The tasks we should now be focusing on are on the supply side, including the scrapping of excess facilities and the building of new industries and businesses to deal with the alarming rise of joblessness. One of the few figures remaining in government who experienced life as an enlisted soldier in World War II, Nonaka Hiromu, acting secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party during the administration of Prime Minister Hashimoto, was a late bloomer politically. Ozawa secured a place in the ruling coalitions put together after the LDP's electoral defeat in 1993, but Nonaka was instrumental in ousting his rival from the government the following year, and he has since worked to build links with other opposition forces so as to block Ozawa's involvement. Meanwhile, he continues to push for normalizing relations with North Korea, remembering the harsh treatment of workers from the Korean Peninsula brought to Japan during the war years. Chang estimates that 260,000-350,000 people were killied in the atrocities after the city's fall in 1937.
Many Japanese scholars accept similar figures.
Chang's book is also flawed by its use of photographs that have been misleadingly cropped or totally miscaptioned. Similar trickery with wartime photos is unfortunately widespread in Japan also. A Recent Bibliography View PDF Version Japanese Textbook Treatment of the Nanking Massacre Excerpts from widely used middle school and high school texts on the start of the Sino-Japanese War and the capture of Nanking.