Japanese people skim over the "Iris Chang: The Rape of Nanking" Japanese edition in a bookshop in Tokyo Dec. 15, 2007. The book written by Chinese-American writer Iris Chang was originally published in English. It explored one of the darkest episodes of history in 1937 when Japanese troops occupied Nanjing, the then capital of China in Jiangsu Province. An estimated 300,000 Chinese or more were killed while one-third of the houses in the city were burned and more than 20,000 women raped.

(Xinhua News Agency December 17, 2007)