MCLC: Nanjing severs sister-city ties with Nagoya

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Nanjing severs sister-city ties with Nagoya
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Source: NYT (2/22/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/world/asia/chinese-city-severs-ties-after
-japanese-mayor-denies-massacre.html

Chinese City Severs Ties After Japanese Mayor Denies Massacre
By MARTIN FACKLER 

TOKYO ‹ The Chinese city of Nanjing has suspended its sister-city
relationship with Nagoya in Japan after the Japanese city¹s mayor
expressed doubts that the Japanese army¹s 1937 Nanjing Massacre actually
took place, the Nagoya city hall said Wednesday.

The falling out began on Monday when Nagoya¹s mayor, Takashi Kawamura,
told a visiting delegation of Chinese Communist Party officials from
Nanjing that he doubted that Japanese troops had actually massacred
Chinese civilians. Most historians say that at least tens of thousands of
civilians were slaughtered in Nanjing, in one of the most infamous
atrocities of Japan¹s early 20th century military expansion across Asia.

The falling out underscored how history remains a potential flashpoint in
Japan¹s ties with the nations that it once conquered. While such denials
are common by Japanese conservatives like Mr. Kawamura, they are rarely
raised in such a public manner, and directly to Chinese officials. But
there is also a widely shared perception in Japan that China¹s communist
government plays up the massacre for its own propaganda purposes, with
many serious historians dismissing the official Chinese claims of 300,000
dead as exaggerated.

Still, the Japanese government scrambled to head off a full-blown
diplomatic incident. The top government spokesman restated Japan¹s
official position that the massacre did, in fact, take place.

³This is a problem that should be appropriately resolved between the
cities of Nagoya and Nanjing,² said the spokesman, Chief Cabinet Secretary
Osamu Fujimura.

The city hall of Nagoya, an industrial city in central Japan, said it
received what it described as a short and business-like e-mail on
Wednesday morning from the city government of Nanjing saying that the
Chinese city was temporarily halting all exchanges.

On Wednesday, Mr. Kawamura remained unrepentant, saying that did not
intend to retract the statement or apologize. He explained that his father
had been a solider in Nanjing in 1945, and was treated kindly by city
residents, which he said would have been impossible had an atrocity taken
place there just eight years earlier.

³There are many opinions about the so-called Nanjing incident,² he told
reporters, using the Japanese term for the killings in December 1937. ³I
have said I want to have a debate with people from Nanjing.²

Such disagreements between Japan and its neighbors have quieted from the
early 2000s, when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi angered many in
China and South Korea by visiting the Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo that honors
Japan¹s war dead, included executed war criminals.

However, questions of history can still disrupt relations. In Tokyo in
December, Japan¹s prime minster, Yoshihiko Noda, was rebuffed by the South
Korean president, Lee Myung-bak, when he asked for removal of a statue in
front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to remember women forced to work as
sex slaves for the Japanese military during World War II.

The South Korean leader responded by asking for compensation for the
surviving former sex slaves, most now in their 80s. Japan says war-related
reparations were settled when it established diplomatic ties with South
Korea after World War II.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: February 22, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a meeting in
December between Japan¹s prime minster, Yoshihiko Noda, and the South
Korean president. They were meeting in Tokyo, not in Seoul.