Japan Objects to Unesco Listing China’s Nanjing Massacre Files

Japan, however, has questioned the authenticity of the documents, adding that its offers to cooperate with Chinese experts to establish their veracity had been rejected by Beijing.

The remarks by China’s foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying suggested that China may team up with South Korea and other Asian countries, whose women were forced into sexual slavery for the Japanese military during World War II, to win UNESCO’s approval for the documents.

The statement added that “the Government of Japan as a responsible member of the UNESCO, will ask for a reform of this important project, so as not to be exploited for political purposes”.

Xinhua also cited researchers as saying that UNESCO’s decision was an act of “global recognition” for the massacre.

“UNESCO’s global advisory committee suggested in accordance with application guidelines that all these countries file a joint application, which will be reviewed at the 2017 meeting”, she said. “We were not even allowed access to the contents of the document”, Suga said. The Chinese government says about 300,000 people died during a weeks-long spree of mass killings, rape and looting after the Japanese military occupied Nanjing in late 1937 and 1938.

In February, a senior executive at Japan’s publicly funded TV broadcaster NHK denied the massacre, reportedly dismissing accounts of it as “propaganda”. They also include photos of the killings said to have been taken by the Imperial Japanese Army and film footage taken by an American missionary.

Inscription of the dossier into the UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, created to preserve significant and endangered documents, was announced on the website of the UN’s scientific and cultural body.

Japan had two entries recognised by UNESCO on Friday.

Unesco accepted two Japanese nominations: memoirs and drawings by former Japanese soldiers who were held in Siberian labour camps, and thousands of documents stretching back to the eighth century that belong to a Buddhist temple.