About 100 Japanese governing party lawmakers denounced the Nanjing Massacre as a fabrication on Tuesday, contesting Chinese claims that Japanese soldiers killed hundreds of thousands of people after seizing the Chinese city in 1937.
The members of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Liberal Democratic Party said there was no evidence to prove mass killings by Japanese soldiers in the captured Nationalist capital, then known as Nanking. They accused Beijing of using the alleged incident as a "political advertisement."
Nariaki Nakayama, head of the group created to study World War II historical issues and education, said documents from the Japanese government's archives indicated that about 20,000 people were killed - about one-tenth of the more commonly cited figure of 150,000 to 200,000 - in the 1937 attack. China says that as many as 300,000 people were killed.
Nanjing suffered a rampage of murder, rape and looting by Japanese troops that became known as "The Rape of Nanking."
Historians generally agree that the Japanese Army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women.
Nakayama said the study, which was initiated in part because this year is the 70th anniversary of the battle, determined there was no violation of international law.
Toru Toida, another member of the group, demanded that photographs portraying the Japanese military in a negative light be removed from Chinese war memorials.
"We are absolutely positive that there was no massacre in Nanking," Toida said.
Here are some pictures of what "never happened."
(Warning: These are very graphic and disturbing.)
(Gleaned from QandO which had some good followup links folks can check out, if their stomachs are strong enough for it. There are plenty worse photographic evidence.)
2 comments:
My great-aunt was in Shanghai when the Japanese came in 1937. She was evacuated on a British cruise ship that was in harbor. The ship sat in the harbor for two days, a hew hundreds yards offshore, while the Japanese laid waste to the area, including Nanjing.
Her journal entries and letters describing those days are, to be kind, disturbing.
Obviously she was part of the vast anti-Japanese conspiracy.
Seriously, are your aunt's papers still in private hands or are they in an historical collection someplace?
Post a Comment