was absurd. Iris had never contacted the Chinese government while researching her book. Besides, Iris’s first book, Thread of the Silkworm, criticized Chinese Communism.

  In the meantime, a Japanese movie called Pride glorified World War II Japanese class-A war criminal General Hideki Tojo as a hero. The movie had a preview in April and was shown in Japanese theaters in May. Showing the movie in Japan coincided chronologically with Saito’s criticism of Iris’s book. This movie triggered another wave of media coverage on Iris’s book and its historical context.

  On May 15, Iris e-mailed me and said that a reporter from Time in Tokyo had asked about her reaction to the film Pride. Her response was: “This film is yet another example of Japanese right-wing denial of the Rape of Nanking and other Japanese war atrocities. But no movie can suppress the basic facts of World War II.

  “This film will do more damage to Japan than good, because it has already enraged opinion-makers and politicians all over Asia and the U.S. If Japanese society embraces Pride, it will send a clear signal to the international community that the present generation of Japanese endorses the behavior of the wartime government.

  “In the end, the truth will prevail. I fervently hope and believe that time will allow more people in Japan to find the courage to say ‘This is not the truth about ourselves. This movie is a dishonest depiction of our past.’”

  In Japan, it was reported that Tojo’s granddaughter, Yuko Tojo, was the force behind the movie, which was rumored to be based on a book she had written. She was trying to whitewash her grandpa’s war-crime image. General Hideki Tojo, Japan’s wartime prime minister, was executed as Japan’s top war criminal in 1948, but was portrayed in the movie as a patriot and gentle family man. A Washington Post article on May 25 read: “Fifty years after the war, a remarkable perception gap still exists between Japan and the rest of world. . . . Many in those neighboring countries are still deeply angry at what they see as Japan’s lack of remorse, and Pride is certain to inflame those bad feelings.”

  One scene in the movie, according to one report, was that Tojo refused to believe that Japanese soldiers had carried out the Nanking Massacre in China. After I read the report, I told Iris what a good thing it was that her book had just come out! I said to Iris that Tojo had a granddaughter who tried to cover up her grandfather’s hideous war acts, but that thankfully my father had a granddaughter who told the world what had really happened in 1937. It’s really a shame that up to this day, Japan as a nation has not been able to face up to its war crimes, and no written official apology has ever been issued.

  Iris’s book was praised by American historians and respected by Chinese communities internationally, but Japanese ultranationalists tried to discredit her by any means possible. On June 12, according to AP news, a group of Japanese “academics” in a conference in Tokyo accused Iris’s book of being misl
eading and exaggerating the Nanking Massacre. They blamed the killings on the Chinese themselves. They denied the size of the death toll in the massacre. They also questioned the photos in her book. When the AP reporter tracked Iris down and asked her reaction to the Japanese accusation, Iris was in Lake Placid, New York to give a speech to the Cato Institute. Iris refuted the accusations with dignity and eloquence, one by one, over the phone. She told the reporter that the Japanese revisionists’ denials ultimately only hurt Japan itself.

  When the AFP reporter, Karen Lowe, telephone-interviewed Iris about the accusations of these six Japanese “academics,” Iris replied: “These revisionists are engaged in a second rape of Nanking—the rape of history.” In the AFP report of June 22, William Kirby, the Harvard University history professor and chairman (who wrote the Foreword for Iris’s Nanking book), told Lowe, “This business of the body count is really a gruesome exercise in historical revisionism. If 100,000, 300,000, or 50,000 were killed, is it morally any different?”

  “There really isn’t any question that it was a policy of terror and murder,” Kirby added. “Anyone who suggests that the Rape of Nanking never happened is in historical Never-Never Land.”

  Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center also commented: “Japan cannot be trusted as a member of the community of nations until it once and for all, sincerely and genuinely, apologizes for its deeds during World War II—beginning with Nanking.”

  I would be lying if I said that these accusations about her book had no impact on Iris’s feelings. Even though we knew, and Iris knew, that the criticisms had no basis, it still affected her life in one way or another. It was very stressful for her that her book was under constant questioning and scrutiny. Worse yet, at this time she was also engaging in an exchange of opinions with her Japanese publisher, Kashiwashobo. The publisher, translating her book into Japanese, confessed to her that it was under the threats of ultranationalists in Japan. Consequently, Iris was bombarded with e-mails from the publisher with all sorts of questions and some unreasonable requests, indicating that Kashiwashobo was under tremendous pressure from the right-wingers in Japan.

  In spite of all this, the summer of 1998 still had something that made Iris very happy. On June 24, 1998, she sent me an e-mail:

  Dear Mom:

  Your darling daughter is typing this email from the Miramar Hotel in Montecito right now, after delivering a one-hour speech at the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference to an audience of 150-200 people. The topic? My transformation from struggling author to bestselling author. Some women were so moved by the lecture that they broke down in tears! Indeed, it was an exhilarating evening for me, because so many old friends came to congratulate me, weep over me, to hug and kiss me. “Iris, you’ve gone away and come back a star!” The whole evening was one long joyous reunion, and afterwards I went out to the Montecito Inn with Barbara Masin to enjoy some cheesecake dessert.

  Santa Barbara really is like a second home to me—after Champaign-Urbana.

  I’m ecstatic that my speech in Santa Barbara was so well-received because I hardly had time to prepare my notes. You see, yesterday I really pushed myself write an op-ed article for the New York Times (both the Times and the international edition of Newsweek want articles from me about the Japanese revisionists) and didn’t have the energy to think about the Santa Barbara speech. Yet the audience loved it. Barbara Masin thought the speech was brilliant—a perfect balance of humor, history and personal narrative—and marveled at the improvement in my lecture style. She remembers how nervous I was during my first book signing in Santa Barbara at Barnes and Noble, which just was only two years ago. . . .

  Love, Iris

  Another happy thing for Iris in June was that Reader’s Digest chose her for the cover of their September issue. A couple of months earlier, she had been interviewed by Ralph Kinney Bennett, a writer from the magazine, and they were going to publish a big article on her and The Rape of Nanking. For the cover photo, she went to a beauty salon that was recommended by a friend for a makeover. The magazine photographer came to her place and took many photos of her. When the September issue came out in the middle of August, she immediately mailed us a copy. She was quite satisfied with the cover photo. We enlarged and framed it, and it has been on our wall ever since.

  The September issue of Reader’s Digest stirred up another round of media coverage. Reader’s Digest has fifty million readers and is published in nineteen different languages worldwide. Iris had collected and showed us the issues with her on the cover in different languages. She got many compliments from readers and friends on her look for the cover photo, but I think the cover story really did a great service to get the story of the Rape of Nanking known to the world.

  In October, Iris was invited back to the University of Illinois to give the prestigious MillerComm Lecture to an audience of eight hundred in the huge auditorium on campus; it was a very successful event indeed. On October 10, Iris was also invited to be one of the panelists of the conference on “War Crime of the East” at the UI campus, one of several events scheduled for her visit back to campus.

  During the conference, one of the University of Illinois history professors attacked Iris’s book, which was a complete surprise to all of us. However, I saw that Iris was very calm and presented her argument in a professional way. By this time, she had already written a number of articles to refute the attacks on her book and had answered numerous questions posed by many American and Japanese reporters concerning the Japanese ambassador’s remarks and other Japanese revisionists’ charges. I admired the way she handled the situation, and I realized that Iris had grown and matured into an experienced debater! But I also realized that not only did right-wing forces exist in Japan, but that some of Japan’s right-wing sympathizers in this country could not be ignored either.

  When we drove Iris to the Champaign airport and saw her off for the next stop of her book tour, none of us said very much on the way. I noticed that she was still preoccupied with the incident that had happened at the conference the day before—a surprise ambush by a history professor at her own alma mater. Finally, when she was stepping into the flight gate area, she said to us that a public debate seemed inevitable. She said that only through debating could she answer those criticisms of her book. “Starting with the Japanese ambassador!” she said.

  In November, Iris was invited by the University of Hawaii to give a speech and sign some books. Since the date was close to Thanksgiving, she decided to take a vacation with Brett on a Hawaiian island afterward. This was the first time in a long time that she was taking a vacation. Two days after she returned from Hawaii, on December 1, she called us suddenly and told us that she would appear on the PBS MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour to face the Japanese ambassador to the U.S., Kunihiko Saito!

  We immediately turned on the TV and waited for the 6 P.M. PBS News Hour. After Jim Lehrer reported that day’s major news stories, Elizabeth Farnsworth began mediating the dialogue between Iris and Saito on the current issue of an apology. Iris was at the San Francisco TV station studio, whereas Saito was in Washington, D.C. The issue had arisen in October, when the South Korean president visited Japan, where Japan’s Prime Minister Obuchi did offer a written apology for Japan’s actions during the time it had colonized Korea. Then, several weeks later, when President Jiang Zemin of China visited Japan (the first-ever visit to that country by a Chinese leader), the Japanese prime minister had offered a verbal apology of Japanese wartime aggression against China, but no written statement of apology, infuriating Chinese people worldwide.

  Now Farnsworth was asking Ambassador Saito to explain the difference in treatment for these two countries. Saito answered and said he did not see that there was any difference. He played down any difference and insisted that a written and verbal apology were the same. Then Farnsworth turned to Iris and asked why a written apology was so important. Iris replied that if a written apology was the same as a verbal apology, as Saito insisted, then she
could not understand why Japan would not issue one to China.

  Iris continued: “. . .the Japanese government had delivered an apology to the South Korean government, a written apology, and the Chinese government had expected the same a few weeks ago. And I think that the reason why it became an issue was because that expectation was pretty much dashed during Jiang Zemin’s visit, which was, I think, certainly a loss of a golden opportunity for Japan to properly show its repentance for the crimes committed by the Japanese Imperial Army across Asia. . . .”

  Saito stated that he thought that Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama’s statement in 1995 had already expressed his deep sense of remorse and had offered sincere apologies to the people of Asian countries.

  Farnsworth then turned to Iris. “What would be enough?”

  Iris replied: “. . . First of all, for Japan to honestly acknowledge some of the basic facts of these kinds of atrocities, which many revisionists refuse to do; and definitely a written apology, reparation made to the victims . . . inclusion of Japan’s wartime aggression in school textbooks in Japan. . . .”

  Iris continued: “And I think that people don’t believe that Japan has properly apologized or atoned for what happened because these apologies don’t come spontaneously and naturally. . . .”

  Then she challenged the ambassador. “What I’m curious to know is: can the ambassador, himself, say today on national TV live that he personally is profoundly sorry for the rape of Nanking and other war crimes against China and the Japanese responsibility for it?”

  Saito was responding with the usual words that the Japanese government always used: “. . . to the incident in Nanking, we do recognize that really unfortunate things happened, acts of violence were committed by members of the Japanese military. . . .”

  Farnsworth wanted to conclude the interview and said “We have time only for a brief response from you.”