ความคิดเห็นที่ 93
ขออีกข่าวได้ปะ แบบว่าเคยโพสต์ไว้ตอนที่ iris chang ฆ่าตัวตายเมื่อต้นเดือนทีนึงแล้ว อันนั้นจาก bangkok post แต่รอบนี้ทาง the economist เอามาลงเป็นแนวกึ่งวิเคราะห์พร้อมประวัติศาสตร์เพิ่มเติมอีก เห็นว่าน่าสนใจดีน่ะค่ะ
IRIS CHANG
Nov 25th 2004
Iris Chang, chronicler of a massacre, died on November 9th, aged 36
AMONG the many issues that bedevil relations between China and Japan,
the most intractable occurred almost 70 years ago. In 1937 around
50,000 Japanese troops descended on Nanking, China's former capital,
and took charge there. What happened next is a matter of lasting
controversy. The Chinese say that more than 300,000 civilians were
killed, and 80,000 girls and women raped. The Japanese divide into
different schools of thought. At one extreme, the "Great Illusion"
school argues that almost no civilians were killed, and that most of
the deaths were legal killings of soldiers in plain clothes. At the
other, the "Great Massacre" school thinks as many as 200,000 Chinese
may have died. Scholars on both sides continue to revile each other
either as Japan-bashers, or as apologists for imperialism.
In Japan, the Nanking "Incident"--still too controversial even to have
a settled name--is central to a wider debate about history teaching in
Japanese schools. In China, it is crucial to the nation's modern
identity. After the war, the atrocity was played down: Japan, seared by
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was seen as a victim nation, not as an
aggressor, and the Americans were keen to cultivate it as a
counterweight to dangerous Red China. To deny the Chinese version of
Nanking, therefore, is to continue to gang up on China and to stifle
its account of history.
Into this maelstrom of nationalist pride and pain stepped, in the
1990s, a 29-year-old Chinese-American. Iris Chang was not an historian
by training. She had studied journalism at the University of Illinois,
then taken a master's in science writing, and had worked for a while on
the CHICAGO TRIBUNE. Her interest in Nanking was aroused incidentally,
by hearing her grandparents talk about it. Like many others, they had
fled the city before the Japanese arrived; what they knew was hearsay.
But it was sufficiently terrible for Miss Chang to spend a day "walking
around in a state of shock", before deciding to devote herself to
making the massacre known.
For two years she did research in China, rifling the archives and
talking to survivors. She pinned a map of Nanking on her study wall,
covering it with pictures of tortures and killing in the places where
they had happened. Some civilians had been mutilated with broken beer
bottles, some impaled on bamboo. Women's breasts had been cut off and
nailed to walls. The Japanese killed so many men that they found it
quicker to bayonet them as they stood in a line, rather than behead
them.
As the grim stories accumulated, Miss Chang lost weight and broke
down. She went on, defying exhaustion. When her book on Nanking came
out, in 1997, she spent a year on the road talking about it. More than
half a million copies were sold in America alone; she became a
celebrity, leaving audiences astonished that this pretty, smiling girl
could tell such tales of horror. But she did not care, she said,
whether she made a cent from it. All she wanted to do was get the story
out.
FACING THE AMBASSADOR
"Proper" historians cavilled, and with some reason. Her book, several
said, was too polemical, and was riddled with mistakes which she
refused to correct. Her reliance on oral history, especially the fading
memories of Chinese witnesses, was unwise. Even her use of the
invaluable diaries of foreign "bystanders" in Nanking was suspect, for
these people--who had organised a "safety zone" both for foreigners and
Chinese--had no idea of the actual numbers killed. When her book was
translated into Japanese, supporters of the Great Massacre school found
they could not defend her figures, which were higher even than those
claimed in China.
Miss Chang could not bear this nit-picking. A great injustice had
occurred, and had been all but covered up. There was no doubt at all
that it had happened, with immense human suffering. She had no time for
semantics: whether to include deaths outside the city walls, whether
the plain-clothes soldiers had been billeted with civilians, and so on.
What she wanted, at the very least, was an official Japanese apology.
Face to face on television with the Japanese ambassador to America, she
demanded one. When he muttered that there had been "perhaps some
unfortunate incidents", she was outraged.
When she died--apparently by shooting herself in the head, on a rural
road in California--she had started work on a book on the Bataan Death
March and the abuse of American prisoners-of-war by the Japanese.
Again, the stories were affecting her: she had been taken to hospital,
suffering from depression.
She had been planning, too, to publish the diaries of Minnie Vautrin,
an American missionary in Nanking during the massacre. Vautrin, like
her, came from Illinois. She had saved thousands of Chinese civilians
from the Japanese, sometimes giving them her own last ration of rice.
In 1941, however, a year to the day after leaving Nanking, she had
committed suicide, convinced that she had done too little.
Friends wondered whether Miss Chang had felt the same. This was
certainly likely. But she was also aware that her writings had played
into the hands of the massacre's deniers: that she had perhaps not only
done too little, but protested too much.
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Angel Eyes 
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