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| A man walks past the entrance of an Apa Hotel in Tokyo, Jan 18, 2017. (AP Photo/Shizuo Kambayashi) |
China has lodged a complaint after a Japanese hotel placed in its rooms a book denying the Nanjing Massacre and the forced recruitment of comfort women.
APA Group, a Tokyo-based land developer and operator of 400-plus hotels, drew fire for putting the books in hotel guestrooms and also selling them.
The book "Theoretical Modern History" was written by company president Toshio Motoya under the penname Seiji Fuji.
In response to the incident, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying on Tuesday urged the Japanese government to ensure that Japanese people are exposed to authoritative versions of history.
Some forces in Japan have been denying history from the outset and even attempting to distort it
Hua Chunying, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson
"Some forces in Japan have been denying history from the outset and even attempting to distort it," she said.
Coercive recruitment of comfort women and the Nanjing massacre were crimes against humanity committed by wartime Japan and "an iron-clad fact recognized by the international community," she added.
"History can never change over time, and facts will not fade away despite deliberate evasion," she said.
Despite the protest, the APA hotel chain has refused to remove the book from its rooms.
READ MORE: China calls for Japan's correct attitude towards war crimes
"We have no intention of withdrawing the book from our guestrooms even if we receive criticisms from those with different viewpoints," APA hotel said in a statement. "Japan guarantees freedom of speech, and no one-sided pressure should be allowed to cause a retraction of a statement."
Zhang Jianjun, chief researcher with the Nanjing Massacre research institute, said the book is a fabrication based on the rhetoric of the Japanese right-wing.
Nanjing was home to more than 600,000 people before the slaughter of around 300,000 soldiers and civilians in December 1937, but the book claims that there were only 200,000 people in the city at the time.
In addition, the book said there are no eyewitness accounts of the massacre by either Chinese or Japanese observers, despite the existence of a plethora of diaries, letters and photographs.
"It is nonsense," said Zhang, curator of the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders.
More than 20 people from Europe and the United States recorded the atrocities and their documents have been preserved by UNESCO in its Memory of the World Register , Zhang said.
"The book portraits Japan as the victim of the war. The attempt to whitewash its role as the invader confuses right and wrong," Zhang said.
APA has expanded quickly in recent years, offering relatively reasonably priced, no-frills rooms across Japan.
