The mayor of a Japanese city has sparked outrage after playing down a well-documented massacre of civilians in China's former capital more than 70 years ago.
An estimated 300,000 people died when Japanese troops invaded the city of Nanjing in China's Jiangsu province in 1937, unleashing a campaign of rape, murder and looting that became known as the Nanjing Massacre. The event was recently portrayed in a movie starring Christian Bale called "The Flowers of War."
But earlier this week, Takashi Kawamura, the mayor of Nagoya, told a visiting delegation from Nanjing that he believed only "conventional acts of combat" took place there, not the mass murders and rapes, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. He repeated his assertion to Japanese reporters Wednesday. (CNN)
↧