Art & Creativity Quote by Iris Chang

Amnesia is a political technology, and Iris Chang is naming the circuitry. By bundling “comfort women,” “forced sexual slavery,” and “Unit 731” into one breath, she refuses the usual menu of detachable atrocities where audiences are allowed to mourn one horror while keeping the rest safely offstage. The list works like an indictment: not just of Imperial Japan’s crimes, but of the selective memory habits of the United States, a country that helped build the postwar order and then largely opted out of confronting some of its ugliest files.

Her key phrase is “in the US psyche,” a shrewd choice that shifts the problem from ignorance to identity. She’s arguing that these events aren’t merely under-taught; they’re culturally unassimilated, absent from the stories Americans tell themselves about World War II, moral clarity, and who gets positioned as villain or ally. The subtext is uncomfortable: US narratives often privilege the Pacific War’s climactic set pieces (Pearl Harbor, island battles, Hiroshima) while downplaying crimes that complicate diplomatic relationships, Cold War alliances, and the convenient notion that justice was cleanly administered in 1945.

“That is changing because many books are coming out” is both hopeful and tactical. Chang understood publishing as infrastructure for memory: archives translated into argument, argument into curriculum, curriculum into public conscience. Coming from a historian best known for forcing the Nanjing Massacre into mainstream conversation, the line reads like a manifesto for why she wrote at all: to move suppressed history from specialist knowledge into moral weather, where it can actually alter what a society tolerates.