Asia Times: BOOK REVIEW The Good Man of Nanking: the Diaries of John Rabe



	March 10, 2000	atimes.com

Japan

BOOK REVIEW
The Good Man of Nanking: the Diaries of John Rabe
Knopf, 1998, 384 pages

Reviewed by Victor Fic

On September 22, 1937, John Rabe grabbed his pen with the same determination that marauding Japanese soldiers advancing on Nanking clutched their rifles. He started a diary recording the atrocities that he heard about or saw, especially from mid-December forward, when ancient Nanking became a zone for rape, murder and pillage. Rabe's diaries will refute those who deny the occurrence of the so-called ''Rape of Nanking'', while his documented efforts to save lives will confound those cynical about altruism.

Rabe was a Hamburg businessman posted to the city. As Japanese forces approached Nanking, he organized a sprawling International Safety Zone that eventually saved over 250,000 lives. The middle-aged, balding Rabe was like Oskar Schindler: the circumstances provoked his conscience, allowing him to attain greatness. Nanking's citizens eventually called this modest man a Living Buddha.

He gave several motives for staying in Nanjing. First. Rabe cited duty to his company. More personally, he insisted that, ''I cannot . . . betray'' friends and employees. He also invoked humanitarianism in an unpretentious, yet touching way, writing, ''Anyone who has ever held a trembling Chinese child during an air raid'' cannot run. When circumstances stranded him and Nanking's terrorized citizens in a moral desert, Rabe became an oasis of decency and homespun courage. Once a blast shook a bomb shelter crowded with civilians, Rabe reflected that that fear could be controlled through his common man's formula: ''a few cheerful words, a really rotten joke, grins all around.''

Although he was usually good-humored, Rabe demonstrated a capacity for righteous rage when he encountered a soldier about to rape. He hollered at, and then shoved away, the battle-hardened soldier, who knew that he was outmatched by the chubby, bow-tied businessman.

The diaries' credulity are enhanced by Rabe's obsession with accuracy. He usually recorded the precise time, location, and nature of an atrocity. Also, the ever-composed Rabe never inflamed emotions. For instance, he wrote plainly that, ''The older [child] was bayoneted and the younger split down through the head with a sword.''

The Chinese calculate that 300,000 people were murdered in Nanking. However, Japanese revisionists like Tokyo mayor Shintaro Ishihara, who recently visited Taiwan, claim that the massacre is a Chinese fabrication. Other Japanese nationalists maintain that only 50,000 people died. Rabe cites no figures. One reason might be because ''cases are pouring in faster than we can type them out.'' Sometimes words failed him, for the horrors were ''indescribable''. Ironically, their ubiquity encouraged shorthand such as, ''You hear of nothing but rape.'' At other times Rabe indicates that the suffering simply dumbfounded him.

In any event, the cruelty was extreme. Women had golf clubs or bamboo poles rammed up their genitals, and others were raped up to 40 times, with even 70-year-olds victimized. Children were murdered and raped. Hospital patients were executed, and looting was constant. Any Chinese man suspected of being a soldier was bound, killed, dumped into a fire, or kicked into the river.

Although the Japanese had pledged to respect the International Safety Zone, they killed and raped within it. Often the soldiers humiliated the people. For example, once a Japanese soldier, passing a poor Chinese family sitting down to eat, urinated in their common bowl of rice gruel. Rabe wrote that an additional reason for staying was to witness these horrors, ''so that one fine day the truth will be out.''

A Japanese diplomat in Nanking referred to the soldiers as ''rascals''. This diplomat tried to win Rabe's goodwill at a reception, by playing Western songs. One was ''Chinatown, My Chinatown.'' Rabe was chagrined that most Japanese in Nanking hid behind denials or excuses. Unfortunately, as long as influential Japanese like Ishihara follow suit, Sino-Japanese relations will remain unstable.

In 1938, Rabe left for his homeland, Germany, where he continued to keep a diary. The hopelessly naive Rabe implored the Nazis to restrain Japan. However, the Gestapo censored him in order to maintain amity between Berlin and Tokyo.

Rabe died in 1950. The diaries resurfaced by chance in 1996; their publication has excited specialists on Japan and the war who consider the diaries an irrefutable account of the massacre. Rabe was poor and obscure when he died. As the end came, he had to barter his Chinese art for food. He traded away his statue of Kuanyin -- the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy - for a handful of potatoes.

(Special to Asia Times Online)

back to the top

©1999 Asia Times Online Co., Ltd.