The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II.

• Author: Horowitz, Carl F.

by Iris Chang, New York: Basic Books, 290 pages, $25.00

Ienaga Saburo had been an unusually busy man, and not out of choice. In 1965 the Japanese historian sued his government for forcing him to rewrite a portion of a textbook. The Ministry of Education was incensed over his brief denunciation of Japanese genocide against at least 300,000 civilians in the Chinese city of Nanking during December 1937 and January 1938. Just mentioning this World War II story would have been bad enough.

Luckily, in 1970 a Tokyo judge ruled in Saburo's favor, saying textbook screening could not go beyond correction of factual and typographical errors. Japanese ultranationalists, in retaliation, fired off death threats to the judge, Saburo, and his attorneys. They also demonstrated outside his house, screaming slogans and banging pots and pans.

The lawsuit proved to be the snowball that led to the current avalanche of worldwide outrage over the Rape of Nanking and its long cover-up. It also inspired a new generation of tenacious researchers, one of whom is Iris Chang, a 29-year-old Chinese-American author whose grandparents survived the slaughter. In writing this book, the first full-length, English-language account, Chang conducted interviews with survivors, reviewed film footage, and pored through official documents. Her work speaks much not only about genocide but about how a nation prepares its people to commit and whitewash it.

At least in America we know a lot more than before; in Japan, the dissemination mills grind more slowly. Not only is Nanking unmentionable, apparently in some quarters so is America. Early this decade one Japanese high school teacher expressed surprise that his students did not know their country had been at war with the United States. The first thing they'd wanted to know was who won. Whatever "unfortunate" circumstances occurred in Nanking, say official spokesmen (and still most textbooks), these incidents were isolated, if they occurred at all.

Chang knows that a successful official truth shield must be unyielding. To allow a single crack in the foundation of silence risks setting in motion the collapse of the whole edifice. She terms Japan's silence and disinformation campaign "the second rape," which began even while the first was in progress. One headline of a Japanese-controlled newspaper in Shanghai in January 1938 blared the headline, "The Harmonious Atmosphere of Nanking City Develops Enjoyably." The article claimed, "The...