China, Japan set for fresh showdown over Nanjing massacre

The inscription was met with criticism by Japan, with Tokyo’s foreign ministry questioning the authenticity of the documents, calling on Unesco to be neutral, fair and for changes to be made to the process.

But UNESCO’s decision came after a two-year process where experts rigorously studied the nominations with an unbiased attitude. The Japanese accusation is a desperate attempt to discredit its decision.

The Memory of the World Register also included Chinese documents on the atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers in Nanjing during the 1937-1945 Second Sino-Japanese War. Last month, Japan was up in arms against UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s participation in China’ s WWII Victory Day commemoration.

As a country that has yet to sincerely own up to its history of aggression in World War II, Japan tried to block the UNESCO move. No respected historians and mainstream academics in the world doubt that the massacre took place.

In Japan, however, a few question that view.

In February, a senior executive at Japan’s publicly funded TV broadcaster NHK denied the massacre, reportedly dismissing accounts of it as “propaganda”.

Japan claims that the number of victims is grossly exaggerated and has consistently tried to trivialize the magnitude of the massacre.

In April this year, Japan rebuffed protests about newly approved textbooks after complaints that they failed to use the word “massacre” when referring to the mass slaughter in Nanking, opting for the term “incident”.

The Japanese government had repeatedly called on China to retract the nomination of the documents and requested careful consideration by UNESCO.

He noted that there are other UNESCO-listed documents about dark episodes of history such as war and slavery. “If, however, the veracity of the documents submitted by China is questioned, that would undermine the credibility of the entire Memory of the World heritage”, he said.

Conservative factions in the Japanese political community have long called for suspending or reducing the country’s contribution to UNESCO, if the Nanjing massacre were listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme.

The Memory of the World program was established by Unesco in 1992 with the goal to preserve and ensure access to documentary heritage around the world.