However, the Japanese government says the forced requisition of comfort women by the Japanese military has not been confirmed.
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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.
Beijing’s dossier on the widespread killings of Chinese citizens and soldiers following the 1937 capture of Nanking, which is presently known as Nanjing, by the Japanese military is among dozens of new additions of documentary items, also including two sets of archives from Japan.
“The government would like to ask for fairness and transparency in the Memory of the World programme so that it would not be used for political purposes”, Suga said.
Xinhua also cited researchers as saying that UNESCO’s decision was an act of “global recognition” for the massacre.
“Facts is not meant to be refused and historical past not re-written”, Hua incorporated.
But the Chinese nomination titled “Archives about “Comfort Women”: the Sex Slaves for Imperial Japanese Troops” failed to gain the status.
While Japan objected to the inclusion of the documents on the Nanjing Massacre, it succeeded in having a few of its own candidates for the memory list included, including details on detainees held in Siberia after World War II.
The Japanese far-rightists can try and deny the facts all they want, but now the rest of the world has a clearer picture of what really happened in the Chinese capital at that time, when the invading Japanese army killed 300,000 civilians and unarmed combatants over the course of six weeks.
A few respected foreign academics put the number lower but there is very little mainstream scholarship doubting that a massacre took place.
Unesco’s director-general, Irina Bokova, approved the Nanjing inscription in Abu Dhabi last Friday, after receiving recommendations from a 14-member panel of archivists and librarians.
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The first was a body of 18th century documents amassed by a Buddhist temple and the second a tranche of documents related to the internment of Japanese prisoners in Siberian labour camps after the end of World War II.
