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.
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
Cook Islands officials yesterday said they had discussed seabed minerals research with China as the small Pacific island mulls deep-sea mining of its waters. The self-governing country of 17,000 people — a former colony of close partner New Zealand — has licensed three companies to explore the seabed for nodules rich in metals such as nickel and cobalt, which are used in electric vehicle (EV) batteries. Despite issuing the five-year exploration licenses in 2022, the Cook Islands government said it would not decide whether to harvest the potato-sized nodules until it has assessed environmental and other impacts. Cook Islands Prime Minister Mark Brown
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
STEADFAST DART: The six-week exercise, which involves about 10,000 troops from nine nations, focuses on rapid deployment scenarios and multidomain operations NATO is testing its ability to rapidly deploy across eastern Europe — without direct US assistance — as Washington shifts its approach toward European defense and the war in Ukraine. The six-week Steadfast Dart 2025 exercises across Bulgaria, Romania and Greece are taking place as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches the three-year mark. They involve about 10,000 troops from nine nations and represent the largest NATO operation planned this year. The US absence from the exercises comes as European nations scramble to build greater military self-sufficiency over their concerns about the commitment of US President Donald Trump’s administration to common defense and