Feature: Tokyo residents gather to remember the Nanjing Massacre

TOKYO, Dec. 12 (Xinhua) -- "Three or four thousand Chinese, with their arms tied behind them, were driven in groups of four in four columns, to the coal port north of Nanjing, where they were shot with two heavy machine guns," reads the diary of Kenrou Kajitani, a sergeant at the Second Anchorage headquarters of the Japanese military on December 17, 1937.

December 13 marks the 84th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre and the eighth National Memorial Day for Nanjing Massacre Victims.

Lin Boyao, an overseas Chinese in Japan, gave a lecture on the history of the Massacre at the YMCA Asian Youth Center in Tokyo, on Saturday. Nearly 100 Japanese people attended the gathering, organized by the No More Nanjing movement.

Apart from Kajitani's diary, Lin also presented the personal diaries of senior military commanders Kesago Nakajima and Toichi Sasaki.

"We broke through the enemy's position before dawn and fired 15,000 rounds at those who gathered on the river bank and the remaining soldiers," Sasaki wrote.

The number of people taken to the riverbank and the location of the shooting correspond with Kajitani's diary. The lecture featured videos of Chen Degui and Pan Kaiming, two survivors of the massacre who described the same scene.

Hiroshi Tanaka, representative of No More Nanjing, told reporters that the association was founded in the hope that the Japanese people, already familiar with "No More Hiroshima", should also remember the Nanjing Massacre. "Only by facing the facts can we truly move on from the tragedy and think about the future," he said.

Despite the evidence, some Japanese politicians still deny the facts. In his speech, Nobuo Kono, a retired history teacher at a Tokyo public high school, criticized the Japanese government's manipulation of textbooks and curricula to obscure Japan's role in the War of Aggression Against China.

For example, some Japanese politicians called the Nanjing Massacre the "Nanjing Incident", called the War of Aggression against China the "Japan-China War", denied the number of victims of the Nanjing Massacre, and constantly blurred the historical truth with unclear statements.

"Each time the government revises small details," Kono said. "Eventually, the truth is completely destroyed."