artist Hiroshi Motomiya, whose work contains serious social commentary.
Japanese apologists claim that the Rape of Nanking is a fabrication or that the number killed was small and not unusual for wartime.
In October, the Right-wing Sankei newspaper denounced Mr Motomiya’s account of “the fictional, so-called Nanking Massacre”.
The author who did most to publicise the horrors perpetrated by the Japanese was Iris Chang, whose body was found recently after a presumed suicide.
From the Amazon review of her book:
After fierce fighting in Shanghai, the Japanese occupied the old Chinese imperial city of Nanking on 13 December 1937. Over the next six weeks, the Japanese massacred more than 300,000 Chinese and raped more than 80,000 women. But these bare figures don’t begin to describe the atrocities. The Japanese indulged in execution contests to see who could behead the most civilians in the shortest time, they burned their victims, they buried them alive, they set dogs on them. No form of mutilation and torture was too extreme or bizarre and no one escaped. Men, women, children and babies were all butchered.
A Japanese edition of her book was cancelled after threats to the publisher.
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