‘Americans not the bad guys’ – Nanjing Never Cries author sets the record straight

It is 80 years since the Japanese army invaded Nanking, a city today known as Nanjing. What happened over the next six weeks has become known around the world as the Nanking massacre. About 50,000 Japanese soldiers killed, raped and looted indiscriminately. Estimates of the dead are as high as 300,000. The atrocity was described in several eyewitness accounts, including diaries by Westerners John Rabe and Minnie Vautrin, and film taken by John Magee.

When I ask Cheng about the origins of the book, he suggests another date: April 13, 1995. This was when he gatecrashed a symposium hosted by MIT entitled “The Atomic Bombs: Myth, Memory and History”. Three of the speakers were American (professors Philip Morrison, John W. Dower and Charles Weiner); the other was Rinjiro Sodei, a professor at Tokyo’s Hosei University.