The United Nations cultural body has encouraged “relevant countries” to make a joint bid with China in applying for the world heritage status of documents concerning Japan’s wartime sexual slavery, China’s foreign ministry said Monday.
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In the next registration phase in 2017, Japan will seek to list the records of diplomat Chiune Sugihara who issued visas to help a few 6,000 Jews flee from Nazi persecution during WWII, as well as three ancient stone monuments and documents of Korean missions to Japan in the Edo period.
Given the repeated denials and whitewashing of their country’s past by Japanese nationalists, UNESCO’s inclusion of the materials as part of the world’s memory is an authoritative global refusal to condone the lies of Japanese far-rightists.
The statement added that “the Government of Japan as a responsible member of the UNESCO, will ask for a reform of this important project, so as not to be exploited for political purposes”.
Beijing rejected Japan’s protest about the UNESCO move, the official Xinhua news agency said.
The Nankin massacre, like other atrocities committed by Nippon soldiers in continental Asia before the Second World War, is a cause of recurring tension between Peking and Tokyo.
But documents on Japan’s drafting of women to serve as sex slaves during the World War II, which Chinese government attempted to register as well, was not included this time. No respected historians or mainstream academics in the world doubt that the massacre took place.
“We can not deny that there (were) murders and looting against non-combatants after the Japanese imperial army entered into Nanjing”.
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 of Chinese civilians in Nanjing, preferring the term “incident”.
The Memory of the World register, set up in 1992, is aimed at preserving humanity’s documentary heritage, and now holds 348 documents and archives that come from countries all over the world.
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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.
