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This week I'm going to recommend Nanjing Requiem by Ha Jin.

Ha Jin is an immensely talented Chinese-American writer, and here he tells the story of

someone we'll be talking about today, Minnie Vachran, who tried to protect the Chinese

college girls she'd come to teach from the depredations of the Imperial Japanese Army.

Go to audiblechild.com slash Japan to claim your copy.

Hello and welcome to the History of Japan podcast, episode 142, The Rape of Nanjing, part one.

So my original plan was to get this series out in January, roughly in line with the anniversary of the actual events surrounding the fall of Nanjing. But the fall of the samurai experience ran a little longer than I thought

it was going to, and then I figured, well, we just did a 21-part series, maybe we should put some

slightly light stuff in there before we go on to talk about the most infamous massacre in Japanese history.

So here we are two months later than originally intended,

but this isn't really a topic I want to put off.

So, let's talk about it.

This week we're going to focus primarily on setting the stage of what happened in Nanjing.

Next week, we're going to deal with the issue of how it's been interpreted.

So, on July 7, 1937, skirmishes between Japanese and Chinese forces broke out near the vicinity

of Lugo Chiao, or Marco Polo Bridge, near Beijing.

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