The headline, One final victim of the Rape of Nanking?, refers to Iris Chang, the young historian who killed herself after earning fame writing about the atrocities. And they were atrocities:
The Rape of Nanking in 1937 began with the march of invading Japanese soldiers up the Yangtse River. They occupied the Chinese capital of the time and soon conquest was followed by bloodlust. Soldiers slaughtered between 100,000 and 300,000 civilians sheltering in a few city blocks. Slowly.Over a six-week period, up to 80,000 women were raped. But it wasn?t so much the sheer numbers as the details that shock — fathers forced at gunpoint to rape daughters, stakes driven through vaginas, women nailed to trees, tied-up prisoners used for bayonet practice, breasts sliced off the living, speed decapitation contests.