TOKYO: A Japanese hotel chain under fire for books its president wrote denying the Nanjing Massacre in wartime China will remove them from a hotel hosting athletes at the 2017 Sapporo Asian Winter Games, organisers said on Wednesday.
The Tokyo-based hotel and real estate developer APA Group is at the centre of a furore over books by president Toshio Motoya, which contain his revisionist views on history and are placed in every room of the company’s 400-plus APA Hotels.
Motoya, using the pen name Seiji Fuji, wrote of the Nanjing Massacre that « these acts were all said to be committed by the Japanese army, but this is not true. » He also denied stories of Korean women forced to work as prostitutes in wartime military brothels, the so-called « comfort women. «
China says Japanese troops killed 300,000 people in Nanjing from December 1937 to January 1938. A post-war Allied tribunal put the death toll at about half that.
