Japan today lashed out at UNESCO's decision to inscribe documents related to the Nanjing massacre in its Memory of the World register, describing it as "extremely regrettable" and calling for the process to be reformed.
Today, the UN's cultural and scientific body agreed to 47 new inscriptions, including a request by Beijing to mark documents recording the mass murder and rape committed by Japanese troops after the fall of the Chinese city of Nanjing in 1937.
The massacre, often referred to as the "Rape of Nanjing", is an exceptionally sensitive issue in the often-tense relations between Japan and China, with Beijing charging that Tokyo has failed to atone for the atrocity.
Japan had called for the Nanjing documents not to be included and accused UNESCO today of being politicised.
"It is extremely regrettable that a global organisation that should be neutral and fair entered the documents in the Memory of the World register, despite the repeated pleas made by the Japanese government," Tokyo's foreign ministry said in a statement.
"As a responsible member of UNESCO, the Japanese government will seek a reform of this important project, so that it will not be used politically," the statement added.
The UNESCO decision came after a two-year process during a
meeting of experts tasked with studying nominations from 40 countries.
The new inscriptions were agreed at a meeting that ran from Sunday to Tuesday and was held in the United Arab Emirates.
The Japanese military invaded China in the 1930s and the two countries fought a full-scale war from 1937 until Japan's defeat in World War II in 1945.
China says 300,000 people died in a six-week spree of killing, rape and destruction after the Japanese military entered Nanjing.
Some respected foreign academics put the number lower but there is very little mainstream scholarship doubting that a massacre took place.
China historian Jonathan Spence, for example, estimates that 42,000 soldiers and citizens were killed and 20,000 women raped, many of whom later died.
In Japan, however, some question that view entirely, particularly among some conservatives and nationalists.
In February, a senior executive at Japan's publicly funded TV broadcaster NHK denied the massacre, reportedly dismissing accounts of it as "propaganda".
