Nagoya mayor's claim over slaughter is 'nonsense', says history expert
BEIJING - China does not accept Nagoya Mayor Takashi Kawamura's denial of the crime of the Nanjing Massacre, Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a regular news briefing on Monday.
Hong emphasized that there is irrefutable evidence regarding the Nanjing Massacre and China hopes Japan "takes history as a mirror", urging Tokyo to properly deal with historical problems.
Kawamura, head of the Nagoya municipal government, told Liu Zhiwei, a member of the Communist Party of China Nanjing City Standing Committee, that he thought the massacre of civilians by Japanese troops in 1937 never took place.
"There were regular combative activities, but I believe the Nanjing (Massacre) never happened," he said.
The Japanese army slaughtered more than 300,000 men, women and children when they invaded Nanjing, then the capital of China.
Japan's government said "the killing of a large number of noncombatants, looting and other acts" cannot be denied, according to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan in the "Historical Issues Q&A" section of its website.
Kawamura declared his doubts because he said his father was "welcomed" by people in Nanjing when the war ended eight years later.
The 63-years-old mayor's father Kaneo Kawamura was one of the soldiers guilty of the war crime.
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