A Chinese court has awarded a Nanjing Massacre survivor 1.6 million yuan (US$200,000) in compensation after ruling in her favor against two Japanese historians who claimed she fabricated her account of the atrocity, state media said yesterday.
The court in Nanjing ruled that Xia Shuqin (
Shudo Higashinakano and Toshio Matsumura claimed in two books, A Thorough Review of the Nanjing Massacre, and The Big Question of the Nanjing Massacre, that historical accounts of the event were untrue. The books, published in the late 1990s, also claimed that accounts by Xia and another survivor, Li Xiuying (
The Nanjing court's verdict also requires the Japanese publisher, Tendensha, to immediately stop publishing the books and recall those already distributed, Xinhua said.
Higashinakano, 58, rejected the ruling, saying both Japanese and Chinese law would require the case to be heard in Japan to have any validity.
Hiromichi Moteki, the president of Sekai Shuppan Inc, which published an English translation of Higashinakano's book, said that the demand to stop printing the book was "unthinkable."
"These books are written based on firm facts and evidence. This ruling lacks common sense," he said.
Historians generally agree that the Japanese army slaughtered at least 150,000 civilians and raped tens of thousands of women during their 1937-1938 occupation of Nanjing. China says up to 300,000 people were killed in Nanjing during the rampage of murder, rape and looting by Japanese troops, also known as the Rape of Nanking.
Li, who died in December 2004, won a defamation case against Matsumura in Japan in April 2003 and was awarded ?1.5 million (US$12,900). Li, 18 years old and pregnant at the time of the massacre, was slashed by swords while hiding in an American mission school, she said.
According to Xia, now 76, on Dec. 13, 1937, a group of Japanese soldiers forced their way into her family's home in Nanjing and murdered seven of her family members.
Xia and her four-year-old sister were seriously injured but escaped, she says.
Last year, Higashinakano and Matsumura filed a lawsuit against Xia in Tokyo District Court demanding that she acknowledge that her lawsuit in Nanjing was groundless. In May, Xia countersued the two men in the same court. The Japanese men dropped their lawsuit.
REVENGE: Trump said he had the support of the Syrian government for the strikes, which took place in response to an Islamic State attack on US soldiers last week The US launched large-scale airstrikes on more than 70 targets across Syria, the Pentagon said on Friday, fulfilling US President Donald Trump’s vow to strike back after the killing of two US soldiers. “This is not the beginning of a war — it is a declaration of vengeance,” US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wrote on social media. “Today, we hunted and we killed our enemies. Lots of them. And we will continue.” The US Central Command said that fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery targeted ISIS infrastructure and weapon sites. “All terrorists who are evil enough to attack Americans are hereby warned
‘POLITICAL LOYALTY’: The move breaks with decades of precedent among US administrations, which have tended to leave career ambassadors in their posts US President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered dozens of US ambassadors to step down, people familiar with the matter said, a precedent-breaking recall that would leave embassies abroad without US Senate-confirmed leadership. The envoys, career diplomats who were almost all named to their jobs under former US president Joe Biden, were told over the phone in the past few days they needed to depart in the next few weeks, the people said. They would not be fired, but finding new roles would be a challenge given that many are far along in their careers and opportunities for senior diplomats can
Seven wild Asiatic elephants were killed and a calf was injured when a high-speed passenger train collided with a herd crossing the tracks in India’s northeastern state of Assam early yesterday, local authorities said. The train driver spotted the herd of about 100 elephants and used the emergency brakes, but the train still hit some of the animals, Indian Railways spokesman Kapinjal Kishore Sharma told reporters. Five train coaches and the engine derailed following the impact, but there were no human casualties, Sharma said. Veterinarians carried out autopsies on the dead elephants, which were to be buried later in the day. The accident site
The death of a former head of China’s one-child policy has been met not by tributes, but by castigation of the abandoned policy on social media this week. State media praised Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), former head of China’s National Family Planning Commission from 1988 to 1998, as “an outstanding leader” in her work related to women and children. The reaction on Chinese social media to Peng’s death in Beijing on Sunday, just shy of her 96th birthday, was less positive. “Those children who were lost, naked, are waiting for you over there” in the afterlife, one person posted on China’s Sina Weibo platform. China’s
RSS