NEW YORK -- My businessman friend Michio Hamaji, whose avowed mission is to improve international understanding, recently brought me a Japanese book titled "Charz." He told me it's a childhood memoir describing a Chinese atrocity in the late 1940s. If translated into English and published in the United States, he thought, it might counter whatever ill effects Iris Chang's book, "The Rape of Nanking" (1998), might have created in America. Without reading the memoir, I had to tell him that was unlikely.

The success of Chang's book was due to a combination of factors inimical to the Japanese. Foremost among them is the prevailing sense in the U.S. that the Japanese have the propensity to sweep under the tatami whatever is inconvenient in their past. There is, at the same time, the long-standing sense that China deserves America's special protection.

Also, most Americans, including big-time journalists, don't know that the Nanjing massacre has been a subject of intense debate in Japan for the last three decades. So, when a young Chinese-American one day decided to make a splashy issue of the 60-year-old incident, calling it "a forgotten holocaust," righteous anger was assured.