Woman Who Could Not Forget

by Richard Rhodes

  Iris started to say that what Saito said was not entirely correct, but she was interrupted by Farnsworth asking her: “The apology?”

  Iris at first was not quite sure she’d understood the question and repeated back, “The apology.”

  “Did you hear an apology?” Farnsworth asked.

  “I don’t know. Did YOU hear an apology? I did not really hear the word ‘apology’ that was made. And I think that if he had said genuinely, I personally am sorry for what the Japanese military had done during World War II, I would have considered that an apology. I think that would have been a great step in the right direction. . . .”

  Shau-Jin and I, after watching the program, felt very worried and frightened. On the one hand we were very proud of Iris that she had the courage to ask the ambassador to apologize to the Chinese people on live TV, but on the other hand we felt that the right-wing nationalists in Japan would be angry if they saw it. I could not fall asleep that night. The next day, one of Shau-Jin’s physics colleagues told him that he admired Iris for her courage, but at the end he added that Iris should hire a bodyguard. That comment fed our worries even more.

  Right after the PBS appearance that night, Iris was in San Francisco engaging in a public interview with Professor Orville Schell of UC-Berkeley at Herbst Theatre. We did not get her call until later. She called after midnight and told us how successful the San Francisco event had been.

  “There were more than eight hundred people in the audience, and most of them had to pay to get in,” she said.

  She also told us that everyone she met at the theatre congratulated her and said she had done a fabulous job on TV debating the Japanese ambassador. She seemed not worried about it at all. Actually, she was unhappy when we mentioned that she should be more careful about her personal safety. She said our worry was a burden to her and that we should relax. Then, a few days later, we received a big bouquet of fresh flowers from her with a thank-you card. I think she wanted to comfort our frightened souls.

  When Iris’s book became an international best seller, she reached a status most writers can only dream of: she became a celebrity. But she also paid a price for it. In February 1998, after a long book tour, she had already told us that once she came home, she did not want to go out anymore. All she wanted was to stay home with Brett and have a good sleep. After several weeks of continuous book signings, public speeches, and traveling, she said, her life was a nonstop blur of airport—lecture hall—hotel, airport—lecture hall—hotel. The responses to her speeches were overwhelming. Wherever she went, people besieged her after every speech. When she came home, she inevitably came down with a cold or the flu, only to recover just in time for the next book tour. She was physically exhausted.

  Not only that, she said, but during the book signings, many old Asian people came up to her: Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Singaporean, Indian—they poured out their personal stories of suffering during World War II in Asia to her. Some of them wept and thanked her profusely for writing such a book. They said “It’s so frustrating to see that Japan to this day hasn’t formally acknowledged their war crimes!” They exclaimed “It’s about time!” Iris said that on the one hand she felt rewarded that she was sought out and greatly respected by many people, but on the other hand she was mentally and emotionally drained after hearing those stories.

  On June 29, 1998, Iris wrote:

  Dear Mom,

  I arrived safely in New York today, after giving a well-received speech in Baltimore to the women doctors. Actually, it was very depressing—during the Q and A, a Pakistani doctor told the audience about the atrocities against Bengali women in 1971, a Filipino doctor described how she escaped the Rape of Manila when she was 12, an Indian doctor discussed the Indian tradition of suttee (burning widows alive), etc. Others talked about the international sex slave industry, the trafficking for women and children, female genital mutilation in Africa—you get the idea.

  It seemed that there were endless gruesome stories that people were eager to share with her.

  When she was book-signing in one bookstore in San Francisco at the end of March 1998, the store was packed, all seats taken. One woman shouted out at the end of her speech that Iris deserved a Pulitzer and a Nobel Prize! She certainly felt flattered. In another bookstore in San Francisco in April, Iris said one man stood up and said “You’ve got guts!” There was long applause, and then he said, “Do you think the Japanese have a contract on your head?” At another speech on the East Coast, one person wrote a comment: “Brilliant to tell such a powerful story! I fear for your life.” Iris said she was very disturbed by these comments, and they did nothing to quell my own worry either.

  Some people told her that she was a Chinese Joan of Arc. Some Chinese people told her that she was Mulan, the legendary Chinese woman warrior who dressed in men’s clothes and pretended to be her aged father’s son, going into wars. Still another called her Qiu Jin, the turn-of-the-century Chinese revolutionary woman martyr who led an uprising against Manchus. The success of The Rape of Nanking now was not just a publishing phenomenon, but the beginning of a political movement. Iris found that people perceived her as some kind of crusader and activist, and that worried her. Michael, her brother, told her that many of his friends, mostly young Asian Americans, were urging her to go into politics. Michael said to his sister, “All Chinese-Americans look up to you to lead!” But in her heart, she said, she considered herself just a writer and a historian who merely wanted to right some wrongs.

  But it was not all stress and politics—Iris had good times on her book tours, too. On November 4, 1998, Iris e-mailed me that she’d been able to meet three descendants of Nanking Safety Zone committee members at Ann Arbor, Michigan and received a priceless gift—the original Nanking Safety Zone Red Cross flag:

  Dear Mom:

  I just had a fabulous event at Shaman Drum bookstore in Ann Arbor, as well as a “hou gou” dinner with Harriet Mills, her sister Angie Mills (who came from Chicago to see me), Neal Brady, son of Richard Brady (a surgeon who worked for the safety zone committee after the worst of the massacre was over) and Rob Gray. Neal Brady (who is a doctor, like his father) gave me one of the original Nanking safety zone Red Cross flags, which I showed to an awestruck audience at Shaman Drum this evening. (It was truly exciting for them to meet with three descendants of the safety zone committee—two of whom are daughters of the founder of the zone committee itself. And it was exciting for Harriet, Angie and Richard Brady as well. . . . Harriet had not seen Brady since he was eight years old!!)

  Love, Iris

  Harriet Mills and Angie Mills are daughters of Wilson Plumer Mills, who was the Presbyterian missionary in Nanking in 1937 and who first suggested that the Nanking Safety Zone be created, according to Iris’s book The Rape of Nanking, which cites a letter from Mills’s daughter Angie to Iris; the letter cites a speech given by John Rabe wherein he says that “Mr. Mills is the man who originally had the idea of creating the Safety Zone.” Later, Iris donated the Red Cross flag used at the Safety Zone to the Hoover Institution at Stanford.

  On the book tour, Iris met many of our old friends and was also reunited with college and high-school friends. Iris told me that various of her friends reacted to her fame and celebrity status differently. Most of her friends were really happy for her; those she considered her true friends. A few, however, were threatened by her success and turned frosty and unhappy when Iris mentioned her book. But I suppose such things are to be expected from human nature.

  She was also amazed that some former authors whom she had worshiped in college now treated her like their peer. Even more surprising was when she got requests from people thirty or forty years older, asking for blurbs and letters of reference. All this had happened in seven years. She said that she still couldn’t quite believe it—it had all happened so fast!

  But Iris said her major concern was her loss of time to read. One day, she called me after she’d read an excellent article in the New Yorker and felt
bad. She asked herself how many hours she’d been able to spend reading new books over the past few months. She hadn’t had time to read for pleasure in a long time. She said she should get back to reading and writing, and recalled the days when she’d been able to read as many books as she wanted. We laughed when we recalled how we’d caught her reading secretly after her light was supposed to be out, so Shau-Jin had to go down to the basement and unplug the electric circuit breaker. She was quite nostalgic about the years when she’d had plenty of time to read. She really felt this loss and supposed that this was a price she had to pay for her new celebrity status.

  On top of her busy schedule of book tours, outside people might not realize that besides her traveling, signings and speeches, she was constantly bombarded with additional e-mail requests from news reporters for written interviews. Sometimes there were ten or fifteen written questions for her to answer, so the reporters could write a news article or a profile. Iris still could find time to answer those questions accordingly. She would always mail me a copy to “preserve” in case her computer for some unforeseen cause erased her files. In addition, in the summer of 1998, she had a heavy correspondence with the Japanese publisher Kashiwashobo, who was supposed to translate her book into Japanese, in working out the differences in historical interpretations, which took a lot of time to answer.

  From March to July 1998, especially with the heat of the attack from the Japanese ambassador and the Japanese revisionists still sizzling, Iris received many requests from Japanese news reporters for an interview. Reporters from Japanese magazines such as Bungei Shuju and some freelance Japanese reporters asked Iris a number of questions, from why she wanted to write this book to questions on the controversy over the death toll in the Nanking Massacre. Some reporters even went into such details as the legal issue of reparation and the words of apology used by the former Japanese prime minister. She patiently repeated her argument, one point after another, never losing her head to pettiness or emotion.

  In July 1998, Iris was invited to write for both the Asian and International editions of Newsweek to refute the criticisms raised by Japanese revisionists. Her article, titled “It’s history, not a lie,” was intended to set the record straight.

  In the article, she wrote:

  The revisionists are fighting an ultimately futile battle if they hope to erase the Rape of Nanking from history. Thousands of pages of primary source documents on the subject must be explained away. These documents are available in archives across the globe. They include American missionary diaries, U.S. Naval Intelligence reports, Japanese military diaries, letters and reports produced by the German embassy and the Nazi party in Nanking, declassified American intercepts of Japanese official communications, war-crimes transcripts, 1,700 testimonials from Chinese survivors, and news reports, including front page coverage of the massacre in the New York Times. In addition, photographs and newsreel film footage still exist.

  In the summer of 1998, Kinue Tokudome, a Japanese reporter who lived in Los Angeles, conducted an interview with Iris via e-mail. Iris took a great deal of time answering her, and Kinue translated the Q&A into Japanese and published it in the October 1998 issue of the Japanese magazine Ronza. Among the fifteen questions Kinue posted, the most-asked questions were about the death toll in the massacre, the authenticity of the photos used in the book, and the reparation issue. Iris answered those questions clearly, as she had answered them every other time she’d been asked them before.

  Kinue Tokudome asked, “Some said that Japan already had apologized and the issue of compensation had been settled. How do you respond?” Iris replied:

  “There have been vague apologies made but there has never been, to my knowledge, a specific apology issued by the Japanese government to the victims of the Rape of Nanking. And the issue of compensation is far from being settled. If you look at the 1951 San Francisco peace treaty you will find that the treaty explicitly states that the issue of compensation is to be postponed until Japan has financial means. I have contacts with many international human rights lawyers and they all tell me that the issue of compensation is far from being settled.”

  Back in February 1998, Iris had been invited by the New York newspaper Newsday to write an Op-Ed article, which was published on February 19, 1998. She specifically wrote about the reparation issue. Her article was titled “Japan Must Pay for Its War Crimes.” In the article, Iris wrote:

  Japan has argued that all matters related to reparations were settled in the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty. But a close reading of the treaty shows that the issue was merely postponed until the Japanese economy, still devastated by war, had the ability to make good on any restitution assigned them. Such an excuse is laughable today. The current financial crisis in Asia notwithstanding, Japan ranks as one of the world’s wealthiest countries.

  If Germany can apologize and pay reparations, why can’t Japan? The Germans have paid the equivalent of $60 billion to their victims and they will continue to pay several more billions by the year 2005. Earlier this year they agreed to pay additional billions to victims in Eastern Bloc countries. Indeed, in an era when even the Swiss have pledged billions to pay for the money stolen from Jewish bank accounts, allowing Japan to continue to evade its responsibilities becomes a new assault on the sensibilities of the victims of Nanking—let alone the conscience of humanity.

  Iris was one of the first few people to press the issue of monetary reparation from Japan. I could see why the revisionists and the Japanese government were earnestly trying to discredit her and her book, and had even invented the myth that the Rape of Nanking was a “fabrication” or a “lie.” Iris may not have known it, but her quest to force Japan to pay compensation for the war had caused others to perceive her as an activist.

  The last question Kinue Tokudome asked Iris was: “Are you planning to go to Japan when your book comes out there?” Iris’s answer showed her sincerity and support for those in Japan who wanted to reconcile the past and present. Iris replied:

  I don’t know. All I do know is that I recognize that there are many sincere, wonderful and courageous people in Japan who want nothing more than to promote the truth, and these kinds of people—though in small numbers—can be found worldwide. This is a human quality that transcends ethnicity and nationality. Such people recognize that what happened in Nanking and in other regions of China is a human rights issue, and that patriotism or nationality or ethnicity has no bearing on human rights issues. They see the larger picture. I am one hundred percent behind those people in Japan, and I certainly hope to meet them one day.

  One of the most time-consuming e-mail exchanges Iris engaged in at that time was with Charles Burress, a news reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle. In the summer of 1998, Burress wrote to Iris and asked her a number of questions about her book. Iris patiently replied, giving him her point of view. On July 26, 1998, Burress’s article “Wars of Memory” was published. In the article, Burress mentioned that the Japanese “academics” and the Japanese conservatives had criticized Iris’s book, but omitted mentioning Iris’s responses to those unfounded accusations. Iris had explained these responses to him in a long course of communications between them. Iris felt that his article was unbalanced. She wrote a letter to the editor in response to Burress’s article, but the Chronicle did not publish it.

  In this new Internet era, newspapers were no longer the exclusive news outlet. Iris posted her long letter in response to Burress’s article on the Web and promised to give a copy of the letter to any journalist who asked about Burress’s article.

  Iris’s e-mail address was open to the public. Whenever she was on a book tour and too busy to check her e-mail on the road, her AOL inbox maxed out quite quickly. Even my e-mails bounced and did not reach her. She had so many fans! In addition to e-mails, she received a huge amount of postal mail from her fans. Whenever she came back from a book tour, her mail was piled up high. At the end, she had several boxes of mail from her fans, not onl
y from the U.S., but from other parts of the world as well. I could not forget how she told me about a young man paralyzed from the neck down due to a motorcycle accident. He saw Iris on TV and listened to her speech and managed to write a moving letter to her, with a request for an autographed copy of The Rape of Nanking. Iris was very touched and sent him an autographed book along with copies of magazines carrying her picture on the cover and featuring the book.

  Some people sent poems and music to her composed specifically for the victims of the Nanking Massacre. One World War II veteran wanted to give her his Purple Heart decoration, and many asked for her picture. All these things surely made her very happy, made her feel like it was all worthwhile.

  Iris usually was good about replying to her fans if they wrote her e-mails; but when she got home from book tours tired and emotionally spent, she was overwhelmed by the mountains of mail. She told me she felt very guilty that she was not able to reply to all of it. She was the kind of person who had always graciously replied to her mail before she became a bestselling author. It took almost two years, but with a helper she finally replied to all those accumulated admiration letters from her fans; she said she had sent out a postcard bearing her photo on one side and a “thank you” with her signature on the other side.

  She received some hate mail, too. She did not tell us right away, because she did not want us to worry. When we asked her for details, she said the hate mail was very limited, compared with the huge amount of positive mail she received. She seemed not to worry about it. Only after we moved to California to be near her did we realize that she had received an envelope containing two bullets.

  Regarding Iris’s family life, she did not have a whole lot of time with Brett that year; most of her time was spent on the road, promoting her book. In July 1998, Brett’s parents came to California for a visit; they were hoping that Iris would accompany them and Brett to Tahoe and Yosemite for a vacation. Iris was in the middle of the battle defending her book against those Japanese revisionists, and she was also writing her next book proposal, so she had no interest in leaving home once she returned from book tours. In an e-mail of July 18, 1998, she wrote to me: “I think I’ve outraged countless old friends and acquaintances by now . . . simply by being busy. The truth is, interaction with people—even loved ones—can be draining, and I only have so much physical energy these days. After weeks in front of audiences and cameras, I relish being totally alone.”